Between Peace and Passion - Images from Israel and the Arab Middle East

My fascination with Middle Eastern subjects dates to the 1970s, when I was a journalism student at the University of Minnesota. In the same year that I discovered the work of Edward Steichen, which made photography the passion of my life, I also developed a strong and rather mystical attachment to Middle Eastern history and religion. And though I spent much of my early career working for National Geographic in North America, I always felt the pull of the Middle East, where so many of the important dramas of human history have occurred. They are, of course, still taking place today.

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As these historical events play out, the truest measure of their impact is, for me, in the faces and hearts of ordinary people - the ones who somehow manage to survive in this cruel and crazy part of the world, and who spend much of their daily lives digging for spiritual bedrock in a land of shifting sand. This is the drama that intrigues me, and my goal with this project was to convey the beauty and dignity of the people that I came to know so well in their houses, their tents, and their places of worship. I found the woman's role in this world especially heroic.

There are no shortcuts into this world. It took time - and many cups of strong Turkish coffee - before I could shoot in many of these situations. I am most grateful to National Geographic for granting me the time to do this work. Without their support and encouragement, I could not have stayed with situations long enough to gain the trust that is implicit in these photographs. There are grievances here as old as recorded history. There are others as raw as the evening news, brought on by the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, or the Six Day War of 1967, or the latest confiscation of Arab land, or yesterday's terrorist bus bombing in Tel Aviv or Afula.
Time may yet heal all wounds in the Middle East - and I pray that it does - but for Israel and its Arab neighbors the region often seems, in the words of Israeli novelist David Grossman, "hard and twisted, like scar tissue on a bone that was broken and badly set."

Great Falls, Virginia, June, 1999