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Liftah -- abandoned village

68213570.jpg


Liftah (also Neftoah -- the two names are close in Arabic) was abandoned in 1948 or 1949, and has remained empty. It lies hidden on two steep hillsides in a narrow corner of the last valley on the climb to Jerusalem, and only fleeting glimpses are seen when you drive into the city. Although I have lived within a few kilometers of Liftah for the past six years, yesterday was the first time I have explored the site. I put some quick sketches in a Pbase gallery, which you can see at http://www.pbase.com/skirkp/liftah . The village appears to have been rather wealthy, and was probably Christian, based on the cross motifs seen in some of the stoneware, and the absence of a mosque among the ruins. It had a good water supply; a spring in which you can swim is still kept up.

I expect to return and work harder on several scenes in different light, and also to see if there are vantage points which permit getting a better sense of what the whole village might have been like.

scott
 

Don Lashier

New member
scott kirkpatrick said:
I expect to return and work harder on several scenes in different light, and also to see if there are vantage points which permit getting a better sense of what the whole village might have been like.
Scott, definitely some potential there, but definitely you need better light! That building could be very interesting face-on (no sky or blue sky) with good light, and perhaps some close-ups.

- DL
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Scott,

Try this experiment,

Block off the top of the picture on a line cutting 1 brick level above the main wall.

See if it changes the nature of the picture in any way. I have some ideas. I don't want to influence yours.

Asher
 
Asher Kelman said:
Hi Scott,

Try this experiment,

Block off the top of the picture on a line cutting 1 brick level above the main wall.

See if it changes the nature of the picture in any way. I have some ideas. I don't want to influence yours.

Asher

It does. I was struck by two aspects when I saw this house, one the remains of blue color, indicating that once it must have been plastered and had a smooth exterior, and the second, more general observation that so much is now growing out through the walls and up into the sky. That's why I included so much sky. The third aspect of the site is that it has been a prosperous village, briefly a war zone, then a slum reputed to be the locale of squatters and drug dealers, and now, thanks to recent highway construction, it is just cut off and abandoned. I'd like to bring out evidence of all three phases of its life. In the pbase gallery there are pictures showing some of these other aspects, for example

68209417.jpg
.

Where were you headed with the image you commented on?

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
scott kirkpatrick said:
It does. I was struck by two aspects when I saw this house, one the remains of blue color, indicating that once it must have been plastered and had a smooth exterior, and the second, more general observation that so much is now growing out through the walls and up into the sky. That's why I included so much sky. The third aspect of the site is that it has been a prosperous village, briefly a war zone, then a slum reputed to be the locale of squatters and drug dealers, and now, thanks to recent highway construction, it is just cut off and abandoned. I'd like to bring out evidence of all three phases of its life. In the pbase gallery there are pictures showing some of these other aspects, for example

Where were you headed with the image you commented on?

scott

The image cut as I suggested forces one to re distribute attention to the lower part of the picture and forces a kind of intimacy.

The black empty spaces of the windows now become important and make one think more of who might be or have been iside.

Removing friendly sky and the plants that grow between the roof stones, takes away the generality of "an old building" to something specific that could harbor life, nurturing hope, arguments or fear.

The procedure in fact changes the frame of reference from the abandoned house being a landscape feature returning to nature to a container for many voices.

When you have your exhibition you can quote my analysis!

I do think of the people. What happened to them?

Asher
 

Ben Rubinstein

pro member
That spring/pool you mention is still used as a Mikva (ritual bath) every friday by Chassidim or so I'm told. I've been down there and paddled in the pool. Have to admit that I don't remember such intact buildings though.
 
Liftah comments

Ben -- the most impressive houses extend quite far along the west-facing slope in the direction of Ramot, more or less. It got dark before I got to the end of them. There is a marked green/white trail that takes you through what must have been the main street of the town. That trail starts at the hilltop, goes steeply down to the spring, and then goes sideways less steeply through the houses and house-groups that I shot closeup in the gallery. There also quite a few smaller houses scattered on the north-facing wall of the valley, right under Highway 1. Did you ever go to the watermill restaurant, which was above the present Liftah site, and vanished when the Begin Expressway was expanded to its present width? That was the time that Liftah remained connected with walking access to the neighborhoods (which are religious) above, so using the spring as a Mikvah would be more convenient than it is today (also it is now pretty dirty).

