The exhibition "With My Own Eyes" invites us to immerse ourselves in the living Palestinian timeline through the lens of the French photographer Joss Dray, who describes herself as the “Resistance Photographer.” At a time when standing with Palestine was tantamount to professional suicide, Dray bravely documented the atrocities of occupation, tracing the unwavering Palestinian resistance—both in the occupied land and in refugee camps in Lebanon. Through her lens, she captured moments of truth and defiance, creating a visual testimony of a people’s unyielding struggle, from the Sabra and Shatila massacre to the First Intifada, through the Oslo years, and into the Second Intifada.
The act of documenting Palestinian reality through images and sound has not always been an option, leaving our narrative vulnerable to distortion, erasure, and denial. This was true during our first displacement, when survival took precedence over writing, when ensuring the safety of our children and loved ones outweighed documentation, and when our lives, our properties, and the very evidence of our existence—our photographs, our records—were stolen before our eyes.
Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the world is inundated with millions of images, videos, and voice recordings—scenes so horrific they seem ripped from horror films. But as Palestinians, we see it differently: what is happening today has happened before. What we witness now through the camera’s eye is but a repetition of a past that remained obscure—except for scattered testimonies that once seemed almost unreal.
We have heard the stories of the Nakba and the Naksa, of the defining moments that shaped our history, passed down from our grandmothers and mothers. Yet today, we see those stories unfold before our eyes—with every photograph, every cry, every lifeless body, every stone crushing the home once sheltered, every migration southward, every displacement under tattered tents. It is a story we never saw but have memorized by heart.
And yet, Palestine is not a single tragic text. It is a continuum of intertwined individual and collective stories—woven from resistance, from suffering, from an existence both bitter and inspiring. This is the essence captured in these photographs. This exhibition offers us a lens through which to grasp the present moment, to navigate the daily threshold between the ordinary and the epic, between life, death, and the endless waiting in between.
There is no fixed chronology here, no singular narrative arc. The images stand before us—old yet new—open to interpretation, inviting us to read them from any angle to question which turning points will eventually lead us to freedom.
This is not merely a collection of photographs. It is a living archive, a convergence of past and present—one that compels us to rethink history and reimagine the future, both of which run in a circle, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, “begins only to end, and ends only to continue.”
Joss Dray
A photojournalist who likes to define herself as a the "Resistance Photographer ", Joss Dray began documenting the daily story of Palestinian resistance in 1987. Her photographic work has been exhibited in many galleries and publications, including "Memories of Jenin, 1989-2002"; "The New Gates of Jerusalem, Israeli Apartheid" (2002); and "Palestine Between the Blue of the Sky and the Sand of Memory" (2003). She was awarded an honorary prize by the Palestine Media Forum in Istanbul. Her works are housed in the Contemporary International Documentation Library (BDIC), and her full archive is available on the Palestinian Museum’s digital archive website.
In addition to her work in Palestine, Joss Dray has conducted research and photographic documentation on immigration in France. Since the 1970s, she has focused on documenting the living conditions of migrant workers and families, with a particular emphasis on themes such as housing, employment, social life, struggle, youth movements, the appropriation of public space, and cultural demonstrations.
She has held several exhibitions, including "They Are Still Walking" (Tactikollectif, 2013); "Women’s Nomadism in the Movement of the World" (the collective "Some of Us", Blanc Mesnil, 2011); and "Paths of Women in the Nomadic Migration Roads," (Arab World Institute, 2011). She has also contributed to several books, including "Women with a Thousand Doors", in collaboration with Leila Houari (EPO-Syros, 1996); "Neighborhood in Motion, The Caravan of Neighborhoods", in partnership with "In the Name of Memory" and the Abbé Pierre Foundation (1999), "The Israeli War on Information", in collaboration with Denis Sieffert (La Découverte, 2002); "The Abandoned Heart" (La Dispute, 2004); "The Palestinians: Photography of a Land and Its People from 1839 to the Present", in collaboration with Elias Sanbar (2004); and "The Second Palestinian Intifada" by Ramzy Baroud (2012).
