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February 25th, 2022 
Awake Goy The reality of life in Occupied Palestine—a growing international consensus that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is apartheid—is, finally it seems, breaking through the fog of denial.
As this consensus grows, however, so does the vitriol and volume of the counter-consensus, and without the continued attention and vigilance of people who support a free Palestine, there is an immense risk that the gains of the past year can slip away. Turning this growing consensus into material gain is a problem of political power, but sustaining attention and sustaining support is also a problem of representation, both artistic and journalistic.
In a fight that has been so marked by obfuscation and lies, there is an important place for the photographic image in particular, which still carries relative to other types of images an aura of veracity. But photography is always an act of contemporaneous editing—certain moments are selected out of the infinite flow of moments and frozen in time—which is to say that different photographers create different types of images which each offer different images of the truth and carry their own particular types of risk.
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On the one side, there are images of suffering—blood splashed on concrete, a corpse, a grieving mother, a crying child next to her freshly demolished home. These images are undoubtedly necessary, and (one hopes) they shock the conscience, arouse an undeniable empathy, and prompt the previously unconcerned into action, or, at the very least, attention. But the pervasiveness and media saturation of such images bears the risk of lapsing into trauma-porn, of flattening that very real suffering into spectacle, or of flattening the breadth of experience into only this suffering.
Life is, of course, more than oppression—there is a spirit which demands freedom, a quashed flourishing, and it is on the side of life that the fight against oppression is waged. But there is a risk too in the sanguine approach, a photographic approach that leaves out the conditions of oppression—rosy images of children playing, of bustling urban life, of the pastoral beauty of an olive harvest. Life under oppression is still life, yes, but it is life that is crucially marked in a way that other lives are not. The conditions are such that photography that ignores this reality lapses into escapism and risks prompting people to forget the very real urgency of the fact that these lives so celebrated are under the constant threat of violence.
So the question becomes, how to craft images that depict the physical and institutional violence done to the Palestinians while simultaneously depicting the lives and experiences of a people marked, but not defeated, by those conditions. In American photographer Morgan Ashcom’s portfolio “OPEN” we have an answer.
Ashcom traveled to the West Bank in 2009 to accompany his partner on a trip to Nablus, where his partner was invited to work with Tomorrow’s Youth Organization (TYO), an organization providing psycho-social support to refugees and underserved communities around Nablus with a focus on children. During the trip, Ashcom was introduced to Wajdi Yaeesh, the director of the Human Supporters Association (HSA), which carries out similar work to the TYO but receives less outside funding. Yaeesh went on to introduce Ashcom to members of the local Palestinian community, who in turn became the focus of Ashcom’s photographic work—done on a large format 4×5 camera—during that time.
When the trip ended and Ashcom was leaving the country, the box containing his film negatives was ripped open by Israeli security, exposing the film to light. The photos sat dormant until 2021, when that spring’s massive outburst of violence against Palestinians across Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank prompted Ashcom to sell prints of the portfolio as a fundraiser for the HSA. (Funds from the fundraiser were repeatedly held up and blocked by fundraising sites and, in a recently closed exhibition at Candela Gallery in Virginia, images from OPEN were presented as diptychs, each selection framed next to a page of html code from emails between Yaeesh and the various fundraising sites as he responded to their delays and denials. In addition to the portfolio box and exhibition, Ashcom is also working on publishing the portfolio as a book).
The photos in the portfolio come in a box of 4×5 Portra 400 film, held together with layers of black tape. In a masterful mimesis of form and content, the physical act of tearing open the package—a package which one imagines may be the same as Ashcom’s original—forces the viewer to recapitulate the initial act of invasion that exposed the photographs in the first place. The hard work of opening the package drives home the invasive aspect of these searches, the effort and intentionality. The package left stripped and slightly torn serves as a reminder, always, of this invasion, permanently marked.
The photographs within are permanently marked as well. As a result of the exposure, each photograph has taken on a patina ranging from orange to pink, lending the photographs an almost aged, sepia tone. This toning makes the portraits of the locals and the gorgeous shots of olive branches poignantly reminiscent of photographs from before the occupation. But, this past-projection is broken up by interspersed images of soldiers and barricades, serving as forceful reminders of the intolerable present.
While the exposure rendered some images strangely colored, but more or less intact, it left others hazy to the point of oblivion—an orange light field obscuring the entire image. Some, however, the best, exist at the midpoint between faithful and obscured. In one particularly powerful image, a wall of keys (keys being a popular symbol of Palestinian resistance and the demand for the right to return) is visible in the far left of the print, but fades quickly into orange. The color palette of the original image—white, light green, yellow, silver—meshes uncannily well with the imposed orange haze and the image almost takes on the form of a colorfield painting, a geometric arrangement of a monochromatic rectangles.
Recurring throughout the portfolio are images of olive branches shot against a blank background, five in total. Here the effect is almost psychedelic—each image saturated with pale blues, vibrant greens, reds, purples, and that ever-present glowing yellow-orange. Tying them together is a sixth image of an olive tree in its entirety, prominently placed in the center of the image, its twisting trunk splitting into two intertwining outgrowths. Like the images of the individual branches, the image of the tree has an otherworldly beauty and, again like the other images in this portfolio, its haziness projects it into the past, with an added spectrality from the encroaching blur of the corners and extreme sides. There is a heavy semiotic weight to these images—the olive tree is immediately recognizable as a symbol of peace, of Palestinians’ ties to the land, of the land itself. And this semiotic weight, perhaps as much as the olive tree’s vital economic value is why Palestinian olive groves are such frequent targets of settler violence. Here, the disconnect between the images of the olive tree images, and the source of the images’ warm color-toning only heightens and underscores the contradictions of the occupation, only heightens the pathos and rage of this beauty.
Herein lies both the power and irony of Ashcom’s images. Had the Israeli security forces not exposed the film, we would have been left with a series of good photographs, perhaps tipping towards the sanguine, but artfully done and occasionally imbued with both political and aesthetic charge. But as a result of the exposure, Ashcom’s photographs manage to highlight both the dynamism and dignity of Palestine while simultaneously highlighting the conditions of oppression in every image. The imposed-haze on every photograph makes the occupation unavoidable while the image struggling against that haze is resistance made concrete. Oppression prompts resistance, it is inherently unstable, and so as long as there remain people willing to resist, every act of violence, every dispossession, further lays the groundwork for oppression’s end. Despite their best efforts then, oppressive regimes cannot help but be complicit in their own demise. Ashcom’s photographs are images of precisely this dynamic, of the ways in which the efforts of the occupation to stamp out Palestinian life can, sometimes, create a powerful testament to Palestinian dignity and resistance instead.
Jake Romm
Jake Romm’s writing and photography have appeared in Aesthetica Magazine, Protean Magazine, The New Inquiry, Hyperallergic, Humble Arts Foundation, Loosen Art Gallery, Urbanautica, MAP6, and Reading The Pictures among other publications. He can be found on Twitter at @jake_romm.
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