Don -- please do. Go to my pbase account for unresized versions of the images. I shot jpegs (GRD does an OK job of these and doesn't make RAW very easy because of slow write times), and they are soft contrast, not sharpened. I'm curious to see if Asher's feeling that the voices will come out if we concentrate on the stones and interior darkness is correct.

scott
 

Don Lashier

New member
scott kirkpatrick said:
Don -- please do.

Here's the quick version of your first post I did earlier this afternoon. Note that I cropped to leave some green growth around the edge but unfortunately was not able to bring out the color. Shooting with directly early/late light would fix this. I'll take a look at your pbase gallery and see if something else catches my eye.

I think the ideal time for these shots would be very early or very late - essentially sunrise/sunset time. This would not only give a warm light but give some enticing lighting thru the dark openings.

liftah-crop.jpg


- DL
 

Don Lashier

New member
scott kirkpatrick said:
Don -- please do. Go to my pbase account for unresized versions of the images.
Scott, I looked at your pbase gallery and I think this site has a lot of potential, but you really need better light. I wish the site weren't on the other side of the world :) To give an idea of the potential I grabbed another of your shots off pbase that exhibits one of the themes you liked - plants growing out and into the sky. My quick adjustment is rather crude but shows the potential with good light. Oh - and take your DSLR next time if you have one - much easier to pull color and detail out of the crud.

original ....... and tweaked (cropped a bit and could bear perhaps even more severe cropping) to emulate better light
liftah-2-orig.jpg
...
liftah-2-cropw.jpg


- DL
 
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Don Lashier said:
Scott, I looked at your pbase gallery and I think this site has a lot of potential, but you really need better light. I wish the site weren't on the other side of the world :) To give an idea of the potential I grabbed another of your shots off pbase that exhibits one of the themes you liked - plants growing out and into the sky. My quick adjustment is rather crude but shows the potential with good light. Oh - and take your DSLR next time if you have one - much easier to pull color and detail out of the crud.

- DL

Nice improvement on the last one.

I was shooting at and after sunset. The site is in a deep valley, but I am sure there is a month when the sun gets in. Maybe not in wintertime. I agree that getting good color with the Ricoh is tricky. Much easier with the E-1, and I have more focal lengths available. Next time.

scott
 
Asher Kelman said:
The image cut as I suggested forces one to re distribute attention to the lower part of the picture and forces a kind of intimacy.

The black empty spaces of the windows now become important and make one think more of who might be or have been iside.

Removing friendly sky and the plants that grow between the roof stones, takes away the generality of "an old building" to something specific that could harbor life, nurturing hope, arguments or fear.

The procedure in fact changes the frame of reference from the abandoned house being a landscape feature returning to nature to a container for many voices.

When you have your exhibition you can quote my analysis!

I do think of the people. What happened to them?

Asher

I'm curious as well about what happened to the people. There are now revisionist histories that give some detail (in English) about why Arabs fled their villages during the Independence War (known in Arabic as el Nakhba, or the disaster). Googling Liftah using the local copy of Google's index, I turned up the fact that the leading family from Liftah relocated to French Hill in the northeast of Jerusalem and were forced to leave there some 20-30 years later because of expansion of my university's campus and the surrounding residential developments. This time only after a long court case.

If you look closely at some of the pictures you will see that there are holes in the roofs of some houses. That could have resulted from shelling, or could be damage intended to prevent the inhabitants from returning. The holes are quite old.

scott
 

Mary Bull

New member
A famous poem came to my mind

Don Lashier said:
Scott, ... To give an idea of the potential I grabbed another of your shots off pbase that exhibits one of the themes you liked - plants growing out and into the sky. My quick adjustment is rather crude but shows the potential with good light.
Don, your renditions of these two of Scott's takes of this house did bring out iin my mind visually what Scott and Asher were discussing about where all the people had gone.

A famous poem by Edward Arlington Robinson--his dates are 1869–1935--immediately came into my mind, called up by the memory of its first line: "They are all gone away."

