Homeland Lost in Postcards for Palestine

Gignoux Photos is proud to announce that Alan is among the many inspiring artists in the artist-led initiative Postcards for Palestine. It is truly encouraging and moving to see so many artists coming together in support of the Palestinian people.

We submitted portrait and landscape pairs from Alan’s Homeland Lost project made in 2004-5. Homeland Lost juxtaposes photographs of displaced Palestinians living in refugee camps and cities in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, with images of their places of origin in what is today Israel.

Postcards for Palestine was founded in October 2023 by artist Peter Watkins as a direct response to the devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the West Bank which still continues to unfold. The initiative has raised over 9,000 euros at fundraising events at Claire de Rouen Books in London and Berlinskej Model in Prague. The funds were shared between UNRWA and PCRF, charities doing crucial work in Gaza and beyond.

Prompted to revisit Homeland Lost by the conflict in Gaza, Gignoux Photos is working on a photobook based on the project’s extensive archive. The book will include 194 portraits of displaced Palestinians and 93 images of the remains of Palestinian villages in Israel. The portraits are an important record of a significant number of Palestinians displaced in 1948 and their descendants and seen together they resemble a society in exile. The landscapes are documentary evidence of the gradual erosion of the historical Palestinian presence in what is today Israel. We hope that a Homeland Lost photobook will bring home the tremendous personal loss that each incidence of displacement represents. We also hope that by emphasizing the individual integrity of the people in the portraits the book will serve as a reminder that every life affected by this historical conflict has a precious significance.

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