TITLE: Homeland Lost

Made in 2004-5, Homeland Lost juxtaposes portraits of Palestinian refugees and exiles with images of the places they were forced to leave in 1948 during the war that led to the creation of Israel.
The project includes portraits of Palestinians living in refugee camps or cities in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. The portraits reflect the diversity of the diaspora population in gender, class, age and religion and the photographs as a group portray a society in exile.
Palestinians refer to the events in 1948 that led to the creation of Israel as al-Nakba, the catastrophe, to emphasize the suffering caused by dispersal, exile, alienation, and denial. Many older Palestinians still long for lost houses, villages, communities, land, orchards, and olive trees as well as the more abstract "homeland." They have built their lives around the dream of return, keeping keys, maps and entitlement cards from many years ago, as symbols of ownership and loss.
The portraits in Homeland Lost are paired with landscapes showing the sites of the homes and villages from which the people originated. These images record the erasure of the former Palestinian landscape. Many of the villages, razed during the war to discourage return, have fallen into ruin and are now either overgrown with weeds or obscured by forests of pine. Where the houses remain, they have become home to Israeli families, or they have been converted to new uses.
The individuals in this photo essay were displaced from their homeland 76 years ago. Through the act of pairing individual with former home in the medium of photography, they are symbolically reunited with their places of origin.

AUTHOR: Alan Gignoux (United Kingdom)

Alan Gignoux is an award-winning documentary photographer and founder of Gignoux Photos, which produces documentary photography and film projects focussing on socio-political and environmental issues around the world.
Gignoux is committed to exposing the effects of displacement on communities around the world. His most exhibited body of work, Homeland Lost, juxtaposes portraits of Palestinian refugees with their former homes in Israel. He has been a regular visitor to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria, building relationships and recording camp life since 2005. For his recent Arts Council funded project, “You can see me, but I don’t exist,” he used a camera obscura to document asylum seekers living in limbo in the UK.
Alongside his work documenting refugee communities, Gignoux has for the past ten years been investigating and recording the impact of fossil fuels extraction and metals mining and refining on local communities. His photographs show the way in which landscapes have been permanently altered to make way for mining, scarred by the infrastructure of the mining industry, and poisoned by pollution of the air, soil, and water. The short documentary films that often accompany his images reveal through interviews the conflicting interests of mining company owners, politicians, activists, industry employees, and residents, throwing light on the complexities involved in transitioning to a low carbon future.
The NCCA (National Centre for Contemporary Art) invited Gignoux to participate in a residency in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2009. Photographs taken during the residency were published last year in Russian Rust Belt, which looks at the effects of industrial decline and pollution on the people and landscape of the Urals region.
In 2010, Gignoux began work on Oil Sands, which documents the effects of the bitumen extracting industry on the Albertan environment and communities. Oil Sands was developed into an award-winning photobook and selected for exhibition in Taxed to the Max, the Noorderlicht Photofestival, in 2019. In 2025 he aims to release his first feature length documentary, Oil Sands: Curse or Blessing?, co-directed with filmmaker Christopher Kemble. The film will be an in-depth presentation of the issues surrounding the Oil Sands development in Alberta pulling together interviews from stakeholders recorded over the last fifteen years.
Gignoux first visited the Appalachian region in 2012. In 2015, he released Appalachia: From Mountaintops to Moonscapes, a short documentary film shown at film festivals internationally and short-listed in 2016 for the AOP Awards. He self-published a photobook with the same title in 2021.
In 2022 Gignoux published Monuments, a collaboration with photographer Chloe Juno which contemplates lives affected by the insatiable hunger of surface coal mining in Germany. People living in the path of the ever-expanding Garzweiler surface mine south of Dusseldorf are being systematically evacuated from their homes and rehoused. All four of the photography series above were included in Gignoux’s solo exhibition Bruised Lands at the Briggait in Glasgow in November 2021, concurrent with the COP 26 conference on climate change.