I found it on the Bartleby's website just now, since I didn't have it completely memorized. It was published in 1921, and I think it is fair use to quote it in full here, from his 1921 book, *Collected Poems*:

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935). Collected Poems. 1921.

II. The Children of the Night
10. The House on the Hill

THEY are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

Even though the Liftah house is in a valley and Arlington's house is on a hill, I feel acutely the human parallels in the two abandoned dwellings.

Mary
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Mary,

The pictures evoke a lot of feeligs, the unknown. We think of who these eople were and where are they now.

A this point, this poem becomes apt.

Thanks for being here to add this depth to our apprecaition of Scott's photograph.

Asher
 
Where3 and why did they go?

delete duplicate post.

I tried to edit the post title, and this magically produced a second copy... Asher, please clean up after me.

scott
 
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Where and why did they go?

Asher Kelman said:
I do think of the people. What happened to them?

Asher

Benny Morris' book "Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2nd Edition" has some of the gory details. They are, unfortunately, rather familiar and easy to understand. Fairly early in the fighting in Jerusalem, half a year before the declaration of the State of Israel and the ensuing invasion of four armies, Arab leaders evacuated women and childred from Liftah to make room for militias who could then attack the nearby mixed neighborhood of Romema and the main road from Jerusalem to the coast. The Haganah then attacked and destroyed several houses. Fighting continued, there was an attempt to resettle the inhabitants in what was essentially a suburb, not a rural village, but ultimately the inhabitants all moved to Ramallah, the next city to the north of Jerusalem. Liftah is considered to have been evacuated by military action, and it was empty well before the biggest battles over the route that supplied jerusalem. So it was a no-man's land.

scott
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
A picture at dusk or sunset, depending on which gives the shadows, with some people inside, in the back of the room by the window, with a lantern to create shadows inside the doorway, that would be special and bring out the memories.

asher
 
Liftah and Suba

I'll revive a thread from last Fall covering the ruins of Liftah, just at the entrance to Jerusalem. I've been back to Liftah recently and also have some shots from the ruins of Suba, a more rural village sitting on a hilltop which once was a small Crusader fort. Both were destroyed, Suba quite completely, Liftah less so, in the course of the battles to keep access open to Jerusalem in 1948-49. You can see both sites in a pbase gallery by going to http://www.pbase.com/skirkp/liftah_and_suba

76752556.jpg


shows the center of Suba.

scott
 
Liftah -- its setting

I'll add a current picture or two, made with better equipment and better light,
to a thread on Arab villages abandoned more than 60 years ago during the Israeli independence war.
To me the element that is most intriguing is the proximity of the old villages to today's city,
along with their complete disconnect from current life.
At best they provide campsites to the scouts on weekend trips.

Here's a view of several of the house ruins in Liftah, on a steep hillside just outside Jerusalem:

CF000239medium.jpg


and a picture of the same houses in the modern setting.

CF000244_3small.jpg


I cropped the construction occurring below. There is a highway and houses at this edge of the city above. Above and to the right are the cranes of some new construction.

The fancy Calatrava bridge that the light rail system will run on is visible from some parts of Liftah, but a different world.

There are more shots close in Liftah, Suba and another village (in ruins) in my Pbase gallery.

Today's shots were taken from below the site and from across the valley, Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss T* 120/4 CF lens, Phase One P45+ digital back. The second shot can be downloaded at full resolution.

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Scott,

I've been an avid admirer of your pictures of these abandoned Arab villages. The way the plants have gradually moved into the spaces is remarkable, as if the very fact of building on such steep hillsides.

Now that you've taken pictures with your M8, M9 and the P45 back, so how do these differ in giving you what you can see and imagine?

Asher
 
does the camera matter?

