Between Us, A Thread

Ramallah, 1st of August 2025

Dear Moayed Abuammouna,

I write to you from the heart of days that are anything but ordinary — days in which language breaks and the spirit stumbles;
days heavier than any a Palestinian has carried since birth,
since he opened his eyes on this mad world,
since his name became a stigma, his dream an accusation, and his death a passing headline.

I will not ask how you are,
for that question no longer fits here;
it answers itself only with shame and helplessness.

I have known you for almost two years,
from the first photograph you shared,
from the first look your eye caught before the lens did.
I knew you when the annihilation began,
when light itself turned into resistance,
and feeling grew weightier, deeper than the news.

We did not speak much,
perhaps because pain needs no explanation,
but I wished to know you better,
wished to see you before all of this.

In Gaza,
to learn the name of your neighbourhood from your mouth, not from maps;
to see the sea you see;
to walk the street your feet remember.
All of that has grown distant,
yet it lives on in imagination,
in the dream that neither blockade nor warplanes can kill.

But dreaming was not enough.
Imagination does not rescue a neighbourhood, nor does an image pull a child from the rubble.
We write so we do not go mad,
and yet we go mad all the same.
We bear witness, raise our voices, carry images as if they were weapons,
and still we are left alone,
and killed alone.

How many times have I looked at your photos with my body shaking?
Not from fear, but from anger —
at this mute world that hears yet does nothing,
that selects its victims with care and forgets the rest in the daily registers of death.

Why all this?
Why are you exposed while I write behind a screen?
Why are homes bombed as if they were straw,
and words forbidden?
Why must this ruin be allowed to run on?

I do not write to console you,
but so we might remember together:
that we are here —
or rather, that you are here.
In every anger lodged in my chest,
in every photograph I hold in my hand,
in every curse I cast at this complicit order,
at this collapsing humanity.
And though I am far from you,
I am with you in every moment of rage.
I will carry your name on my lips,
as a brother’s, in anger, in loss,
and in the dream that will not be crushed,
no matter how they try.

I can do nothing now but recall a passage of Amal Dunqul’s poem Do Not Reconcile — perhaps I hear in it a voice that answers me:

It is not only your vengeance alone,
but the vengeance of generation after generation.
And tomorrow…
one will be born who wears the armor whole,
who sets the all-consuming fire,
who demands vengeance,
who births justice
from the ribs of the impossible.

I hope to see you soon, Moayed.
With all love and affection,
Ahmed Alaqra

Gaza, August 4, 2025 and September 5, 2025

Dear Ahmed Alaqra,

Your letter crossed all these borders, outstripped the ugliness of this earth, and arrived with its full weight, with the pulse of your heart beating inside it.

To you,
a long, gentle peace from here, from the midst of what I am trapped within —
from the barzakh of Gaza.
To you, from where the light is too faint to open a window,
and the night cannot shut its eyes against the whistling of rockets;
from where I pray, before the world’s newspapers write my blood into their columns.

We have not yet met,
yet the powers of creation were present in our crushed time,
so that you might be my brother in this heavy burden,
and so we might transcend not drinking coffee together — until the time comes.

I write to you, not knowing
whether words can save a life, whether an image can stop a massacre.
But I write, full of what cannot be said,
because if we fall silent… we die twice:
once by their new specters,
and once in the betrayal of meaning.

If you ask me about my neighborhood —
nothing remains of it but the name, Ahmed.
As for the sea, it now washes the bodies of martyrs and of memory.
As for the street, it once held the steps of the living, and of those who have turned to cloud.
Now we struggle to recall it.

Let us not seek explanations.
Here, ruin has no logic,
and a grave explains nothing of death.

But perhaps I can carry to you
what my window held at four in the morning,
before all this death and the absence of cool air:
“Allah ma‘ak ya hawa” by Fairuz — she too, like you, surpasses borders.

…

Perhaps grief kills us, once.
But the thread between us gives us life all the more,
toward the dream that cannot be crushed.

I share this letter — this thread extended — with my friend, the artist Isma‘il Abu Hatab, who departed after losing his life in the war:

Isma‘il,
my living, abiding friend,
I search for you and find only my questions.
What does it mean that you are gone,
while your spirit still directs the scene,
still courses through me, and through Gaza?

