To many, a photographer’s worth may come down to a number. Perhaps it’s a six-figure contract with a Fortune 100 company or a seven-figure following on Instagram. But what if the number was just one? What if your work changed the life of just “one” person? For over five years, Munich, Germany-based photographer Erol Gurian has been nurturing a personal project – teaching a photojournalism workshop to teenagers in a Beirut refugee settlement. The typical metrics of a photographer’s success may evade this project. But every year, Erol walks away knowing that a young adult may have altered their perspective on life, waking up the next day with a renewed sense of hope.
Erol’s time in Lebanon began in 2013 while working on a project called “terra arMEnia.” It was about the Armenian diaspora and their relationship with their homeland. Two years later, in 2015, would mark a hundred years since the Armenian genocide, so he headed to Beirut to photograph and interview half a dozen Armenians about their thoughts, experiences, and reflections. As someone with Armenian roots, this was his own personal way of contributing to the memorial.
While in Beirut, Erol heard of the influx of Syrian refugees residing in the Bekaa Valley, two hours from the capital. While his commitments at the time prevented a visit to the region, he eventually returned in 2016 to document the refugees’ plight. He worked on a photostory about a refugee girl and documented the efforts of a local NGO called Beyond Association.
During the course of many shoots, we discovered Beyond’s so-called Press Club: a group of Syrian teens and their teacher who would write and shoot stories on life inside the refugee camp. Their texts would be handwritten on paper, cut out, and pasted on pages of sturdy construction paper alongside small prints of their photos. Then, they handbound the pages with a thread of wool. It was their “newspaper.”
When Erol and his designer companion István Velsz saw this, they both had the same idea: “why not create a “real” newspaper with them?” It was an obvious train of thought to a photojournalist, so he suggested it to the teacher, Mesiad, and the NGO, starting on the project the very next day.
We asked the kids to brainstorm the name of their newspaper. After some discussion, they came up with the Arabic word صوتنا (sawtuna), which translates to “our voice.” “Why our voice?” I asked. They said they didn’t want the word “refugee” in their name. “We’re normal people, like everyone else here in Lebanon. We are so much more than just refugees,” they said. That convinced us right away.
The first edition of Ourvoice was prepared within a week. Erol and István taught the students the foundations of journalism using Mesiad as a translator. Everything from headlines and captions to layout and design was discussed.
After a week of learning, researching, writing, rewriting, shooting, translating (from Arabic to English), and designing, we were finally able to visit the local copyshop with a USB stick containing our very first PDF of “Ourvoice.” It was just an A3 page with a front and back page, but we were proud of our product. We had managed to create a “real” small newspaper.
Erol and István continued the project over subsequent years, experimenting with a web product on those later tries. Then, during the pandemic, they received assistance from a local journalist, Sara, who ran a solo workshop at the northern Syrian border. With her support, the team published teens’ photostories for the world wide web.
Last year, Erol and Sara decided to be more ambitious.
Having found a sponsor, FNF (Friedrich Naumann Foundation For Freedom), we partnered with an amazing school called Alsama inside a Palestinian camp in Beirut: Shatila. 10 of the school’s most gifted students would spend two weeks with us. This time the challenge was a bit bigger: we set the goal of creating a magazine from scratch.
During the first three days, they reviewed the basics of documentary work via writing and photography. Image composition was vital, mainly because they’d be using smartphones as the primary tool for reporting. They’d have to be mindful of shot sizes and angles since typical smartphone users shoot vertically, minimizing the context surrounding a subject. Each student was given an iPhone 8 for the project’s duration, just to ensure that Erol’s work as digitech would be seamless on his MacBook. The theory soon led to practice, as the teenagers went around the school vicinity to test out what they’d just learned.
I’m a firm believer in learning by doing. As they started researching their individual stories from Day 03 onward, they went into the field and took the first images of their prospective subjects and locations. Of course, the main shoots took place in the second week, when each student got deeply involved in their story. We encouraged them to experiment and shoot lots of images and alternative shots, giving us plenty of choice in the editing stage.
