De ta soif à la mienne MA DIplome - Beaux Arts de Paris 2024 Who is observing whom? On the wall, the railway makes no distinction between enemies — everyone is entitled to their portrait. Anne Simin Shitrit walks a fine line. The forthcoming book undoubtedly documents a form of struggle, the lives of groups of men — Bedouins, Palestinians, or members of the Hilltop Youth movement, young Israeli settlers — but above all, it reads like a journal. To embrace the subjectivity of her gaze is to claim complexity. The artist’s family history is as intricate as the geopolitics of the region, making a biographical detour inevitable. She punctuates her images with texts, archival photographs of her parents, and childhood drawings. Born to an Iranian mother and a Moroccan father who settled in Israel within an ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist Jewish community, Anne Simin Shitrit grew up isolated — far from social interactions and even from the secular, Western past of her parents. She admits identifying with the sheep she repeatedly photographs — at once a symbol of innocence and a pawn on a chessboard where everything can be used to mark territory. She resists any attempt at co-option or institutional curation of her images, yet during the years she took these photographs, the situation grew increasingly tense, as her intermediary position became harder to maintain. The camera became both a tool of inquiry into the world she came from and grew up in, and above all, a tool of emancipation. Most of the portraits she makes are of men, from communities where women are hidden or kept apart. Taking photographs thus became a way of existing, of claiming a place, of proposing a gaze that does not shy away from introspection, intimacy, or even disarming, unsettling desire. The many watchtowers that grid Israel and the colonized territories punctuate the book — observation posts that, for a moment, seem to have been reversed. Henri Guette