A group of student photographers from two Palestinian universities in the West Bank (Birzeit University near Ramallah and Al-Najah University in Nablus) came together to work on the Right to Education Photography Project. Their aim was to document student life and the obstruction of Palestinian education under military occupation, through the artistic expression of their own ideas and experiences.

When the social documentary photographer, Carlos Reyes-Manzo, joined the group in the summer of 2005 to lead a workshop, he opened a discussion that challenged the usual distinctions between ‘fine art photography’ on the one hand and ‘photojournalism’ on the other. He showed us that it is possible to capture what is going on around us – politically and socially – in fine art form.

The heart of social documentary photography is “to see, think, record and comment’, a concept that eventually found its way into everything. During the workshop, the group would often meet at six o’ clock in the morning to travel to different parts of the West Bank, later discussing and reviewing their photographs long after the last daylight hours had gone. As stunning images were downloaded from one small digital camera after another and projected on to the wall, the group would respond with a mixture of contemplation, laughter and collective murmurs of “very strong, very strong”.

As well as capturing the major obstacles to pursuing an education in occupied Palestine – obstacles that include routine harassment and arrests of students by Israeli soldiers and the daily struggle to reach school and university under a regime of military checkpoints - the photographers also reflected on some of the less visual aspects of student life under occupation. The photographs in this book touch on themes as diverse as isolation, poverty, resistance, absent classmates, military barriers, student prisoners and determination.

The resonance of many of these photographs comes from the fact that as students under occupation, the photographers have put themselves in the frame. The people and scenes depicted in each photograph are not distant ‘subjects’ but intimately connected to the person behind the camera. Fadwa describes this as “an experience of living our reality and taking photographs of that reality”. Nida felt it important to capture the experience of going to school in Hebron, where she grew up. Essam, meanwhile, photographed his friends who have to live away from home in student dormitories. He wanted to express the isolation that they feel, cut off from their families by an apartheid pass-system and endless military barriers, while at the same time demonstrating their resilience and determination to continue their education.

Within the group itself, the act of travelling together to different parts of the West Bank to take photographs also involved challenging the barriers imposed by the military occupation. Mirna had to be ‘smuggled’ in out of Nablus by taxi through the mountains, simply in order to avoid the numerous checkpoints around the city because she is from Jerusalem and therefore not allowed to enter Nablus according to military rule. On another day, as Muthanna climbed through an unfinished gap in the Wall in East Jerusalem to photograph Al Quds University students going to class, the soldiers waiting on the other side of the Wall checked his Nablus ID card and threatened to arrest him, shouting, “This is Israel, go back!”

It should also be explained that without the special military permits required by the Israeli authorities to travel between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, we could not even consider going to Gaza, despite the fact that it is only two hours away.

A saturation of images of ‘the conflict’ and ‘the violence’ in international news coverage not only obscures the daily reality as it is lived, it can also inhibit any other kind of expression of that reality. As Carlos put it at the outset of the workshop, “the challenge is how to discard the clichés and to document the familiar.” By way of an answer, Hisham summed up when he said, “I am a son of Nablus, I know it well; but this last week I have come to see my city in a different way.”