Growing up in the pastoral rhythms of the Skagit Valley — pancakes in La Conner, afternoons at the baseball fields, friendships woven around the community — photographer Michael Christopher Brown learned early that place, exposure and community matter.
The son of Gary Brown of Mount Vernon, Michael’s childhood was threaded with global encounters: His parents hosted dozens of exchange students, worked in orphanages abroad, and made sure the outside world was never distant. Gary photographed his trips overseas and shared the photos with the community at his home.
Those early experiences instilled in Michael a sense that photography can act as a bridge.
“The power of the photograph, from a very young age, was just ingrained in my mind,” he said. “It’s not only about creating, sustaining, furthering culture, but also a way to create connections with other people who are very different, yet, who, at the end of the day, are exactly the same.”
Now, Michael turns that lifelong impulse toward a collaboration with Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha in a book called “The Difference Between Bullets and Stones.” The book will marry Michael’s photographs from the West Bank and Juresalem with Abu Toha’s poetry and essays. Its aim is to humanize the lives behind the headlines — to show who Palestinians are in their daily moments.
In 2025, Abu Toha, who was born in Gaza, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for a series of essays in The New Yorker. The award recognized his work for combining “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience” of the current war.
The pair are funding the book project through a Kickstarter campaign, which has a philanthropic aim. “The goal with the campaign is to get the book out and raise money for Doctors Without Borderers (MSF) and for Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) that supports families and kids over there,” Michael said.
One reward level will send a copy of the book to a U.S. government official — a move Michael hopes might spark empathy. “Who knows what moves minds — but it’s kind of amazing what a photograph can do if it’s seen by the right person at the right time.”
What binds Michael and Abu Toha is a shared belief in the power of images and words to connect, to expose, to move — even in the most fraught circumstances. Denied access to Gaza several times in 2018, Michael focused on capturing life in the West Bank. His work leans toward documenting the underdog.
“That’s always been my interest — the people who are more disadvantaged,” he said. He recalls one of the most visceral photographs in the yet-to-be-published book: a white horse, dead beside a road in Nablus, left unburied. He described the image as a metaphor for desperation, loss and abandonment.
At its core, “The Difference Between Bullets and Stones” seeks not to shock, but to invite recognition: here are people, their routines, their grief, their courage. It is not straight journalism, Michael said, but neither is it pure poetry — it is a hybrid, where images and words together share human truths.
This story was updated with clarifications on Oct. 22.
Staci Baird is the former managing editor of La Conner Community News.
