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Most of us, especially those of us at newspapers in the early 2000s, were horrible archivists. Most of the digital files we made got trashed, except for those that went into the newspaper’s system. Even people like me, who believed in saving everything, only saved the tags, those selected images that I might do something with someday. Usually, it was because of space. Hard drives were expensive then. Some of my hard drives are on such an arcane connection (Anyone remember SCSI drives? How about Firewire Zip drives, y’all?) But, looking back it was also partly done out of ignorance. Not knowing what we had, and not understanding the importance of what the images might mean in the future.
On one of my oldest hard drives, I’ve only got about 1,000 images from a month or so spent in Israel and the Gaza Strip in 2004. I was at my first newspaper staff job, working for the Ft Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. The paper owned a condo in Israel at the time because reporters were there so much since covering the region was of great importance to the readers in South Florida. One of the biggest stories we worked on in Gaza, was about a local doctor of Lebanese descent who would take his own time and go on his own dime every year to perform free heart surgeries (sometimes as many as 10-12 a day, and with a 4-year waiting list) in Al-Shifa Hospital (which has been in the news daily lately, it wasn't the one that was just attacked, but the other one, the biggest one that's trying to keep babies in NICU alive and save lives without power.
I spent some time going back through those images today. And the ones that really jumped out at me were the kids. Kids are the same everywhere. Posing for the camera. Sticking out their tongues. Being silly. Being curious. Showing off. Throwing up bunny ears on their friends. Wanting to be seen.
I’ve always loved kids, and always gravitated toward photographing kids on assignments. Most of my biggest or most important stories were done because I was trying to amplify those kids’ voices. But as a mom now, they hit differently. So going back through that work, I started tagging all the photos with kids. Some kids whom I remember calling out “hey miss take my picture” and others who I remember being curious about the stranger, or shy and hiding behind older siblings. Some scenes I remember vividly, like riding carnival rides at the beach in Gaza with those kids for hours, or watching kids ride their bikes through a kibbutz in Israel, or photographing a foot race with the Iron Wall behind them.
It was a formative trip in a lot of ways, educating me about a part of the world I’d only read about, opening my eyes to how f*cked certain situations are, and reminding me that people are people and that most people are genuinely good.
I can’t help but think of those kids now. It’s been 20 years, so today most of them would be the same age, if not older than I was on that trip. I’m curious how they’re doing and what they’re doing. But most of all, I wonder if they’re still alive.
Thanks for listening to me ramble. In other news, here are some links I was looking at to distract myself from the news of the week:
Here are a few ways to protect your mental health when the news cycle is heavy.
Yes, I know he’s problematic (see: Qatar), but the soccer fan in me is still looking forward to watching Beckham, the four-part series that just dropped on Netflix.
I love listening to musicians break down their songs piece by piece into the sounds and ideas that make them on the Song Exploder podcast. And this week I went down a rabbit hole and rewatched most of the Song Exploder Netflix series.
Digging these Chelsea Hotel portraits by Australian photographer Tony Notarberardino, who arrived at the hotel in 1994 and has lived and worked there since. There’s a good Q&A with Notarberardino here if you want to know more.
This story about How Lunchables Ended Up On School Lunch Trays is equal parts eye-opening and infuriating for what we’re doing to our kids. Also, did you know:
When President Harry S. Truman signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946, part of the impetus was the surprising number of men who had been rejected for military service during World War II because of malnutrition and other diet-related health problems. Under the plan, every child would get a nutritious lunch each day. In later decades, the program expanded to include breakfast and snacks.
Now, the problem for the armed forces is that a third of young adults are too heavy to join, military leaders complain.