The Photographer Searching for Freedom in Palestine

Adam Rouhana has visited Palestine every year of his life. Some of his earliest memories unfold under his grandparents’ grove of lemon and apricot trees, where Rouhana and his cousins would play hide and seek. His family lives on the slopes of Mount Carmel, near Haifa, overlooking a river valley—“a wadi,” he recently told me—with the Mediterranean Sea shining in the distance. “I remember laying in my room in my grandparents’ house, listening to a Radiohead CD my brother gave me,” Rouhana says. “I didn’t really understand what occupation meant at that point.”

Rouhana grew up in Boston and now lives between London and Jerusalem. According to his family’s oral history, his ancestors immigrated to Palestine four hundred years ago from what is now Lebanon. “But,” he adds, “Israeli policy explicitly denies that the land where I’m from, and where my Palestinian ancestors have lived for centuries, is my homeland.” Rouhana has been taking pictures in Palestine since he first picked up a camera at twelve, and he now works under the guidance of Gilles Peress, a Magnum photographer known for covering conflicts such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Rouhana’s photographs reject state-sanctioned narratives and instead oscillate between moments of quiet beauty and brutal scenes of colonization, providing a contemporary Palestinian view of life under Israeli occupation.

In 2008, in a prerecorded address shown at the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature, the critic John Berger noted, “Time passes, but what makes sense of human lives stays the same.” Berger then read “Letter from Gaza” by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian Marxist author. In Kanafani’s epistolary short story, an unnamed protagonist visits his thirteen-year-old niece, Nadia, in a hospital. Shaken by what he sees, he writes to his childhood friend and pleads for him to return to Palestine: “But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.” In the video recording, Berger’s lips tremble as he reads the last line. He puts his head in his hands, and the screen fades to black.

Rouhana’s photos of Palestine search for this idea of “what life is and what existence is worth.” In one image, a young boy closes his eyes, pressing watermelon flesh into his face. The pulp shines red against the dusty background. In others, Rouhana joins thousands of Palestinians crossing one of the heavily militarized checkpoints on their way to work. The flash of his Leica illuminates a sea of Palestinian faces interrupted by sharp metallic barriers. In yet another image, young twin girls in matching floral dresses stand in front of the Israeli Qalandia checkpoint, the primary access point for Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank. The image is blunt, beautiful, absurd even. To exist in this landscape is to be devoured by this machine—a machine with surveillance-camera eyes, barbed-wire teeth, a body made of shabby concrete and sharpened steel.

Rouhana hopes to formulate “new Palestinian representations” while simultaneously questioning his position as a Palestinian American behind the camera. He recognizes his privileged position as both an American citizen and a white-passing Palestinian. He can take pictures where others cannot. “The reason I take photos is to understand and ask questions,” he says. “I want to make images where the viewer can make up their own mind.” These photographs provide alternatives to the stereotypical images of the country: explosions, funerals, Israeli bulldozers, and protests in the streets. While this type of documentation provides value, Rouhana orients his pictures toward the future. “Photography has the productive ability to break the system by imagining something else, by seeing something else,” he says.

Over the past five years, Rouhana has actively sought community among other Palestinians. “Only other Palestinians know what it’s like to be oppressed by Israel in the way that we are,” he says. He studies the ways that other subaltern populations can understand and inform Palestinian liberation. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore says freedom is a place,” says Rouhana, referring to the African American activist, scholar, and prison abolitionist. “I would add that freedom is a place you can call home.” In Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa, one of the characters, Said, says, “I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs.” Rouhana will return to Palestine this year, like every year, and he will continue to look for a homeland he has always known but remains out of reach, like a gated pool under the hot sun. One day, he hopes, he will find it.

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.