Danielle Stephen for 'Human Nature' - 12 images - Part 1/2 (Israel, Aug 2020)

YO! Hope you're good :)

It's been a while but I've been quietly editing about 5 shoots simultaneously and today I'm excited to share the first part of one of them.

This one was photographed in Atlit, the town I grew up in Israel. It's featuring dancer / model Danielle Stephen.

The first part was photographed in the ruins of Sheikh Burak (also known as Sheikh Burik ); an Armenian village near Atlit that was abandoned in the early 1980s. 

Doing some further reading about Sheikh Burak, reveals the mistreatment of the Armenians by the Israeli government. Making me quite sad and thoughtful about how today, someone like myself can come there and create such photographs without even being aware.

More hopeful photos from the 2nd part to be published later on this week ;) you can see a little preview on my Instagram.

_

More from my search (Wiki in Hebrew):

In 1920, a few dozen Armenians who had fled Turkey to escape the massacres settled near Atlit. A Christian Arab landowner leased them Sheikh Brak lands. When he fled to Lebanon in 1948, the lands were appropriated and distributed to the kibbutzim in the area.

"Your state and mine deceived them and took all the land from them," says former agriculture minister Pesach Grupper, an Atlit resident who once employed the Armenians in his fields. Not only was the land taken away from them, but their village also was not connected to the electricity grid and did not have proper sewage. "But they were content. That's their way," says Grupper.

One after the other, the young people married and left the village. The last Armenians left Sheikh Brak in 1981, after receiving compensation from the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Each family was given what amounts to about $40,000 in today's terms.