Sakir Khader’s Portraits of Palestinian Perseverance
Khader’s photographs of people in conflict zones across the Middle East document violence and grief alongside moments of tenderness and reprieve.
Sakir Khader, Defender of the mountain, Beita, 2021
When Sakir Khader was a young journalist working for a Dutch newspaper in the aftermath of the ill-fated Arab Spring, he wanted to report on the civil war in Syria. His editors refused to send him, so Khader left the paper and joined the Dutch public television broadcasting network instead. There, he undertook a formidable education in the logistics and ethics of documentary filmmaking. Again, he turned his attention to Syria. This time, Khader managed to line up a trip. But the situation was volatile. The regime of Bashar al-Assad had brutally crushed a fledging revolution, setting off an unpredictable conflagration of multiple open-ended conflicts among rebels, insurgents, foreign mercenaries, and more. Things never seemed to get any better—only worse.
Khader’s trip to Syria was canceled. But by that time he was no longer taking no for an answer. He decided to apply what he had learned and go anyway, on his own, as a freelancer. As soon as he arrived, Khader began looking for Abdul Baset al-Sarout, the former goalkeeper for Syria’s youth soccer team who had become a rebel commander with the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade. Sarout was famous for popularizing revolutionary anthems. For that reason, he was hugely irritating to the Syrian regime. Government forces eventually killed him, in 2019, during a chaotic battle in the country’s northwest. Sarout was just twenty-seven years old. Khader was around the same age when he found him, a year earlier, and spent three months living with him and the men of his battalion. Khader made a film and a book and took many photographs, including a portrait of Sarout, close-up, face ablaze with an irresistible smile, tired eyes, and a crown of cherubic curls.
Blurring the line between still and moving images by making extremely short films, which Khader refers to as “moving still lifes,” as well as singular photographs that play with high contrasts and the conventions of tableau vivant, Khader’s work combines the beauty of Italian neorealist cinema with the horrifying churn of contemporary warfare. He photographs and prints almost exclusively in black and white. He has won a slew of awards. He joined Magnum last summer as a nominee. His second photobook, Dying to Exist, was published last year. His “moving still lifes” add up to over fifty-five hours of footage, which he is slowly transforming into a feature-length film. His first solo museum show, focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine and titled Yawm al-firak (Farewell Day), after a line from a poem by the great eighth-century poet of the Islamic world Abu Nuwas, is currently on view at Foam in Amsterdam, accompanied by a forthcoming publication of the same name featuring handwritten notes and Polaroids, subtitled Diary of an Invisible Genocide. For Khader, who lives between the Netherlands and Palestine, his success has been both remarkably efficient and impressively assured. More so than achievements or critical acclaim, however, the story of how Khader got himself to Syria reveals how an all-consuming methodology has defined his visual style.
“I like to stay with people,” Khader says. “A lot of the real work happens when the camera is off.”
In Arabic, Khader’s first name means “falcon” or “hawk.” When I spoke to him by phone during a brief stay in Paris, he joked that his name had predestined him to become a photographer. “See? Sharp-eyed,” he said, laughing. Because he was born in 1990, Khader’s first camera was, in fact, an LG Prada smartphone, which he used as a teenager to take pictures in the West Bank district of Nablus. He wanted to be able to look at them after he’d left, to summon images of the homeland in his mind whenever he was away. This was a pre-professional pursuit. By the time Khader landed at the start of his career and was finding his way through several different modes of image making all at once, it struck him that no one in the mainstream news media was paying enough attention to how, in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, which had been destroyed by years, even decades, of chaotic yet systematic violence, people were carrying on with their daily lives. Khader’s ongoing bodies of work show people young and old, combatants and bystanders, as they fight, survive, grieve, and mourn but also dance, sing, play games, and experience quieter moments of tenderness or reprieve: men and boys resting sideways on oversize armchairs, a balloon seller eating a Popsicle, two boys waiting for a pair of bumper cars to begin, kids celebrating a holiday in absurdly matching festive dress.
Khader doesn’t parachute into war zones. He doesn’t join official military embeds. Without narrative or polemic, his images create a withering critique of US foreign policy from the so-called War on Terror until today. He immerses himself in the lives of his subjects, who are people he knows or has come to know. “I like to stay with people,” he explained. “I blend in fully. I build relationships. A lot of the real work happens when the camera is off.”
Given that he no longer considers himself (or introduces himself as) a journalist, Khader’s status as a Dutch-born, Arabic-speaking, Muslim-observant Palestinian has served him well. It has opened doors to communities that otherwise might not have been so welcoming.
But Khader is also excruciatingly careful not to instrumentalize his or his subjects’ identities. He doesn’t resort to clichés. “I don’t want to shoot olive trees and kaffiyehs,” he said, citing two well-worn symbols of Palestinian struggle. What holds his still and moving images together—and protects them from glorifying the violence that is undeniably his milieu—is Khader’s ability to find in his subjects the same pluck, charm, and relentless perseverance that brought him to Syria six years ago.
All photographs © the artist/Magnum Photos
To be sure, Khader has photographed a prodigious amount of weaponry, including slingshots, rocket launchers, hand grenades, pistols, and AK-47s. His portraits include men in balaclavas, men missing eyes and limbs, and boys who lift their shirts to show gruesome scars. Although he has, on occasion, captured groups of women joking for the camera, his image world is largely male and shattered by violence. “This is the raw reality,” Khader told me. “I can’t filter it out.”
This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 258, “Photography & Painting,” under the column Viewfinder.
