RUG employee photographs the Middle East

Courtney moved here from Boston back in 2009 when her then-partner was offered a research position at the RUG. The decision to leave everything behind – friends, family, a job she loved, all of her possessions – was a hard one. But still, she says, ‘I had this really romantic notion of life in Europe: if I wanted to, I could go anywhere. In that respect, I haven’t been disappointed.’

To be sure, Courtney’s life has wandered into unexpected, sometimes dangerous, and often exciting places. For the last two years, the project leader for the Communications, Career and Society department at the Faculty of Arts has worked as a volunteer photojournalist and translation editor for the Palestine News Network (PNN). Her freelancing work takes her all over. She has covered the funeral of a ten-year-old boy killed for throwing a rock at a soldier in the West Bank; she has talked her way into restricted areas to record the destruction of a post-war environment in western Mosul.

‘Standing ankle-deep in mud staring down a mortar probably isn’t everyone’s dream come true, but it’s my dream come true’, Courtney laughs. People are often surprised to hear what she does in her spare time, but she doesn’t think it’s all that strange. For her, everything comes down to the one consistent thread running through her whole unlikely life: the urge to connect with other people.

‘It’s all communications’

Whether she is working for a communications team at the university, capturing the Middle East with her camera, or introducing herself to a stranger in a café, Courtney says meaningful connection is always the goal. ‘It’s all communications work.’

In 2016, she met a guy at a café in East Jerusalem. It didn’t take long to learn that he was a photojournalist who had worked for National Geographic and the UN. The two geeked out over their mutual love of photography. The new connection would prove serendipitous. He later invited her to a UN event where she made the networking connections that would eventually lead her to the PNN.

Not long after that day in the café, another old connection called her up from Germany. He was working for a charitable organization trying to raise funds for the Makassed hospital in East Jerusalem. He needed a photographer to capture the conditions of the pediatric unit, which was in desperate need of repair. Would she go?

‘Are you kidding me?’ she recalls saying. ‘Yes!’

Courtney says that trip to Beirut started everything. ‘There was no infrastructure at the hospital. From what we could tell, Hamas was running it from the inside. There was a single NICU bed. The conditions were really just deplorable. I met this little boy’, she holds up her phone, showing me an unfocused photo of what appears to be a very sick two-year-old boy sitting in a dirty hospital chair. ‘I heard he died shortly after. And I just couldn’t stop thinking about that room he had to die in.’

See it, fix it

She believes that capturing the realities of daily life in war-torn areas might inspire the kind of altruism that can help. And she has some reason to be hopeful. When she showed her then-six-year-old son pictures from the hospital, he asked, ‘do those kids have any toys?’ and promptly mailed a box of his own toys to the hospital. It was a small thing, she says, but it was something.

So when the opportunity presented itself to put her camera to use again for the PNN, she jumped. ‘For me, the work is about telling the stories of human suffering that we otherwise wouldn’t see. Because when we see a specific instance of human suffering, we want to fix it.’

Here are some of her favourite images that she has taken in the last few years, when she wasn’t behind her desk at the RUG.