The field was an area of 1.5 square kilometers with more than 20,000 inhabitants. Shatila was erected in 1949 to house thousands of Palestinians fleeing their country following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It started as a stretch of tents which has now grown into a city. As Erol puts it, the place resembles a slum: loud and crowded, with the stench of rotting garbage permeating the air. But, on the other hand, he recognizes the sense of community that people have found there. It’s a home for the Stateless, whether they’re Syrian or Palestinian, making ends meet with what little has been offered to them.
The 10 students would bring some of the neighborhood’s stories to the forefront, venturing independently, talking to strangers, and building the skills required of good photojournalists. But it was a case of trial and error. They had to research people, places, and events to find a story with a powerful idea, laying bare the ways of life in Shatila.
There was the story of Rania, a 17-year-old woman abandoned by her husband after giving birth to a baby girl. There was the story of Nader, a 20-year-old recovering from drug addiction after someone laced his candy when he was 14. Then, there was the story of Malik, a 10-year-old who works as a plastic collector to bring home $3 a day to his family.
Besides the tragic and heartwrenching, there were stories of hope and warmth to be found in certain corners of Shatila: of families looking after one another and creating ventures to uplift the community. Even then, the harsh reality on the ground could not be ignored.
Student journalists are a rare sight in Shatila and one that may not be handled too kindly. Some were chasing a story about the area’s stray bullets, a common hazard that can wound, if not kill. Shots can be heard all day in the neighborhood as people fire their weapons for reasons that include celebrations.
People commonly get hurt by stray bullets as they fall from the sky. It is an old tradition here to shoot your gun (or machine gun) for joy. A child is born: “ratatatat”; son received a good report card: “bang, bang, bang.” So when the students approached their potential interviewees, some reacted defensively, saying that shooting is an important part of their tradition, even part of their personality. Why would anyone dare question that…
This particular feature challenged the students more than others. The reporting had an inherent risk, but Erol’s been around long enough to find a riveting premise as a workaround.
It would have been dangerous to take photos of someone firing into the air for celebration purposes – I urged them to go to the school’s front yard and look at the sand and pebble ground. It had occurred to me earlier that when you look very closely, you could find tons of empty shells. So within about fifteen minutes, five of us collected two handfuls of them. That ended up being the photo.
With that and many other stories put together, Erol, István, and Sara published the first tangible result of the Ourvoice workshops.
We had to figure out how to allocate enough space for each story and student since we were limited to 40 pages budget-wise. I did quite some processing with all the images, since our students delivered just their unprocessed jpegs (we didn’t have the time to get into processing). István had to play the print quality by ear, since we would have 50 pieces of the zine printed at a local Beirut copyshop and had no chance to run any tests.
The technical constraints didn’t matter in the end. Now, Erol has a printed magazine that he can share with friends, colleagues, and potential benefactors, securing more funding to continue Ourvoice in the future. The next workshop is set for September 2023 in Lebanon. Still, he sees the project’s scope expanding beyond the Mediterranean nation, especially considering its impact on teenage participants.
I asked one of our students, Marwa, what she would take away from the project. Something completely unexpected came up. She told me that until our workshop, she had only wanted to leave Shatila, to be on a journey, far away from this place that was loud, dirty, and foreign to her. Now she has a different view of her home: “I have discovered the beauty of Shatila. I want to find more that is special and authentic here. I don’t want to leave anymore.”
Recently, Erol secured grant funding to publish a photo book looking through his time in Lebanon. With the working title of “Lebanon Unsheltered,” its pages will feature his personal images from the last decade and those of the intrepid teenage journalists in Shatila. He plans to publish the book in the Fall of 2024, following it up with exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, and Beirut. As things stand, it’s certain that Ourvoice is only getting louder and reaching farther.
See more of Erol’s work on his website.
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