You were here,
with your deep understanding of existence,
with your forgiveness that surpassed eternity.

You walked with the lightness of water,
as though you knew time was narrow,
and that life’s value is not measured by its length
but by the ability to leave behind a meaning that outlives it —
through an open ending, as you did.

Now I know absence is not the opposite of presence.
It is your presence in another form:
another film of your voice,
of your enduring shadow,
of your unconquered dream,
of your heart, so fiercely red.
It was never a fleeting trait,
but a complete philosophy against the cruelty of this world.

Peace be upon you, Isma‘il.

Moayed Abuammouna

Ramallah, 24 July 2025

My brother Laith,

I write this letter to remember you. We did not grow up together, we did not play together. We were raised in different countries, in different times, in different seasons. I remember you small — your first days, your early years — and then I remember nothing.

Across the thirty-five years I have lived on this land, I have written you hundreds of letters that I never sent. I imagined hundreds of conversations with you that appeared to me in scenes, in pictures, in fragments of speech.

I remember when you decided to take up photography. I was so happy then; I told myself, “Maybe this is my way to come closer to you, to build a bridge between us so we can see Palestine together — this land from which we were born far away.”

I have always wanted to ask you, again and again: How are you? How do you feel? Do you still shoot? Do you keep trying? Do you remember? Do you love? Do you remember me? Do you see me?

Do you know, brother, that I have more than ten thousand archival photographs I took over the past ten years? I have only one or two for you — that photo I made of you after building the little kiosk. How happy I was! I remember that scene clearly, though I don’t know why.

But I stood far away — I always stood far away. From you, from our father, from our mother and sister, from the rest of my brothers.
Perhaps I thought then that distance was the only logic that would let me carry this world. I decided to carry this world alone. I wish I had not.
I wish I had sought closeness more — your closeness. I wish the thousands of photos I own held your faces, your eyes, your voices, my family.
I wished those pictures were your memories, your thoughts, your feelings, your names.
I wish I had known you better. If only you knew how I was always with you, even in my absence.

This genocidal war has burdened everything. It has fouled our day, our sky.
And amid all this collapse, what matters most seems to be you — my family. Not the idea of them, but their tangible presence.
We are still alive. I am still here.

I remember the day you were born everyone said you looked like our brother Amr: plump, gentle, blond, with blue eyes.
But when I look at you now, I see myself. I see an extension of my being. Two branches of the same tree stretching in different directions.

I miss you. In waves.
In ways I did not expect.

In the silence.
In the pictures I did not take.

Your brother,
Ahmed

Ramallah, 25 August 2025

My dearest Yasmin,

I write to you across this cold surface they call “email,” though you are near—so near I can almost see you when I close my eyes.

I write because you were the first to walk beside me when I began to photograph. I cannot recall a single image that did not carry you somehow—inside the frame, at its edge, in the light spilling across its borders, or in the fleeting shadow you cast between lens and spirit. You were always there, inhabiting the picture or haunting its silence.

These last two years have been heavy—or rather, these last four—since we dimmed our inner lamps and shut the doors on love. We sat, we fell into silence, we looked outward but dared not face the mirrors. And then the annihilation came, not as an event, but like a thick veil drawn between us and ourselves.

Did you know I carry thousands of photographs? Thousands of moments, each one a record of every meeting and every parting, every rupture of time and place. Images from London, Athens, Paris, Amman, Ramallah, Helsinki, Hanoi, Saigon, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. As though we were trying to seize the world before it flickered out.

Sometimes I wonder… if in you I glimpsed the Palestine I never lived. You were one of its most truthful images—or at least the way I longed to see it: its light unextinguished, its colors unpillaged, its seas and mountains intact, the rippling strata of its fractured history. You were its body, yours to reclaim whenever you wished, yours to offer only to those worthy of it.

For more than two years now, I have not moved.
I wait.
I wait for the bleeding to stop.

We fastened our bodies with hidden, poisoned nails.
Even the body that once trembled between life and delirium… grew still.
And everything stilled with it.

