Some of my photos from Ramallah were published on Vice for their Paradise Series. Unlike other posts in the series that poke fun at whatever city is featured, I wanted to show Ramallah as a strange and wonderful place. They altered my short introduction, here's what I originally wrote:
"I moved to Ramallah last year to work as a newspaper photographer for a newspaper. Coming from Brooklyn, I found the city to be equal parts friendly and odd. In my memories, smells of Arabic coffee and sweet shisha smoke wafting out of cafes mix with the stink of burning garbage and the sting of teargas from clashes at the nearby Qalandiya checkpoint.
Ramallah sits in the middle of an ongoing conflict that is so entwined with daily life that sometimes, when I was swept up in the everyday bustle, I didn’t even notice it."