Giovanni Facouseh

Giovanni Facouseh

After my father passed away last January I started searching in the cupboard for old images. I remember seeing those photos in my old childhood home, in Bethlehem. My mother, brother and I abandoned it during the second intifada, leaving my father behind.
More than a thousand photographs were kept carefully in two drawers, telling the story of my family. The photos show members of my extended family and capture their everyday life from a young age. Among the photos I also found negative slides, of which one caught my eye. It was the official photograph of my grandfather Joudeh’s family, taken at the Shamieh Studio in Bethlehem, circa 1960.
Throughout the years, some of the family members were separated due to several wars in the area. Two sisters moved between Bethlehem, Kuwait and Jordan, others moved to Jerusalem with their husbands to start their own families, only one sister stayed in Bethlehem.

The project tries to reunite the remaining siblings who now live in Amman, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem through portraits in their own houses, due to the impossibility to reunite them in one place because of their old age, geographical and political difficulties, using the same technique as the original picture taken over 60 years ago, a big format 4×5 camera.