Ahmed

Jericho, 14th of October 2025

Habeebi Ahmad,

I write to you when the blood has stopped flowing, but the tears have not. My body has gone still, and time moves in circles around me.

I couldn’t reply to your beautiful letter for a long time. I feel my mind is on a planet with no gravity. I sit tied to my seat, almost orbiting the same radius every day. Its walls transparent but solid. 

I remember us on the road, riding without direction. We found an empty beach in these pictures, and a random open desert to our right. We stopped the motorcycle and walked into it. The horizon became multiplied; the compass non-existent.

Your email reminded me of this sketch I made maybe five years ago. I hope it still exists somewhere between those thousand photos you have. It still feels warm.

Do you remember how I used to tell you there was a smell to Ramallah, one I could always find in my parents’ garden? I still have it. But I’m thinking of leaving town, because even that scent of comfort is fading. I’m starting to notice only the many eyes engraved in the trees. I feel watched more than ever, the earth feels warned too many times. Nature has become dangerous—the settlers yet relaxed. 

You say the past two years have been difficult; I’m scared I lost faith. Last year I went on a trip to the Dead Sea, I remember I showed you snippets. Not in search for God, but into his absence. The so-called Holy Land, the land that raised us, is now the farthest thing from holy. Every sacred place feels desecrated, every sound of prayer mixed with sirens and explosions. They say after war comes harvest, but the soil was only watered with blood. Whenever I step outside, the land itself warns me not to go too far.

I’m replying from the lowest point on earth, the oldest city in the world, where Jesus himself was baptised, land lying in salt and desolation. 

Even the sea is dead. 

The sacred land is sacrificed. 

Until then, I carry you with me —

With love,
Yasmin

Ramallah, 24th of July 2025

Dear Maen,

I’m really happy to see how much you’ve grown — in your work, and as a person.
I don’t remember exactly when we met. A day, a week, a month — time has always been a bit loose in my mind.
But I remember you had just bought a new camera — a Sony, I think. You were excited about how sharp it was, how clean the image looked.
You carried it like it had a future inside it.

I remember when we walked from my place to Ein Kenya.
I have a few images from that route still — the light dipping through the trees, that strange quiet just beyond the concrete.
That place always astonishes me.
Maybe because it feels like the opposite of what Ramallah is trying to be.
Maybe because it sits on the edge of the mirage — that soft blur of Area C.

We met through that loose net of friends — people scattered between cities and years.
Some of them still ask about you.
Do you remember Francesca? The Italian photographer?
She came to Palestine not just to photograph, but to be here.
To sit inside it all.
I think about that sometimes — how some people come with cameras, but what they really want is to belong to a place that doesn’t know how to stay still.

How do you carry on?
How do you keep looking?
Do you still believe in the image — in what it can do, or undo?
I guess I’m not really asking you.
I’m asking myself, through you.

Maen, my friend —
Take care.
Keep doing what you’re doing.
There’s a kind of gentleness in the way you see, and we need that more than ever.

P.S. I’ve attached the images from Ein Kenya — maybe they’ll remind you of something quiet and beautiful. I took this image with you, and developed it at Al-Manar Studio in Ramallah. It was scanned using these old devices that produce very low quality. 

Ahmed

Ramallah, 8th of August

Hey Habibi Ameen, 

Sending you love from Ramallah. I hope your summer is going well. I imagine Beirut is hot and humid. But I know you have loved ones around you and a chosen family there that I hope provides some grounding. 

I think a lot about our people and how much we have been thrown around on this planet. I think about Syria a lot too. Especially Damascus. I remember the first time I heard about you was when I saw your photos from Damascus during an exhibition in New York. They were beautiful black and white photos. There was the one image with birds. others with cement and rubble. I appreciated the slow shutter in some of the others. I remember speaking to Roï and asking whose images these were, he told me, “Ameen. He is a Palestinian living in Syria.” 

A Palestinian living in Syria must have so much weight behind it. Perhaps as much as a Palestinian living in Beirut. Or any other noun or place name of exile. 

My Teta was telling me the other day how unfair it is. How it has always been; unfair. I despise fairness. Or justice. Or accountability. Or other nouns. I think being Palestinian has me jaded about life. About what one ought to expect from it. 

