The Arab World Institute in Paris is exhibiting more than three decades of work on Palestine by French photographer, artist and writer Joos Drey until 1 November. The exhibition revisits Palestinian life inside homes, camps, cities, markets and on the seashore, presenting photography as a tool for preserving people and memory in the face of denial and the reduction of life to scenes of war and destruction.
Paris exhibition revisits images of Palestine since 1987
The exhibition, titled “Palestine through Joos Drey’s Lens”, includes work the photographer began producing in 1987, alongside images connected to an assignment given to her by the Arab World Institute in 2001.
In the Leïla Shahid Library space, scenes of camps, cities, markets, beaches, checkpoints and demonstrations appear side by side, while a collection of rare images is being shown to the public for the first time. The works map a human landscape stretching from Gaza and Jenin to Jabalia, Beach Camp, Qalandiya and Dheisheh, and also include the Ain al-Hilweh and Nahr al-Bared camps in Lebanon.
The photographs do not stop at political and military events, but follow Palestinian life through the two intifadas, the camps, destruction and return, as part of a long photographic journey in which Drey never treated Palestine as a passing subject. The exhibition includes an image of a child discovering the sea, a family gathered around food, an elderly woman looking steadily into the lens, and an old man carrying on his back a bundle containing his Palestinian identity and memory.
Taken together, these moments become a record of a society that continues to live, work, dream and resist despite the siege and destruction around it. Everyday details feature prominently in the photographs, from za’atar bread and falafel to a watermelon shared by a family, as well as a mural recalling a martyr and carrying a promise of loyalty.
Joos Drey devotes her career to Palestinian life
The works also give their subjects space to appear beyond the stereotypical image of the victim, highlighting the vitality, contradictions and memory of Palestinian society through small moments that do not separate people from their historical and political context. Drey’s involvement in rights activism began in France before journalism took her to Palestine in 1987. Since then, she has devoted more than three decades to photographing Palestinians and following the details of their lives.
She believes that Palestinians carry Palestine through their culture, way of life and presence, and that photographing these elements makes it possible to document Palestine in the camps of the occupied territories and Lebanon, as well as in the villages and Jerusalem. Drey said the Arab World Institute had taken the initiative to rediscover the photographs she took in 2001 and had deposited with it.
She said she welcomed the initiative because every space displaying photographs of Palestinians has particular importance for her, and because the cultural institution gives her work additional legitimacy amid criticism that she is an activist and occasional doubts about her credibility on the grounds that she is “not objective”. She added that her aim had always been to speak about the Palestinian people and their legitimacy on their land, and to present their resistance through the strength of their presence.
When choosing the exhibition’s photographs, she wanted to show how Palestinians continued to live with pride during what she described as the horrific campaign of repression in the second intifada, while also documenting what the Israeli army imposed on them and how they maintained their resilience in response.
Trust is the basis of Drey’s relationship with those she photographs
For Drey, photography is not limited to historical documentation, but begins with a relationship and an exchange between the photographer and the person in front of the camera. She said she usually exchanges direct looks with the people she photographs, and that they give her their images, lives and stories because she builds relationships with them based on trust and friendship, then conveys that relationship to the public through the camera.
She gave the example of staying for a week with a family, eating with its members, photographing them and sharing every detail of their lives with all her senses. She said she might begin photographing before finishing her falafel because the family members know that what she ultimately conveys is the result of what they shared together. She described this as an intensely powerful human bond that photographs can transmit to viewers.
She stressed that her eye has always sought, and continues to seek, the Palestinian as someone who carries Palestine, because what Palestinians express through their culture and daily lives represents Palestine itself. She recalled photographs taken while they were eating watermelon, explaining that she later discovered it had become a symbol of Palestine, although she may have shared it with them a hundred times and photographed that shared experience in different places.
Drey believes that a single photograph is not enough to create a complete narrative, and that this role is fulfilled by a succession of images. In Ain al-Hilweh camp, for example, she photographed daily life, meals and the market alongside demonstrations and politicians, allowing the community to be shown in all its components rather than reduced to one aspect.
She stressed the need to tell the history of the people in all its complexity, while recognising the differences between the camps: Ain al-Hilweh is not Jenin, and Nahr al-Bared is not Ain al-Hilweh. Among the images she cited was a shot of Salah Salah, one of the prominent leaders of the Popular Front, taking an afternoon nap, a moment she considered to show the fighter in his everyday human state.
She said the purpose of such images was to challenge the description of these fighters as “terrorists”, as some people do, and to show them as men who lived and resisted, with their own daily lives and contradictions. This approach, in her view, reveals that the human being remains present within history, even when he is a politician, a fighter or a party to major events.
Gaza journalists document the war despite deadly risks
Speaking about Gaza, Drey said photography could confirm that the territory was not only war and destruction, and that people continued to exist within it. She said she was currently unable to enter Gaza, explaining that Palestinian journalists were the ones transmitting images from there while risking their lives, and that more than two hundred of them had been killed.
She said the willingness of journalists to risk their lives reflected the strength of Palestinian society: whenever one colleague is killed, another journalist appears to continue the work, defying what she described as the machinery of destruction. She considered the images recorded daily on mobile phones by journalists and residents to perform an essential role in documenting what she described as the genocide in Gaza.
Drey accused the mainstream media, including French public-service media, of denying the existence of the genocide. She said politicians wanted to erase Palestinians by showing only images of destruction or presenting them as mere victims, while people clinging to life lived within that destruction. She added that her role, and that of others working in this field, was to continue conveying their stories and raising their voices about what was happening in the territory.
This perspective is also connected to the experience she documented in the book “Return to Jenin”. When she returned to Jenin camp for the second time, the camp centre had been rebuilt after its destruction in the “Battle of Jenin” in 2002, and had become what she described as a poor but highly vibrant town. She then decided to create an exhibition prepared with the participation of the residents themselves, rather than simply viewing them from the outside.
She explained that the residents took responsibility for conveying information and expressing their reality, and that the project included two years of writing and photography workshops. The exhibition “Freedom Starts Here” emerged from this experience. It opened on the anniversary of the Nakba and then travelled around France at the same time as celebrations Paris was holding for Israel.
Drey says that, under this approach, photography is a relationship that acknowledges the other, not a power relationship in which the photographer imposes her vision alone. The exchange of views was therefore part of the work, while the final selection of photographs resulted from discussion and participation between the photographer and the residents, giving them the right to determine how their stories and experiences appeared before the public.
The exhibition coincides with France’s commemoration of two hundred years since the emergence of photography, raising for Drey the question of the role of images when reality itself is denied. She said the task was to continue affirming reality and creating memory through it, even if an image did not necessarily offer an absolute truth, because it remained capable of showing and recording a tangible reality.
She added that the denial of Palestinian reality was one reason she continued, without tiring, to tell the story of the Palestinian people.
She believes photography made it possible to record a world that should not have remained vulnerable to denial, but concluded that much of the world still refuses to recognise the Palestinian people despite the accumulation of these images over decades.
