Palestine Self-Portrait Project
A self-portrait project across seven cities in the West Bank, to see how Palestinians see themselves.
A room to reflect
Continue until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner.
Practice until you recognize yourself in everyone — in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop.
Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being.
If you are fully present, the rain of the Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your store consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.
Thich Nhat Hanh · Teachings on Love
See yourself reflected
Impact · social change
Self-authorship for underrepresented voices.
We carry the system to marginalized communities around the world, so that the people who inhabit them can tell their own stories on their own terms. The same mirror that makes a portrait at a gala becomes, in another space, an instrument of self-determination.
“Nothing about us without us.”
The roots run back to Other Worlds, the multimedia nonprofit our founder co-founded to document communities organized outside a profits-over-people paradigm — the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, worker-owned factories in Argentina, a gifting economy in Mali, the Zapatistas in Chiapas. All of them shared a principle of self-determination within their systems.
Applied to photography, it is simple and radical: the subject — not an outside photographer — decides how they are represented. If a decision is being made about you, you should be part of the decision-making process.
The work
Where we've carried it.
Housing for Haiti
With Amnesty InternationalAfter the 2010 earthquake, we brought the system to Haiti so displaced communities could author their own portraits — not be photographed as victims, but seen as they chose to be seen. The work spanned Mozayik, Cité Soleil, Camp Grace, and Solino.
Reflections: Processing the Pandemic
Video testimonials · COVID, five years onA public art & storytelling installation marking COVID's fifth anniversary in partnership with Single Palm Tree Productions.
Moving Self-Portraits
An ongoing seriesInspired by Andy Warhol's Screen Tests, these videos prototype a method of moving self-representation.
Make an inquiry
Bring this work somewhere it's needed.
We partner with organizations, communities, and funders to carry the system where self-representation has been denied. Tell us about the place and the people.
hello@selfportraitproject.com · +1 917.714.3492