I've wandered through Liftah with a GR-D (don't know which one, 1, 2, or 3, probably the 1), and an M8. Usually with fellow walkers, moving right along. The main difference between the GR-D pictures, taken in October and the M8 pictures, taken in April half a year later, is the light. The hillsides face north east and north west. The most dramatic housefronts face NW, and get late afternoon sun even in winter, but the light is usually very cold. I think of two themes when visiting Liftah, the people who no longer live there (subject of a discussion earlier in the thread), and the organic integration of the village's homes with the hillside, the crop terraces below, and probably the grazing areas around it. The integration is proceeding apace, as you see trees and bushes sprouting from the very walls. The people's absence was largely due to the years in which this was a no-man's land. See the shell holes such as this one:

68209417.jpg


Subsequent periods as a squatter camp and drug hangout didn't help. But the title to the land must be in such severe limbo that gentrification occurring at a rapid pace elsewhere in Jerusalem has still passed this area by. Of course gentrification in the New Jerusalem usually takes the form of extremely ugly but highly polished and accessorized apartment blocks, with parking garages beneath them and malls nearby. Perhaps it is just as well. This is a subject for another thread, but maybe finding ugly and expensive apartments under construction is just too easy. You can see that Ben and I both look at buildings and try to show you things about their occupants, but we seem to be heading in opposite directions.

With the M9 (even handheld if the light is good) and the P45+ (almost always on a tripod) the pixel depth and quality of the shadow details makes the images onscreen come alive in a different way as you can fill the frame with details and then zoom into them to see more, finally backing out to see where it all fits in. I have abused your size recommendations just above to try to convey some of that feeling. I use the M9 and a very "clinical" 21mm for pictures of our construction site, which is heaped with stuff of all textures and at all distances. It plays with your sense of space, of foreground and background. I haven't found the best way to share those, since web-scale versions don't show details well, and Flash slideshows further degrade the resolution. With the resolution that the P45+ offers, I thought I would show the houses of Liftah in their setting, from a viewpoint which I discovered just before sunset yesterday. Schlepping a tripod, a standard Hasselblad, and two lenses is a different operation than going for a walk with the kids, but I think I will do more once I get my wide-angle version of this rig back from service.

cheers,

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I Schlepping a tripod, a standard Hasselblad, and two lenses is a different operation than going for a walk with the kids, but I think I will do more once I get my wide-angle version of this rig back from service.
Why not get your kids to help doing the schlepping? They could also be the photographers! They can use the GRD or the M9!

Asher
 
Why not get your kids to help doing the schlepping? They could also be the photographers! They can use the GRD or the M9!

Asher

They are both pretty adept with the GR-Ds, a little Sony jpeg camera that I got for their mother, and the M8. And once the Hasselblad is set up on its tripod, they fight over who gets to squeeze the cable release. Luli has published a few galleries, but prefers video. Tom has a pretty instinctive sense for composition -- here's a shot he pulled off with an X-Pan. But schlepping? Forget it.

Tom's extreme vertical portrait:


122329699.jpg

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
For sure the cameras they use are not exactly pedestrian! But the test is use. Only a panoramic view good give the feeling tom's pictures brings to us!


Tom's extreme vertical portrait:scott

122329699.jpg


This is exceptionally clean but has enough context to be meaningful to me. The clock to the right and the slither of material at the edge balance it all. Remarkably competent and tasteful! How old is the young fellow?

Asher
 
For sure the cameras they use are not exactly pedestrian! But the test is use. Only a panoramic view good give the feeling tom's pictures brings to us!

This is exceptionally clean but has enough context to be meaningful to me. The clock to the right and the slither of material at the edge balance it all. Remarkably competent and tasteful! How old is the young fellow?

Asher

11 this past January. He also did a great job in a summer one week film class a year ago using an M2 and Tri-X despite the instructor's shocked discovery that the camera didn't have a light meter. We just spent an hour outside in the garden and in the house while he calibrated his eyes for ASA 400.

scott
 
Back on topic -- the spring at Liftah

There's a spring at Liftah, mentioned in the old thread.
Here you can see that a pretty wide path connects this part of the village
with the city's edge at the hilltop, where there is a pedestrian crossing to get you across the highway:

CF000248small.jpg


And as a result, on Saturdays (shabbat) there is usually a small crowd collected at the pool:

CF000251small.jpg


scott
 
Liftah as a former home.

