From the Land of Miracles

Greetings from the Land of Miracles, and don’t forget – “You can’t stop love.”

At the conclusion of Wendy Sue Lamm’s three-page opening to her intimate visual portrait of Jerusalem sums a tormented land where Israelis and Palestinians live shoulder to shoulder with the world’s media on the ready to report all society’s missteps there.

“The lines aren’t clear where you are interacting with the people,” says Lamm. “People live regardless of what’s going on around them.”

These statements in themselves are surprising in light of what the perception is of the embattled region where you wonder aloud, “Can’t they get long?”

“When I was working at the Los Angeles Times, I was disappointed with the pictures that were available at the time, so I went there,” recalls Lamm. “The images that you could get from the mainstream didn’t satisfy what I wanted to know about the people there. It was really enlightening to see how people lived among each other. There was no real sense of who was who.”

Make no mistake about it, From the Land of Miracles is not a simplistic utopian dream where the wounds of over a half-century of uprisings, violence and non-tolerance are sweep away and ignored. Lamm’s story is told with few words. In fact, the book scans through 50 pictures, page after page without a single word. The captions are presented on the last few pages in the thumbnail-sized photo recap. Which is exactly what she wanted.

“It is essential not to be caught up in who was from this faction or that faction,” says. “The book represents what you feel when you are there. I wanted to let people think for themselves. You definitely get a different feel when it is about the people and not the governments.”

Predetermination

“When you first get there it is confusing what is going on,” Lamm attempts to explain the simply unexplainable. “Each country and media puts the story in their own narrative and whenever something happens, the perspective falls into the predetermined narrative that we are programmed to express. That really is one of the most impact things I took away from there is that when you are in a place for a long time you don’t see how much you are predetermined to react to given situations.”

Getting Along

“There were times when there were real opportunities where things were good, relationships were good,” she says. “You had real hope that good things would happen. Long stretches of peace where both sides had shared humor and good will. I remember a time where Palestinian and Israeli jazz musicians were playing together and bring their music as one. You wondered if this could carry over into everyday life. Soon enough this hope would disappear and then reappear almost just as fast.

Can a tormented land, fractured with hatred between its peoples still be called Land of Miracles? In the book the question is neither answered, nor shied away from. After looking through it and reading the perspectives provided with poetry by Arthur Miller and a short story by Emile Habiby you begin to change your predetermined views of what you think might or might not be happening in between two proud people in Jerusalem.