التغلب على انقسامات الوطن: تصوير مؤيد أبو أمونة وآدم روحانا

Palestinians today are divided and fragmented. Israel’s colonial borders, walls, and checkpoints aim to keep them separated. The Palestinian struggle is a fight against this fragmentation — a fight for unity. Art and photography are an essential part of this fight. What role can photography play in overcoming colonial divisions? In asserting the permission to narrate? In shaping collective memory and consciousness? 

Moayed Abu Ammouna and Adam Rouhana are two Palestinian photographers wrestling with these questions. Moayed lives in Gaza, while Adam lives in Jerusalem. Separated by colonial borders, they cannot meet. But in today’s online media landscape, they — like many other Palestinian photographers and artists — are in direct dialogue with each other, bypassing both colonial geographic divisions and institutional barriers. They share each other’s work, exchange messages, draw inspiration from each other, and view themselves as part of the same struggle for Palestinian liberation.

I have interviewed both of them to learn about how photography, and dialogue between artists, contributes to this struggle.

Moayed Abu Ammouna

Gaza Strip – Rafah City, March 28, 2024/ A group of children playing together in a displaced persons camp west of Rafah City (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

Moayed Abu Ammouna is a refugee from Yibna — a town ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the Nakba by Zionist militias. Moayed cannot go visit its ruins, nor the rest of historic Palestine. He was born, and lives, in Gaza, locked behind an impenetrable wall imprisoning him within his own homeland. 

Under this siege, Moayed’s camera became a tool for documenting life, expressing the desire for freedom, and imagining liberated futures. And as life under siege turned into life under genocide, “Photography became more urgent than ever,” Moayed tells me. “During a genocide, the image transforms into an essential practice transcending all conventional notions of photography and art”

For Moayed, photography is a way of documenting and preserving the inexplicable feelings and liminalities of life under genocide for future generations.

“My photography is a personal projection of what I feel and experience as someone who is still alive under this genocide. It is the result of long gazes at the invisible scars and details that the media doesn't document.”

Gaza Strip – West Khan Younis "Al-Mawasi", August 30, 2024
A girl lying on the ground, asleep in front of their displacement tent in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

“It is a discovery of social traumas and the feelings of the people of Gaza who live their long days under the guillotine,” Moayed continues. “Through my images, I try to answer questions like: What were people doing before they died? What were their hopes, stories, and dreams? Everyone who dies was doing only one thing: waiting. Waiting for any miracle to stop what is happening.”

Moayed’s work is different from much of the photography the world grew accustomed to seeing from Gaza. He does not show us the explicit violence, the bombs, the blood, or the bodies — instead, through pictures like the one below, he offers us poetic glimpses into the liminality, the inexplicable in-betweenness of an existence that is a blur between life and death.

Gaza Strip – Khan Younis Beach, August 28, 2024
A young man walking along the beach at sunset, attempting to escape the atmosphere of war. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

“The siege of Gaza fosters a remarkable capacity within artists to seek out creative outlets,” Moayed explains. “This allows them to continue producing liberated artistic and intellectual works that break free from all the restrictions imposed by the occupation”

Yet, he also maintains that “artists are not superheroes,” because ultimately, “they need freedom more than anything. They need the ability to traverse all borders to practice art that is valuable and creative, away from the systematic colonial policies aimed at stifling these artistic and cultural practices.”

Gaza Strip – West Khan Younis, October 8, 2024
Two girls playing with their hands and singing joyfully in front of their displacement tent. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

The siege therefore empowers artists to imagine liberated futures, while blocking their realization. Within this paradox between freedom and captivity, art itself emerges as the vehicle transcending colonially imposed fragmentation. “Photography is the strongest bridge to overcome the divisions of the homeland.” 

On the one hand, Moayed uses photography to overcome temporal fragmentation by connecting his work to a historical Palestinian narrative.

“When I look at what happened during the Nakba and throughout Palestine’s history, and compare it to what’s happening today, I feel like I’m living the past within a more intense present,” Moayed says. “This in itself is a defiance of time and the laws and rules of life, and must be documented in every possible way.” 

The image below is of a truck loaded with personal belongings, in a scene of displacement painfully familiar to all Palestinians. Heaven and earth, past and present, melt together in a timeless gray — it is a visual metaphor of the ongoing Nakba.