Everything has changed these days. But perhaps nothing has changed at all. Is this how the oppressed have always felt at different points in time? Sometimes I think it is a blessing to bear our curse. I can see the world with such clarity. Evil, empire, greed, and other nouns. They are out in the open. 

Sometimes, I day-dream about breaking things. My enemy. Their settlements. Their jeeps. Their towers. Other nouns. I think about storming the hilltop in front of me, the one with settlers and wine from the land of my wife’s family. I think about sprinting into the hills of Jerusalem to recapture my grandfather’s land and to hold it. 

I day-dream about this fantasy where they are all gone. Our enemy. And our people can return. What would it look like? How would it be organized? Would there be a list of names? Would the oldest of the village welcome them home? How would we get around all of the fighting that would be inevitable. My Teta’s brothers are suing her for her land, for example. 

Would those who returned be impressed? Would having them see it be enough. Would they prefer to go back to exile? Is exile our curse? 

I think about you sometimes. I imagine it would be overwhelming to come back to Palestine. You hold an extra layer. You lost Syria, too. Or, instead, parts of Syria were lost with you. And what Palestine would you return to? Part of me would feel embarrassed if it were the one that exists now. The West Bank is a series of shopping malls and sniper towers. If this is to change, for the better, it will need to be drastic. Gaza has shown us the costs of this cause.  

I am planning to go to Syria in a few weeks. To Damascus. I want to photograph and film the places that were important to my mom’s side. They spent 30+ years there. In a way Syria is where they are from. Even though they are from Helhul, here. My mom came back to Palestine and couldn’t bear it, for many reasons. Mostly because of the people. And their “values”. She was a daughter of a revolutionary and their family paid the price of his politics. Including being idealists. And jaded.

I am including a few photos from my jiddo’s archive: one with fellow Baathists before Hafez arrested him. And another of him in Tulkarem in a spring, while he was studying just before the Nakba. I spend a lot of time going through these images and imagining what life must have been like then. My Teta tells me that liberation and Palestine were everything everyone talked about back then. It all felt so close and proximate. What are we supposed to do with that truth? That the past was closer to our future. And what is to come might only get worse. 

Yours,
Maen 

Ramallah, 1st of September 2025

Dear Reem, my dear friend,

I write to you from Palestine, to tell you of a land I know you would fall in love with.
From the first time I saw your photographs in Jeddah, I was struck — I said to myself: how alive your eye would feel here, among the mountains, the olives, the figs, the pomegranates, the oranges.

For even with all the entanglements this place carries, there is a stillness I have glimpsed reflected in your work. The photograph of an orange below reminded me of that stillness. It comes from the archive of Frank Scholten, who documented Palestine in the 1920s.

I wanted to share this letter with you, to weave you into a thread of correspondence I’ve begun with a few Arab photographers. It would mean so much to me if you chose to extend this thread. In these times, stillness must be wrestled back in the face of annihilation.

Your friend, 

Ahmed Alaqra

Paris, September 4, 2025

My dear friend Ahmad,

Thank you deeply for your letter. I write to you from Paris, after five months in this city everyone describes as harsh and fast-paced. A condition I do not necessarily live myself, but I understand the inevitability of its disappointments—soft, slight, and intimate disappointments, carrying the nature of quick disintegration. I move through them with my small kit of psychological tools, long years of training in boredom, and a daily readiness to cry before the Seine.

I will not deny that the creative thread—your words about my work, and about Palestine—placed me in a state of temporary paralysis: I felt I knew nothing, that my knife was no longer sharp. I thought a great deal about what I might share, and even as I write to you now, I am not entirely certain. The question presses on me: to return to the core, or to drift toward other zones, lighter, less burdened than the centrality of things.

I decided to attach a new print from the family archive: a photograph of my mother’s hand, at no more than fifteen years old, leaning on the cushion in my grandmother’s house. Somehow, over the years, my relationship with that cushion itself deepened more than my relationship with my mother. And so, I share the print while thinking of the fabric pattern of the cushion, and only after that, of my mother’s hand.

