It is the most human tendency to take the place where you were raised for granted — a site literally granted to you upon your entry into the world. Some of us never leave our place of origin, which makes it hard to develop any real perspective about it, while others might travel the world and still not bother to look critically at the factors that shape their worldview.
Not photographer, printmaker, and bookmaker Toby Millman, though.
As a second-generation American, Millman spent her childhood routinely visiting family in Tel Aviv. As the American cousin, she was already the odd one out, a status that increased in 1998, when she began to develop curiosity about the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“My dad happened to be in Tel Aviv, and he asked if I wanted to join, so I thought I would do a two-week trip, but I ended up staying for about six months and I enrolled in a government-sponsored Hebrew class,” Millman told Hyperallergic in an interview. “It’s meant for recent immigrants to do language immersion, but it’s really like indoctrination. Being there for that period of time, I had a series of small epiphany moments. One of them was the indoctrination of that language class, while Palestinians were working on the exterior of the building.”
“The teacher would make these racist comments, and then to go outside on break and see people working on the building, I had this feeling that this is wrong, and at that point, I thought: There’s a story that has been hidden. As a Jewish-American person, there’s a story out there that I have not been privy to,” she continued. “And then it became my life mission to figure out the Palestinian narrative.”
From the late 1990s to 2006, Millman was a media junkie, taking classes — including introductory Arabic — following global news, and reading anything she could get her hands on. In 2006, Millman spent a 10-week residency in Palestinian areas, during which time she lived in a Melkite convent in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, studying Arabic at Al-Quds University and traveling to the West Bank. She returned for a second visit, spending about two months in Tel Aviv and another five months in Ramallah to continue her study of Arabic at Birzeit University, volunteer at a youth club at Jalazone refugee camp, write for various cultural institutions and grassroots campaigns, and attempt to teach at a high school.
Her collected experiences and minimalist cut-paper imagery became the basis for her first work on the subject, Access & Closure: Stories from In and Out of an Occupied Palestine (2008), a 64-page letterpress book completed in 2008 at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. As Millman continued to explore and make connections within the Palestinian territories, her next work shifted focus from her personal experience to a collective one.
“[Access & Closure] were mostly my stories with a couple of Palestinian stories kind of slid in,” Millman explained. Another one of her books, Facts on the Ground (2011), is “mostly Palestinian stories with my story slid in,” she said.
Facts on the Ground comprises maps and testimonies she collected from various Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, accompanied by Millman’s writings and drawings.
Millman’s oeuvre, taken as a whole, highlights a few of her interests and themes — ones which bridge her examinations of Palestine with projects that land closer to home, in her city of Hamtramck. Whether working as a census taker in 2010 (Census 2010:48212), or collecting stories from passers-by while tending to a community garden plot (From Here on Out, published 2014), Millman is drawn to places of cultural mixing and tension, has a keen eye for evidence of exposed or diminished city infrastructure, and an uncanny ability to connect one-to-one with strangers near home or around the world.
When Millman describes the curiosity expressed by her Jewish relatives about her time in Palestine, it’s easy to hear an echo of Metro Detroit suburbanites, who hold generational bias — but also fascination — about what it means to be a White person moving into a city not centered around them. One of her final works involving Palestine is a hand-drawn single-edition book, Parallel/Parallax, which presents drawings based on photos taken in Detroit and Ramallah between 2011 and 2014 and cut-paper collage elements from materials gathered in both places. It is impossible, from spread to spread, to determine which city is which.
These days, in spite of spending more than a decade devoted to Palestine as a subject, Millman seems content to cede that territory to others, for whom it is a birthright.
“I had this position of privilege as someone who could travel freely, who can kind of get along with everyone,” she said. “I’m open to talking to strangers. I had a photography background, and before everyone had a smartphone, I felt like taking pictures [in Palestine] was an act of protest. But I have to say now, I feel like there are so many Palestinian artists who are getting their work out there. I feel like I’ve done my bit. There are other people that can share their stories now.”