Gaza Strip – West Khan Younis "Al-Mawasi", May 11, 2024
A group of displaced residents, due to bombing and evacuation orders, trying to find space to set up a tent for shelter. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

On the other hand, photography can overcome spatial fragmentation. While Moayed cannot cross the colonial borders himself, his photos can travel freely, enabling him to “create a dialogue with other artistic communities, sharing our experiences and voices beyond the deadly borders.” Through this artistic dialogue between Palestinians across fragmented geographies, Moayed hopes to work toward a “complete and unified Palestinian narrative.”

Moayed views his and Adam's work as a dialogue that contributes to these efforts. 

“I live in Gaza, and Adam lives in Jerusalem. We’re separated by some of the most complex borders in the world. We’re scattered and alienated within our own homeland,” Moayed says. 

Yet despite their separation, and their different perspectives and artistic styles, Moayed believes that both their photography work contributes to a broader Palestinian narrative. 

“We’re concerned with the same fundamental issues: the Palestinian people, Palestinian identity, and the Palestinian relationship with the land. And we both draw on the history of the Palestinian cause to build our current memory from a collective memory.”

Gaza Strip – Khan Younis Beach, May 25, 2024
A group of girls sitting on the beach, with the city of Khan Younis fully destroyed behind them. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

“Ultimately, we’re on the same shared land, facing the same tough challenges, and one common enemy,” Moayed insists. “We try to erase this colonial geographic division through our art.”

Adam Rouhana

Bethlehem, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

Adam Rouhana first picked up a camera at the age of 12. He has captured Palestine through its lens ever since. He shoots intimate photographs of everyday life in the heartland (‘48 Occupied lands) and the West Bank, separated from Moayed and Gaza by colonial borders. Yet, like Moayed, Adam highlights how Israel’s effort to build walls only reinforces the Palestinian effort to build bridges. 

“Somehow, as social fragmentation and physical division becomes more entrenched by the Israeli settler-colonial project, our modalities of resistance evolve and Palestinian resolve to remain in a unified homeland only becomes stronger.” 

Adam believes that culture and art play a key role in this fight. 

“While the Palestinian body-politic is still highly fractured, and our economic and social institutions are weak, the Palestinian cultural sector is perhaps the strongest it’s been in years, and this cultural plasma is embedded with discursive political, social, and epistemic subtext.” 

He adds that, “the power of cultural production then, is its ability to actively transport these ideas across borders through different media vectors.” Adam explains that photographs, due to their unique visual form, “have an innate capacity for stickiness — consolidating into lasting cognitive formations and leaving imprints of reality on our collective consciousness.”

Tulkarem refugee camp, 2024. © Adam Rouhana

Adam deliberates carefully about how he can leverage the power of photography within the struggle. 

“As a photographer, I try to ask: how can making images serve as a decolonial activity?” He does so by creating images highlighting the agency of Palestinians and countering Orientalist narratives.

Checkpoint 300. Bethlehem, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

Through what he describes as “vernacularizing photography,” Adam invites viewers into the lives of ordinary Palestinians. 

“All Palestinian photographers in some way or another are producing vernacular photography — images embedded with local knowledge, that act as a counter-visuality to the foreign gaze,” Adam explains. Adam’s photography works against the settler-colonial gaze, which perceives Palestinians as a threat to be subordinated, incarcerated, and eliminated. Adam’s gaze, however, turns away from Palestinian death, and toward Palestinian life. 

“I hope to frame the livability of those remaining in our homeland: simply moving, swimming, crying, planting, loving, walking, jumping — being alive and well despite a system designed for and intent on our removal,” Adam says during a talk delivered at the Victoria and Albert Museum last year. 

Men swimming. Ain Aouja, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

Adam argues that power and knowledge are intertwined. He references Foucault when he says that dominant narratives "determine the boundaries of thought." He asserts that Israel’s settler-colonial narrative, which remains widespread among “Western elites,” attempts to erase Palestine.

"My photography works in opposition to Zionism’s force of erasure.”

He provides many examples of this attempted erasure: “Every university obliterated by 2000-pound American ‘dumb bombs’ in Gaza, every house demolished in East Jerusalem, every village unrecognized in the Naqab, every Palestinian who starts to identify as ‘Arab-Israeli’ inside the borders of 1948, every cultural institution whose doors are shuttered, every ounce of unborn love blocked by Israel’s draconian restrictions on movement, every assassinated political leader, every slain poet, every journalist who is killed, every burned olive tree, every looted book, every… every… every… frankly it amazes me sometimes that we are still here on this land—we owe our lives to those who fought and died before us.”

