It’s the most human tendency to take for granted where you were raised – a site literally which is granted to you as soon as you enter the world. Some of us never leave our place of origin, making it difficult to develop a true perspective on this, while others may travel the world and not bother to examine critically the factors that shape their worldview.
Not photographer, engraver and bookmaker Toby Millmanbut.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida as a second-generation American, Millman spent her childhood regularly visiting family in Jerusalem. As an American cousin, she was already the intruder, a status that rose in 1998, when she began developing curiosity about the occupied palestinian territories.
“My dad was in Tel Aviv, and he asked me if I wanted to join him, so I thought I’d take a two-week trip, but I ended up staying for about six months, and I enrolled in a government-sponsored Hebrew language course.”, millman said Hyperallergic in an interview. “It’s aimed at recent immigrants for language immersion, but it’s really like indoctrination. Being there during this period of time, I had a series of little epiphany moments. One of them was the indoctrination of this language class, as the Palestinians worked outside the building.
“The professor was making these racist comments, and then going out on break and seeing people working on the building, I had this feeling that was wrong, and at that point I was like, ‘There’s a story that’s been hidden. As a Jewish American person, there’s a story out there that I haven’t been aware of,” she continued. “And then it became my life mission to understand the Palestinian narrative.
From the late 1990s to 2006, Millman was a media junkie, taking classes — including Intro to Arabic — following world news and reading anything she could get her hands on. In 2006, Millman spent a 10-week residency in the Palestinian areas, during which time she lived in a Melkite nunnery in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, studying Arabic at Al-Quds University and traveling in the West Bank. She returned for a second visit, spending about two months in Tel Aviv and another five months in Ramallah. continue she studied Arabic at Birzeit University, volunteered in a youth club at Jalazone refugee camp, wrote for various cultural institutions and grassroots campaigns, and attempted to teach at a high school.
His collected and minimalist experiences cut paper pictures became the basis of his first works on the subject, Access and closure: Stories from inside and outside an occupied Palestine (2008), a 64-page typographic book completed in 2008 at the Oregon College of Art and Crafts. As Millman continued to explore and make connections in the Palestinian territories, her subsequent work shifted the focus from her personal experience to a collective experience.
“[Access & Closure] were mostly my stories with some sort of slipped-in Palestinian stories,” Millman explained. Another of his books, Facts from the field (2011), is “mostly Palestinian stories with my story slipped into them,” she said.
Facts from the field includes maps and testimonies she collected from various Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations, along with writings and drawings by Millman.
Millman’s work, taken as a whole, highlights some of her interests and themes – those that link her examinations of Palestine to projects that land closer to home, in her home town of Hamtramck. Whether you were working as an enumerator in 2010 (Census 2010:48212), or collect the stories of passers-by while attending a community garden plot (From now onpublished in 2014)Millman is drawn to places of cultural mixing and tension, has a keen eye for evidence of exposure or reduced urban infrastructureand an incredible ability to connect one-on-one with strangers near home or around the world.
When Millman describes the curiosity expressed by Jewish relatives about his time in Palestine, it’s easy to hear an echo from Metro Detroit commuters, who have a generational bias — but also a fascination — about what it means to be a person. white woman moving into a city not centered around them. One of his finals works involving Palestine is a unique hand-drawn edition book, Parallel/Parallax, which features drawings from photos taken in Detroit and Ramallah between 2011 and 2014 and paper-cut collage elements from materials collected from both locations. It is impossible, from broadcast to broadcast, to determine which city is which.
These days, despite more than a decade devoted to Palestine as a subject, Millman seems content to cede this territory to others, for whom it is a birthright.
“I had this privileged position as someone who could travel freely, who could kind of get along with everyone,” she said. “I’m open to talking to strangers. I had a background in photography, and before everyone had a smartphone, I wanted to take pictures [in Palestine] was an act of protest. But I have to say now, I feel like there are so many Palestinian artists releasing their work there. I feel like I did my part. There are other people who can share their stories now.
