When Eduardo Soteras Jalil left his career in finance, he was pretty sure what he didn’t want to do with his life. Trouble was, he had no clue what he wanted to do, except that he liked to tell stories.
“In the middle of this quest,” he tells me, ”I came across an exhibition by Koudelka (the Czech photographer) and fell in love with the medium. I couldn’t believe how something so silent could say so much.”
Soteras had just found his answer, and picking up the camera didn’t mean forgetting his penchant for telling tales. There’s one story he likes to tell in particular. It’s about Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the South Hebron Hills, home to traditional Palestinian cave-dwelling communities, where he ended up in 2011. It’s a place to which he keeps returning.
In part, the story’s about the meaning of Masafer, which comes from ‘sifr’ meaning zero or nothingness. The name can be traced back to the Ottoman era and although it isn’t entirely clear how it came to be, Soteras explains, with a degree of literary license, that it might be because every time the Ottoman tax collector made his rounds, the residents disappeared (probably in the caves) and so he would write “000” in his report. Less colourfully, the area is now designated as Firing Zone 918 by the Israeli army.
Largely unknown in the rest of Palestine and threatened with constant deportation, the shepherds and farmers of Masafer Yatta live in the caves their ancestors carved, isolated by a belt of illegal Israeli settlements that separate them from the rest of the West Bank. It’s a place trapped between worlds.
Despite the harsh environment, Soteras says it’s somewhere he felt at home as soon as he arrived. Perhaps this fascination with being at the crossroads, between different worlds, comes from the fact that the 39-year-old is no stranger to migration – his grandparents emigrated to Argentina from Lebanon and he himself has chosen to live nomadically for the last decade, with his first photo-project tracing the journey of Central American migrants through Mexico in 2009.
In essence, a lot of Soteras’ work is about capturing the invisible. “I find inspiration in looking for stories that are trapped in little gaps between things,” he says, explaining his interest in-between spaces like Masafer, which are like crevices within the whole, interstices that mark void from fullness, absence from presence, blackness from white. “While walking through Masafer’s empty spaces, I was able to immerse in the void that such spaces can contain. The desert, the void, is a very particular feeling. It can be nothing and it can be everything at the same time.”
Soteras’ choice to use black-and-white photography to tell the story of this barren landscape is pitch perfect. His monochrome approach captures the starkness, which he says was more of an emotional decision than a conscious one. “It’s like searching for the appropriate rhythm in a song or text. You keep on trying until you find the beat that will deliver the story better.”
His current project, recording the melting of glaciers in northern Nepal, is also being shot in black and white. “It’s not easy to document disappearing ice,” he says. “Reality isn’t monochrome so whatever we do with that aesthetic is already a very personal statement of what we see and when I work in monochrome, I don’t see in monochrome, though I do see differently than when I shoot in colour. I might add that I’m colour-blind, so I usually don’t believe much in the colours I see. Perhaps then monochrome is a more honest statement.”
