A View from Somewhere True: Rula Halawani’s Photomontages

We know that photographs lie. Or, rather, that they can be made to lie. It would be clean, easy, to refute the possibility of visual veracity, to declare that contemporary photographic images are too vulnerable to manipulation to ever show us something that we could consider true. So, the very concept of photographic truth is an uncomfortable starting point for discussion. As an ideal, it is at once too contested and too utopian to be debated in purely abstract terms—the stakes are too high.

After all, we risk ourselves when we declare our truth. But, more importantly, we risk the world when we are blind to the truth of others.

I have found myself thinking often, recently, about a series of photomontages made by the Palestinian artist Rula Halawani. Though these images have been created through manipulation and alteration, they offer me a quietly persistent truth. The series of eleven photomontages make up the first chapter of a larger body of work titled For you Mother, made between 2018 and 2022. These photomontages consist of the combination of two key elements: contemporary landscape photographs of Palestine taken by Halawani, and archival photographs of Palestinian families taken before the 1948 Nakba. To make these composite photographs Halawani has utilised montage, one of the earliest forms of photographic manipulation, eliding two visual images, two timescales, two lived realities. In doing so, she creates an entirely new photographic image through which she can show us the truth of a people and their land.

In the resulting photographs mottled grey skies gradually transfigure, inhabited by the subtlest imprint of historic group portraits. Clouds morph into bodies and faces. The sky’s pallor shifts as the outlines of figures become momentarily clear—an arm bent at the elbow, the hand of a standing figure resting upon the shoulder of a seated child. The monochromatic archival photographs are made translucent, tempering the solidity of the figures which hover in perpetuity above the olive tree-clad hills, the abandoned villages, and the border walls of the landscapes beneath them.

Halawani, in describing the impetus behind the creation of For you Mother, recalls these words spoken by her mother: ‘Even when we die and leave this world, our spirits remain, floating in the skies of our country, Palestine.’ At first, Halawani explains, she did not grasp the fullness of her mother’s meaning. When she came to do so, it was through the act of creating these works, in ‘visualizing her thought and feelings through my experimentations.’¹ For Halawani, then, it was in the process of making her mother’s words visible—transmuting language into photographic image—that she was able to gain insight into her mother’s truth.

As a writer and curator, I work across visual and linguistic terrain. As a result, much of my life is spent transcribing the visual world into language, and considering the ways that language itself structures our ability to see clearly. To write about images, we take material made by an artist, and we transform it into something else. Translating artworks into language should, I think, be a metabolic act, rather than one of strict equivalency. It should produce something new.

Halawani takes an archival image, a portrait of a people to whom she belongs, and she folds it into the sky hanging over the lands to which she belongs. I, in turn, have started with the image she has created. Looking through the digital rendering of this composite image, I am prompted to examine the histories and lived realities it holds. From my home in Aotearoa New Zealand, Halawani invites me to think of the truths these images contain, and to shape them into words. This constant slippage from language to vision and back again is, perhaps, one of those intermediary spaces in which our truths can be examined.

Our understanding of truth is fundamentally tied to the notion of objectivity and, for me, no one has written so insightfully about objectivity as Donna Haraway, who declares it as a position, rather than a fixed truth. “Its images,” she writes, “are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions—of views from somewhere.”²

Halawani gifts us a view from somewhere true. It is a view of separation and exile, but it is also a view of belonging and return.

1. Rula Halawani, https://www.ayyamgallery.com/exhibitions/257-rula-halawani-for-you-mother/press_release_text/ Accessed 9
2. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in Feminist Studies Vol 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), 575-599, 590. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066. Accessed 12 April 2024.