Click to Enlarge Keep the change
Macduff Everton, a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler, has spent four decades focusing his lenses on the Maya. Early in his work he found himself in a quandary. He says, "When the Maya first began buying wristwatches and transistor radios, I thought, 'Do I try to make this image look like it was taken 1,500 years ago, or do I try to capture the incursions and change?'"
He opted for the latter, and in doing so created a rich photographic record of a people whose history was evolving at light speed.
It was a dilemma that nagged at me when I went into the Negev Desert to meet nomadic Arab Bedouins with Adam Sela, owner of Challenging Experience tours (www.adamsela.com). Sela shook his head when I described what I envisioned: robed men sipping tea in goat-hair tents, tasseled camels hitched to palm trees.
"That's Hollywood," he laughed. Instead, the tents were burlap, and the patriarch had traded his traditional robe for jeans and a T-shirt. We sipped coffee made from beans pounded in an old howitzer shell casing and sat before the gaze of a dusty television. It was real history, but it wasn't postcard-pretty.
Here and now
In the end, it doesn't matter so much what you photograph when trying to bring history alive -- real or as you imagine it should be. What matters is that you care about each picture.Raul Touzon, a documentary shooter whose work has appeared in National Geographic, once told me that when we try to bring history to life, we have a responsibility. "We are able to see the Paris of the 1940s because of Cartier-Bresson, and Mexico during the Revolution because of Casasola," he said. "At the end of the day, the simplest things you shoot are history -- that Pizza Hut next to the cathedral. It's a moment in time that will never happen again."
I thought about that during my last hours in Israel, in a hotel room overlooking the seaside city of Tel Aviv. I had already cleaned and packed my cameras, downloaded, captioned, and copied my images to backup drives. Dusk had fallen. Below me was a brightly lit mosque; beyond it Tel Aviv's skyscrapers twinkled. I was hoping to catch a few hours of sleep before my flight.
But here was this magical moment, the old and the new, the slow-shutter blur of traffic, an unexpected moment in time when history and beauty and reality all converged. I unpacked my Nikon and tripod.
Sometimes, bringing history to life is hard work, full of early mornings, endless research, patience, and sweat. But, if you're available for the moment, it can be very, very easy.
For details on visiting Israel, go to www.goisrael.com or call 888-774-7723. El Al is the national airline: www.elal.co.il or call 800-223-6700.
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