Bethlehem, 2024. © Adam Rouhana

Perhaps one reason why Palestinians have been able to resist Zionism is their ability to hold onto a collective identity and consciousness: “[Our resistance] really is a testament to the astonishing Palestinian strength, resilience, sumud, whatever you want to call it — we need a new word for this after the genocide — but not only that, it’s also a testament to the depth and thickness of the Palestinian collective cultural memory, which has formed over thousands of years of continuous life in Palestine, and is only becoming stronger by the day in direct defiance of Zionism’s unsuccessful attempts to eliminate us.”

Ramadan in al-Aqsa. Jerusalem, 2024. © Adam Rouhana

Adam questions the degree to which photography played a role in the formation of this collective cultural memory, acknowledging that language, oral storytelling, poetry, music, dance, religion, geography, tatreez, and literature were traditions that had more significant impacts. 

He observes that image-based representations of Palestine emerged in the latter half of the 20th century, and that there has been a significant proliferation of Palestinian photographers who have been telling local stories since around the year 2000.

These photographers leverage what Adam views as their medium’s distinct quality, namely that it is simultaneously objective and subjective.

“Photography has a unique potential in [the] role it can play in preserving and creating collective memory,” Adam says. ”An image is empirical, it is an exact transcription of light hitting film at a particular moment, but it’s also highly subjective — it carries the viewpoint of the photographer.” 

He quotes Susan Sontag, “This sleight of hand allows photographs to be both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality — a feat literature has long aspired to but could never attain in this literal sense.” 

Twins. Qalandia, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

And on this note, Adam closes the circle by connecting his photography back across the colonial divide, and to Moayed and Gaza: “I think this is where my work dovetails with Moayed’s: it is personal testimony, not just objective recording. Instead of always covering news [events], we’re looking beyond what the media shows and are instead questioning how history is diffracted into the realities of Palestinians in the everyday.”

Adam discovered Moayed’s work on Instagram during the genocide, and was moved by it: “In Moayed’s work I see the reflection of death in the eyes of Palestinians in Gaza, but I don’t see the gore itself. I see destitution in the blur of the gray-red figures. And I see the apocalyptic agony of living through genocide, but I don’t see any drones or bombs,” Adam reflects. “From the [photographs] I’ve seen, Moayed is channeling the impossible realities of life under genocide into pictorial form.”

Beyond the Border

Viewing Moayed’s and Adam’s work together, what emerges is a critical interrogation of the very idea of “unity.” Their photography works against essentializing foreign gazes that often – whether intentionally or unintentionally – lock Palestinians into a fixed positionality, be it victimhood, threat, or even resistance. By rejecting artificial homogeneity of what the image of a Palestinian should, or is expected, to be, the photographers focus on what is real; a diversity of Palestinian existence and experiences which, just like the photograph itself, transcends borders. 

Israel’s colonial system is intent on keeping Moayed and Adam apart — yet listening to their stories, I could see how they use their photography to find cracks in the wall. Their art centers the hopes, stories, and dreams of Palestinians across geographies, insisting on unity in the face of division. And in doing so, they help us to imagine a future for Palestine, and the Middle East at large, where the border is a relic of the past — and where Moayed and Adam will meet. 

Gaza Strip – West Khan Younis "Al-Mawasi", January 3, 2025
A displaced girl staying in a tent on the beach, stretching her arms out to face the sea. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

Aida refugee camp, Bethlehem, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

Gaza Strip – Central Rafah City, January 4, 2024
A young man riding a transport cart in Rafah City market, amid the lack of transportation and basic living conditions. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

Masafer Yatta, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

Gaza Strip – West Khan Younis "Al-Mawasi", June 28, 2024
A girl sitting and watching the overcrowding of displaced persons' tents amid the genocide being practiced against them. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

Al-Jib, 2024. © Adam Rouhana

Gaza Strip – West Khan Younis "Al-Mawasi", August 30, 2024
A group of displaced men returning to their temporary tents after spending the day at Khan Younis Beach. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

Checkpoint 300, Bethlehem, 2022. © Adam Rouhana

Gaza Strip – Rafah City, January 30, 2024
A Palestinian family lost and searching for shelter in Rafah City, coinciding with the beginning of the war and the issuance of evacuation orders in Gaza. (Moayed Abu Ammouna)

Qalandia Checkpoint. Qalandia, 2016. © Adam Rouhana