A Gazan Photographer Embraces Her Refugee Lens in San Francisco

When she thinks back to her childhood in Gaza in the late ’90s, Lara Aburamadan recalls spending her days hanging out and enjoying food with her family on sandy beaches, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea during hot, humid summers.

“Gaza is a small place. To drive from north to south it takes 25 minutes, and from west to east, 15 minutes,” she says. “It’s a small city, probably the size of San Francisco.”

Now based in Berkeley, Aburamadan is a visual artist, independent journalist and photographer. She is also the founder of Refugee Eye, an art studio on Valencia Street in San Francisco.

When she picked up a camera 10 years ago, those beaches and daily life in Gaza City became some of her first subjects. “I wanted to show the beauty of Gaza,” she says.

Yet life in a war-torn region made capturing beauty a privilege. The killings of her people back home motivated her to use her art and journalism skills for social change.

Aburamadan’s photos have been published in Time Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera and more. She has also written for The Atlantic and The New York Times.

In her 2012 piece for The New York Times, “Trapped in Gaza,” she recounts her visit to a film festival. Suddenly, an organizer interrupted the program to warn the audience of impending Israeli strikes, urging everyone to go home for safety. Aburamadan, her mother and young siblings listened to the sounds of bombs from inside their home for the next 48 hours.

“And all the while, we hear bombs. Bombs that bear autumn’s scent and winter’s chill. Bombs that batter. Bombs that kill. I still have waking nightmares of the bombs that tore through our sky nearly four years ago, when a classmate, Maha, lost her mother in an Israeli strike,” she wrote.

2014 marked another deadly year in Gaza, when the Israeli military killed 2,200 Palestinians, over half of whom were civilians according to a United Nations report. Aburamadan and her then-husband live-streamed the shelling from their 11th-floor apartment, sharing with the world what mainstream media wouldn’t.

“The point of our work, which we posted on Twitter and Facebook, was to make it more difficult for people around the world to say, ‘I didn’t know,’” she wrote in The Atlantic in 2015.

“The sound of Israeli drones incessantly hovering overhead is terrifying, but the bombs — and their promise to bring either an explosion or death — are worse,” she wrote.

Aburamadan and her then-husband moved to the U.S. as asylum seekers when they were both 24 years old. When she first arrived in the Bay Area in 2017, she struggled to connect and feel at home.

“I didn’t know people, I didn’t have friends or community,” she says.

In time, she eventually accepted this new phase in her life. “I’m a refugee in this new place. It’s okay not to find the familiarity now,” she told herself.

Her current work explores the social and political narratives of refugees and marginalized communities. Through Refugee Eye, she creates a space for refugee artists and photographers from all around the world to share their stories.

“I wanted to embrace my perspective as a refugee,” she says.

Earlier this year, she curated an exhibition at Refugee Eye called Gaza: Between Life and Loss, featuring photographs and illustrations by Palestinian artists, including work by popular Gaza street photographer Suhail Nassar and illustrator Bayan Abu Nahla.

“It’s been a beautiful journey to learn more about the art scene here in the Bay Area and connect with different refugee artists around the world,” Aburamadan reflects.

Having lived through multiple bombardments of Gaza, the war that began in October last year didn’t surprise Aburamadan. But it felt different this time. “In the first few months, my mind was constantly on Gaza,” she says.

“It was super stressful,” she adds. “My people are being killed everyday.”

Seeing protests and Palestinian flags in the streets of the Bay Area has made her feel less alone. But despite these efforts, she is disappointed that, after a year, nothing has changed.

“Protests have called for a ceasefire, but the bombing continues every day,” she says. “It’s even getting worse.”

Through her work, Aburamadan hopes to continue showing the world a different side of Gaza. “I want people to see Gaza as a beautiful place with genuinely kind people who don’t want wars and just want peace,” she says.

“I want my art to reflect who we are as a collective, proving that we exist and that we’re amazing.”