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The Longer Now

30 Arab and Jewish youngsters received Polaroid cameras and films (a donation of Project Inspire). During 4 meetings – two in Um-El-Fahem and two in Ramat-Gan, they learned about photography, took pictures and collaborated through photography and physical photographs.

How can instant cameras create interactions between people? What is the difference between taking a photo with your smartphone and taking a photo with a Polaroid? and most importantly – can you really get to know each other using photography?

In the meetings, the participants acted in pairs, in groups and as a whole. Exercises included taking self-portraits, continuous photographs, chain reaction photographs for each other’s photographs, and telling stories about their own and others’ photographs.

At the end of each meeting, the students defined the assignments for the next meeting together: what images they should take. In this way they created corpuses of images on different topics, like their families, food, home etc. Sharing and comparing the materials created a feeling of closeness and similarity between them.