There were things she didn’t want to leave in Israel: a fierce-eyed child biting her lip; an elderly woman smoothing down her shirt; barrels of grain arranged together, looking like a sea of open mouths.
The 16-year-old snatched them up and took them home the way she preserves all the images she loves: with her camera.
“I do it all the time,” says Aliza Rand. “It’s like I have to. I feel like wherever I go, I have to pick up images and learn from them.”
When she went to Israel last summer on the S.F.-based Bureau of Jewish Education’s five-week trip, she packed 20 rolls of film. She came home with “Faces of Israel,” a series of portraits now on view at San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel, where she is a member. The exhibit will also be shown at Cafe Echo on San Francisco’s Haight Street in the coming months.
“I bring my camera everywhere with me,” says Rand, a junior at the Urban School of San Francisco.
Rand began studying photography almost three years ago. She says taking pictures took her away from the loneliness she felt as a first-year student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic school she left after only one year.
“I wanted to escape, to find a hobby I could do all the time. I was a Jew going to a Catholic school, an all-girls’ school, and I hated it,” Rand says.
If she hadn’t felt so alienated, she says she never would have picked up a camera that year. And it wasn’t long before she realized that what started as a distraction became a new way to see the world. She began spending hours every week in a local darkroom, and eventually enrolled in a monthlong summer intensive at a Los Angeles art school.
“You start seeing everything as a picture,” Rand explains.
In Israel, it was mainly children that she framed in her mind’s eye. Their portraits figure prominently in “Faces of Israel,” and Rand says it is the innocence of those faces that attracts her.
“They don’t hide things.”
Gayle Rosenberg, director of education and youth at Sherith Israel and a counselor on Rand’s Israel trip, remembers the teen snapping photos constantly, patiently waiting for one of her young subjects to assume the right angle or move into the proper light. It was Rosenberg’s idea, upon seeing the finished prints, to present them at the synagogue.
“I could tell she was taking pictures in a different way than normal teenagers take pictures: with great care, taking a portrait rather than snapping a picture,” Rosenberg says. “I remember walking through the Old City with her, watching her creating, really just getting the image right, positioning it.”
Meanwhile, Rosenberg had to keep “telling her, `We have to move on; we’re going to lose the group.'”
What impressed Rosenberg wasn’t just Rand’s technical prowess but also her ability to “catch the feelings of the people of Israel. I was struck by her sensitivity.”
Rand is satisfied with the feelings and faces she caught, but she remains obsessed with those she did not.
The scenes the young photographer left unphotographed in Israel are the ones that haunt her. Her eyes narrow and her hand goes to her forehead when she talks about images she saw either when she didn’t have her camera, or was told not to use it.
“There were these completely gorgeous kids on this balcony, looking down through bars with bright blue and green eyes. And I remember this lady walking down the street with bright red lipstick and a red rose. Those are the pictures I didn’t get to take. It’s really frustrating when you don’t get a picture. You think about those forever,” Rand says.
Next, she’s thinking about fashion photography, planning an internship in the field for next summer. Until than, the 16-year-old will be keeping her camera close at hand and her eyes open for scenes she can’t leave behind.