Adam Rouhana is a Palestinian-American photographer whose work moves at the intersection of memory, representation, and the ethics of seeing. His project, Before Freedom (2022–ongoing), is both intimate and political—a meditation on Palestinian life that establishes a visual language at once engaged, poetic, and profoundly human. Across the cities and landscapes of historic Palestine—Jerusalem, Hebron, Jericho, Bethlehem, Haifa—Rouhana captures moments often overlooked: children laughing in sunlit alleys, friends preparing for a football match, families gathering quietly in gardens, neighbours sharing morning rituals. 

These fleeting gestures challenge the dominant visual narratives that have long defined Palestine in the international imagination. For decades, mainstream media has reduced Palestinian life to images of conflict, destruction, and suffering. Rouhana’s work refuses this simplification. In his photographs, Palestinians are no longer passive subjects of news coverage; they are active participants in shaping their own stories, asserting life, dignity, and presence under the pressures of occupation. Olive groves, bustling streets, quiet domestic corners—these familiar landscapes become radical sites of encounter, reshaping assumptions hardened by reductive media imagery. 

Rouhana’s approach to photography is deliberate, reflective, and rooted in intimacy. He works with natural light, tableau-like compositions, and considered framing, allowing each image to balance aesthetic beauty with ethical responsibility. His camera is not a tool of detached observation but of witnessing—a participant in shared experience. Everyday gestures—a child chasing a ball, men playing cards under a tree’s shade, a family cooking together—become acts of quiet resistance, affirming continuity in a landscape under threat of erasure. 

Within these tender moments, the full humanity of his subjects emerges. Ordinary acts of living and relating gain weight precisely because they resist reduction, defying political and historical forces that seek to render life invisible. Before Freedom is also attentive to the spatial and structural realities of occupation: long corridors, checkpoints, barriers. These conditions frame daily life not only as limitation but also as terrain for resilience. Rouhana’s lens captures how people carve joy, connection, and play from constraint, transforming ordinary gestures into extraordinary acts of defiance. 

Symbolism runs through his work. A watermelon, recalling a time when Palestinian flags were prohibited, carries the red and green of collective memory; children flash victory signs or engage in playful acts that combine joy with assertion. Through these visual motifs, personal experience intertwines with historical consciousness, linking the everyday to a legacy of resistance. 

ADAM ROUHANA is a Palestinian-American artist based between Jerusalem and London. He is currently a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Rouhana’s photography introduces a contemporary Palestinian visual culture characterised by reclaiming agency. His work has been exhibited at the 60th Venice Art Biennale and Les Rencontres d’Arles, among others.  

TAOUS R. DAHMANI is a London-based French, British, and Algerian art historian specialising in photography. She has curated both group and solo exhibitions internationally, including the 2022 Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles (France); the 2024 Jaou Photo Biennale in Tunis (Tunisia) and the 2025 Guangzhou Image Triennial titled Ecology of sensitivity (China). Her solo curatorial projects include SMITH at NOUA (Bodø, Norway), Anastasia Samoylova at the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK), and Adam Rouhana at Kyotographie (Kyoto, Japan). Since September 2025, she is curator at the Photographers’ Gallery. Dahmani’s writing has been widely published in photobooks and journals, with contributions to titles by Phaidon, Loose Joints, Textuel, Tate Publishing, and Pompidou, as well as features in Aperture, FOAM, Camera Austria, The British Journal of Photography, Dazed, GQ, and 1000 Words Magazine. She is the associate editor of Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain (MACK/Autograph ABP, 2024), a critically acclaimed, award-winning publication. In 2025, she also edited Assemblies (FOMU) and Feel the Sound (Barbican).