I walked down to the spring today and around the general area in nice thin overcast light,
using the Hasselblad SWC and P45+ digital back to reshoot some of the more impressive
buildings at Liftah. Such as this very organic structure,

CF000346small.jpg

or this complex of houses:

CF000364small.jpg

An Israeli Arab family was also touring. The father told me that his family had lived there before 1949.
Fighting in the area of Liftah and Deir Yassin drove most of the families to relocate to Ramallah.
He told me several things that I had not realized. The area was home to about 200 extended
families. And Liftah remained under Jordanian administration from 1949 until
1967, so it was the Jordanian Army that refused to allow resettlement.
Here they are, in front of the former library and mosque:

CF000366small.jpg

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Scott,

What ISO and shutter speed are you using? Film would give you about the same resolution I expect, given the SWC Zeiss lens and the film size, if you had chosen that instead of the P45+. Am I right the the main difference is the ability to change ISO and the lack of need to process film?

I must say the Israeli-Arab tourists seem very at ease with the situation. It must be painful for them to realize that had the soldiers let them stay there, they might be living there right now! They show no animosity or bitterness but there must be a lot of inner angst, so I feel for them. Who "owns" this place now. Are there not "titles" to the property? Were the folk here renters or they owned property?

Asher
 
film vs MFDB

I've spent some time trying to get this quality out of scanned film. In color there are more challenges than I was able to overcome with an Epson V500 scanner, and either Epson's, Vuescan's or Silverfast software. Getting the color and tone ranges right is the biggest obstacle. And even when I am reasonably happy with the resulting colors, the resolution I was achieving with Portra or Ektra, scanned, was not close to what I see with the P45+. I was dragging the SWC/M around with a medium weight tripod attached, since there is still about a factor of 2 difference between the resolution obtained handheld on a nice day at f/8 and 1/125 (ISO 50) and on the tripod. This really pays off for shots of groups, which is my main reason for staying with MF.

I have been shrinking the pictures from the P45+ to 1800 pixels width for web posting to leave some feeling for their resolution. To see the full image (about 7000 pixels wide), look here (in a few minutes).

Pixels are somewhat addictive, now that 32 inch Apple and better displays are common. I selected the P45+ because it is the last Kodak CCD-based back that Phase One has sold, offers twice the pixel count of my M9, and permits night shooting exposures of up to an hour, with dark field subtraction to hold noise down. But Ken Tanaka, who has been using the P65+ Dalsa-chip unit is among the many who are signed up for the very latest 60-80 MPx backs, which offer some significant usability improvements along with all those pixels. I haven't got enough Schedule C income to pay off the P45+ just yet. My next indulgence along this line would probably be an Alpa-style tech camera with a Rodenstock wide angle lens, not a bigger back. The Phase Backs fit many cameras (unlike Hasselblad's backs).

BTW, scanned black and white film from the Hasselblads looks nice to me. I continue to use TMax 400 and HP5+ in 120. Also, the Zeiss 38mm f/4.5 is a symmetric design with essentially no distortion. Mine is a T* CF late model, with very good coatings but will still flare if the sun is anywhere forward of the image plane and I don't shield the lens. Resolution is excellent at f/8 and f/11. You have to look at the specs for the Leica S2's lenses (and some of the current Rodenstock offerings) to see what a modern computer-designed lens can now do, and do it wide open. All of these leave the wide angle lenses available on DSLRs in the dust, even my now-lost Olympus 11-22.

scott
 
A family from Liftah

Yes, the very ordinariness of a family hamming it up for the camera in front of the home they are more or less exiled from is what makes this picture important for me. When I first posted pictures from this area, you asked how the pictures could be made to suggest the people no longer living there. Well, here are some of them. I have their address and will send them a copy of their picture. They live between Jerusalem and Ramallah, inside Israel of today, and seem to be doing well. Others were less fortunate.

Before WW I, the land in Jerusalem mostly belonged to either the Armenian Church, or the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The Turkish holdings I believe passed into various forms of public ownership, under British, Jordanian, and Israeli stewardship. Armenian land is still earning money for the church. The land recording system is still basically Turkish, and baroque beyond explanation to simple-minded foreigners like me. It is not uncommon to own your house or apartment and rent your land.

It would be nice to see this lovely hillside turned into a park, but the message it would give is still uncomfortable. The rim of the hill that you see behind the village is the main highway into Jerusalem, the center of a year of warfare. According to Benny Morris' careful analysis of the Israeli and the few surviving Arab army records, the village was emptied to allow "irregulars" to operate against the highway, and partially destroyed by the Israeli Haganah to make that more difficult.

scott
 
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