“Shades of Los Angeles” Project Spotlights Middle Eastern Communities

by Fadwa El Guindi

Four years after its founding in the fall of 1991, the Los Angeles Public Library ethnic photo project called “Shades of Los Angeles: A Search for Visual Ethnic and Cultural History” reached out to the varied communities of Middle Eastern origin encompassed in the megalopolis of the West Coast. As with the ethnic groups previously recorded, the project answers some questions about the makeup of Los Angeles, but raises others. Directed by Carolyn Cole and sponsored by the Photo Friends of the Los Angeles Public Library, a nonprofit support group, the project is funded by grants from Sunlaw Congeneration Partners I and the California Council for the Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funds also are sought from private sources within the communities represented.

The first phase of the “Shades of L.A.” project began in the fall of 1991 with the African-American community, followed by Chicano/Mexican, Pacific Islander, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino-American, and American Indian communities. The latest phase, which began in 1995, focuses on Middle Eastern communities in Los Angeles.

The Middle Eastern project began with solicitations to community leaders and ethnic organizations for family photos that “reflect community life and diversity and preserve the ethnic history of the city.”

Photo days were held, starting in the summer of 1995, during which trained interns and volunteers met with donors to select photos. The specific communities of Middle Eastern origin selected by project personnel were Arabs, Armenians, Iranians, Israelis, Jews and Turks. Thousands of photographs submitted by members of these groups were copied on-site by professional photographers. These now are part of the Los Angeles Public Library Photograph Collection, which is accessible to the public.

After initial assessments of the acquisitions by library staff members, subsequent make-up days were offered to members of the low-response groups, namely the Arab, Iranian, and Turkish-American communities. Finally, a much smaller selection of photos was made from the “Shades” archive for public exhibition.

In a project such as this one, a certain subjectivity is expected. The photos are submitted by “donors” who tend to belong to the community’s visible networkactivists, organizers, spokespersons, and leaders.

The Issue of Privacy

Other than subjectivity, there is the issue of privacy. Are consenting photo owners aware of the shift in meaning the photo undergoes as it is transferred from the privacy of the family album to the world of public library visitors and exhibits? In its journey from family albums to library archives, the photo becomes a tool for communication, a subject of analysis, a depersonalized object of judgment. Viewers’ interpretations’ can be explored and studied but are not easily controlled. To share the meaning intended by the photo owner, the viewer will have to set her/himself inside the donor’s ethnic-immigrant world.

To help achieve this, a symposium entitled “From Albums to Archives” was held on Feb. 4, 1996, a few days before the public opening of the exhibit, to assess the “Shades of L.A.” project on Middle Eastern communities. The participating panel comprised scholars Fadwa El Guindi (anthropology), Ali Behdad (comparative literature), Steve Gold (sociology), Sheila Pinkel (art), graduate student Wendy Shaw (art history), library staff member Sylvia Manoogian and UCLA Near Eastern Center representative Jonathan Friedlander. The questions posed for the panel were: (1) In what way would a collection of family photos change or contribute to the public record? (2) What issues does the collection of these photographs raise? and (3) How might this collection be used by researchers working in each discipline?

To enable panelists to address these questions, photo submissions along with accession notes and comments were made available for analysis and slide showing. For my own presentation, I selected 25 photos. In them, certain images recurred such as “father holding baby son” (challenging stereotypical images of Middle Eastern men) or “posed old world studies portrait of grandfather proudly dressed in traditional attire” (projecting pride in family and roots). There were interesting ordinary human images such as that of the Iraqi “grandmother on floor rolling cigarettes for living” dated 1975, and a portrait of “Iraqi grandfather dressed in traditional clothes in Baghdad” dated 1948. An Israeli photo that stood out in symbolism and uniqueness among ethnic submissions was a snapshot of an Israeli soldier standing side by side with a Hasidic man on top of a military tank in Israel following the 1967 war.

Submissions tell a story. Often, however, what is not submitted is more telling. For example, there were no photos showing children taken to foster homes, battered or abandoned women in shelters, AIDS victims, the homeless or unemployed, or the Arab man making a living at the gas pump. These situations, too, exist, but are there photographs of them? If so, would they be submitted?

What we have in the archives mostly reflects a distilled picture without blemishesan idealized community full of dreams, hopes, aspirations, accomplishments, history, art. In general, most portraits reflect pride and memory (many of weddings) from the homeland. Others projected dreams and hopes in the new homeland.

Most portraits reflect pride and memory from the homeland.

In the Arab-American collection there also were images of community historic memory, such as early efforts at organizing as Arabs in America through cultural activities (such as those performed in conjunction with the Olympic Games in Los Angeles), community leaders planning an Arab cultural center that was never to be, or building the Islamic Foundation of Southern California that was to be realized as the Islamic Center of Southern California, producing Arab-American TV in a warehouse, “the big men” getting together to found the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and celebrations of cultural heritage through Al-Funun Al-Arabiya’s theater group recently dramatizing bedouin women’s poetry.

It also was evident that the prevalent imagery submitted in the Jewish collection was that of European character (particularly Eastern European) rather than Middle Eastern. This raises the question of the inclusion and exclusion of groups within the project’s definition of Middle Eastern. What underlies the choice? Is it cultural roots, geography, shared immigrant experience, ideology, politics or faith? If faith is the criterion, how can the absence of Muslims from the Middle Eastern community in Los Angeles be justified?

Less obvious, but equally integral, are Middle Eastern Christians, a uniquely significant religious group representing the oldest and most original forms of the Christian church. Middle Eastern Jews, Muslims and Christians all can be defined by faith and identity. Who then makes up the Middle Eastern community? What criterion is used? Is it culture, history or faith? Who decided? Is the choice idealistic, ideological, or realistic? Does it relate to funding?

Ultimately the question of concern becomes who will write Los Angeles ethnic history? Can the public library serve as ethnic memory gatekeeper? And how will the story behind these images ultimately be told? These questions are raised because the Los Angeles Public Library photo project has launched a successful project. Subjectivity now submits to objective analysis and ethnic memory has joined the national treasure.