“Fire and Stones: A State of Being” is a selection of photographs from my work about the emotional traces of the on-going occupation of the Palestinian population.
Perhaps, as the oldest conflict in contemporary political consciousness, the struggle of the Palestinians is often described from a political news perspective as manifested in street confrontations between stone throwing Palestinian youth and Israeli security forces. Moving beyond this image that is engraved in our memory, as a photographer, I aim to depict a state of being that has surrendered the daily experience of Palestinians under occupation. From a mother who mourns the death of her kid to the man who confronts the security forces in the streets of Jerusalem, I believe that the damage from the occupation is also psychological and whose affects therefore are perhaps even more detrimental to the peace processes.
Emine Gozde Sevim (b. 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey) arrived in the United States in 2001 as a scholarship student in high school. She then graduated from Bard College in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Photography, Sociology and International Relations.
During her college years, Sevim studied old and new photographic traditions with Gilles Peress, Stephen Shore, An-My Lê, John Pilson and Barbara Ess. As a result of her developing interest in the convergence between film/video and photography, she began experimenting with multimedia storytelling. For her undergraduate thesis exhibition, she created a multimedia film entitled "In Search of Audra Prokofiev", along side of a photographic exhibition with the same title in 2008 at Bard College's Woods Gallery.
Following graduation, Sevim was invited to work with photographers of the Magnum Photos Agency in New York. Between 2008 and 2012, she assisted Bruce Gilden, Gilles Peress, and Susan Meiselas on various independent photographic projects in field research, studio production, exhibitions, and multimedia storytelling assignments for international venues. In 2010, Sevim joined Marco Bischof, filmmaker and director of the Werner Bischof Estate in Switzerland, in the development of the MagnumTime project of the Magnum Foundation, a non-linear interactive oral history project on photographic traditions where she worked as cinematographer and associate producer.
In 2007, Sevim embarked on an on-going body of work across the Middle East, "The Believers", about life in contested geographies of the region. Her photographs from Afghanistan were exhibited at New York University as part of a panel discussion on Afghan identity in the U.S. in 2009. In 2011, she began photographing in Egypt to document life in transition since the fall of former president Mubarak.
As of 2012, Sevim began merely focusing on her photographic projects across the Middle East. She divides her time between the U.S. and the Middle East.
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