Over the centuries, writers, artists, and filmmakers have often tried to convey the idea of Hell, and I’ve never witnessed anything on Earth closer to those depictions than the images coming out of Palestine in the last 14 months. A rising death toll estimated at 45,000, with the UN Human Rights Office reporting that 44 percent of the dead it’s been able to verify have been children; warnings of famine as food and water grow scarce; hospitals razed to the ground; endless images of misery, mutilation, and death: too much suffering for any heart to bear.
Of all the work in our recent Photography Issue, Adam Rouhana’s is perhaps the most laden with poignancy. He started taking pictures when his parents gave him his first camera at the age of 12, and has spent much of his life flying between his native Boston in the US, and Palestine, where his family hail from and where he now spends about half of the year.
Those visits have often been fraught, but this year’s horrifying escalation in violence has been something else entirely. Adam’s remarkable photos capture a world before all hell broke loose, with an emphasis on showing the other side of Palestine, the one that people don’t hear about on the news—the one not under siege, constantly fighting for survival.
VICE: When I look at your photos, there are visual traces of the relentless hardships faced by the Palestinian people. But mostly, they seem focused on joy and hope.
Adam Rouhana: When I first started this project, I found myself trying to recreate pictures that I had in my head: a boy throwing a rock at a soldier, a masked Palestinian with a gun, and so on. But after a while, I stepped back and reflected, why am I trying to recreate representations of a place that I know so well? And then I thought, what happens if I take the camera and point it away from the machineries of Apartheid, away from the violence, and towards us—the Palestinian people—instead. And that’s how this body of work started.
I often hear photographers talk about the effects of time on their work—there’s a logic that runs something like ‘an ordinary photo today will become extraordinary in the future,’ when the world has changed and life looks different. I feel like the conditions Palestinians have faced for over a year now have had a similar kind of accelerating effect on your work. Looking at the photos yourself, and the joy and hope in them, do you feel as though you are looking at a version of Palestine that has been lost?
No, not yet. After all, these are photos, not paintings. These are images of what I actually experienced. Things are of course changing—Israel’s genocide has transformed Gaza from a concentration camp into a necropolis. But my photos are from the rest of Palestine, and despite Israeli Apartheid, Palestinian livability is still very much an active form of resisting settler-colonialism.
What are the things that outsiders get wrong about Palestine and daily life there?
I think that one thing people get wrong about Palestine is assuming that it is homogenous—that Palestinians are somehow all the same. The reality is that Palestine lies at the crossroads of three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. And Palestinian society has been an open, pluricultural place for thousands of years—until 1948. The result is historic diversity of thought, religion, language, and culture, tied together through topography, heritage, and today an, albeit fractured, ongoing anti-colonial struggle.
How, when, and why did you start taking photographs?
When I was about 12 years old or so. My parents had this old Canon Powershot that they didn’t know how to use, so they gave it to me and I became the sort of family photographer. I kept making images for the past 20 years; photography became a sort of default for me.
What’s the story behind the photo of the red patch on the white wall?
Photographers are always asked these days to tell the stories behind their photos. I don’t really share the back stories from my images—I prefer to leave them open-text, to allow the viewer to write their own stories, to make up their own mind.
How has your perspective been influenced by the American part of your identity?
I grew up coming back and forth from Palestine to the US. I think that dissonance created the space for me to observe the types of differences between representations and reality that my work explores.
Going back to the ‘joy and hope’ I spoke about earlier—are those two things that have completely exited the equation in Palestine?
Franz Fanon wrote that, for the colonized, “To live means to keep on existing. Every day is a victory.” I think the same is true during a genocide. Every day you survive is a victory.
Follow Adam Rouhana on Instagram @adam.rouhana
The post Adam Rouhana Photographs the Palestinian People appeared first on VICE.
The post Adam Rouhana Photographs the Palestinian People appeared first on VICE.
