Rachel Papo Photography: Points for Empathy

Artist’s Statement:

At an age when social, sexual, and educational explorations are at their highest point, the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli girl is interrupted. She is plucked from her home surroundings and placed in a rigorous institution where her individuality is temporarily forced aside in the name of nationalism. During the next two years, immersed in a regimented and masculine environment, she will be transformed from a girl to a woman, within the framework of an army that is engaged in daily war and conflict. She is now a soldier serving her country, in a military camp amidst hundreds like her, yet beneath the uniform there is someone wishing to be noticed, listened to, and understood.Almost fifteen years after my mandatory military duty ended, I went back to several Israeli army bases, using the medium of photography as a vehicle to re-enter this world. Serial No. 3817131 represents my effort to come to terms with the experiences of being a soldier from the perspective of an adult. My service had been a period of utter loneliness, mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all. Through the camera’s lens, I tried to reconstruct facets of my military life, hopeful to reconcile matters that had been left unresolved.

Walking onto an army base after all these years was very disorienting, as memories began to surface, and blend with feelings of estrangement. The girls who I encountered during these visits were disconnected from the outside world, completely absorbed in their paradoxical reality. They spoke a language now foreign to me, using phrases like “Armored Cavalry Regiment” and “Defense Artillery.” Would it have made any difference to explain to them that in a few years the only thing they might remember is their serial number? Photographing these soldiers, I saw my reflection; I was on the other side of a pane of glass—observing a world that I had once been a part of, yet I could not go back in time or change anything. It felt like a dream.

The photographs in this project serve as a bridge between past and present—a combination of my own recollections and the experiences of the girls who I observed. Each image embodies traces of things that I recognize, illuminating fragments of my history, striking emotional cords that resonate within me. In some way, each is a self-portrait, depicting a young woman caught in transient moments of introspection and uncertainty, trying to make sense of a challenging daily routine. In striving to maintain her gentleness and femininity, the soldier seems to be questioning her own identity, embracing the fact that two years of her youth will be spent in a wistful compromise.

*****

Points for empathy. And what do I think? I think I am still trying to understand a part of my life this brings back.

I understand that I was a part of a system that pressed youth into military necessity,

I understand that I became a foundation to carry those particular doctrines and discipline forward, tradition regardless of right or wrong,

I understand that my words and actions inspired generations of recruits,

I understand that the same doctrines glorified the potential of pushing the biochemical, biomechanical boundaries torwards death,

I understand that principles of imposition are a remnant of the same ideological desperation that spawned the Hitler Youth of the Allied world and

I understand now, so clearly why

I just can’t be a soldier anymore.

Film Response: Sans Soleil (Part 1)

“My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past.

“He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine’s world the ‘zone,’ an homage to Tarkovsky.

“What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn’t share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

“I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

“As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they ‘trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.’

“They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That’s why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.”

- Sans Soleil at 00:39:49. Director: Chris Marker.