I extend this thread as well to the Palestinian photographer, my dear friend Yaqeen Yamani, whom I met here in Paris. Her companionship was vital and warm on many levels, giving me spaces that reordered the intimate within the heart of the everyday. Perhaps for this reason, in sharing this print from the family archive, I also recover our conversations together—about memory, about Palestine, about the many shapes of home when it turns into an image.

With all my love,

Reem Ali

Jericho, September 17, 2025

Dear Reem,

Thank you for your letter! Honestly, I was very happy to meet you and for all the conversations we shared; I still carry them with me in Palestine and have been recalling them recently.

Since my return, fear has accompanied me daily, and I try as best I can to learn how to continue a life that is ordinary where nothing is ordinary.

Despite the darkness we live through every day, I decided to attach a photograph of Ramadan Dahdah—a man from Jericho who works harvesting his palm trees. In the past, my grandfather used to climb the palms and pick their dates, but since his passing, we became accustomed to Ramadan coming without a set schedule, tending to the palm, and returning months later to harvest it. This has always been one of the most beautiful memories of my childhood in Jericho.

Today, Ramadan came to harvest my grandfather’s palm and brought me some hope and life in this difficult time.

I extend this thread to my friend Musab Abu Shama. Musab and I met only once in the United States. Although our meeting lasted only a few hours, I felt as if I had known him for years, and I am very grateful for all his messages checking on me—they have given me much strength.

With love to you all,
Yaqeen

New York, 4th of October 2025

Peace to you, Yaqeen,

Thank you for your message. I’m sorry for the delay in replying. Truly, I didn’t know how to respond to such kindness. It’s hard to believe more than a year has passed since our first meeting (and I hope it won’t be the last).

I hope you and those you love are well, wherever you are. I read your words more than once, and they reached me like the voice of someone dear, despite the distances.

Thank you for weaving me into this thread, and thanks to everyone who keeps it alive—who makes of it a place of warmth and meaning.

Since leaving Sudan, something in me lost the ability to see things as they were. They appear faded now, without shade, without flavor. Yet, as with the birds, there comes a lean season when migration is forced upon you, and another when you return to your nest.

I share with you a photograph taken by me in NY, and a song by Mohammed Wardi that I’ve always loved. It carries something of this long-awaited return.

https://youtu.be/lWmTgCuIwHo?si=NSuD8D0OKis70yUJ

Now I pass this thread to our friend Amira, who never fails to astonish me with her gift for finding beauty in small things, and for speaking of herself without adornment.
Amira, I look forward to you joining these exchanges, to continue what Ahmad began—of light, of conversation, of memory.

With affection to you all,
and may you stay well.
Mosab

Libya, 10th of October 2025

Dear Musab,

How are you? I know everything around us feels exhausting, but I want you to know that I’m proud of you. You can’t imagine what your project did to me — how deeply your Sudanese story moved and inspired me. I hope you find your peace, my dear.

Your letter reached me like a photograph emerging from an old darkness. As I read it, I kept thinking how these correspondences resemble light seeping through the cracks of distant places — and how much we need this kind of invisible meeting.

For some time now, I’ve been working on a project that tries to see what cannot be seen — blindness, and the photographic memory of those who have lost sight. This project both captivates and haunts me. Ever since I learned that I might have even a small chance of losing my vision, I’ve been afraid.

I’m sending you a photograph I took of my mother — the light of my eyes — wearing the Amazigh dress from the city of Zuwara, Libya.

And I’m also including a Libyan song I love deeply, “My heart will never forget you, beloveds of my heart” — it carries a warmth that feels like return, like a small promise to meet again.

With this letter, I pass the thread from Sudan and Libya back to Sudan — to the photographer Hashim Nasr, whose colors have long captivated me. I recently found some answers to my questions about them during a short online meeting, where he shared precious insights with me.

I hope we meet soon, friends of light — may distance one day dissolve between us.

With love, from the shore of the Mediterranean,
Amira

Alexandria, 13th of October 2025

Dear Ameera,

I write to you from the same shore of the Mediterranean, hoping that the currents might carry to you both my apology for the delay in replying, and my growing admiration for the way you weave the details of your images through your love for your family. The constant presence of family in your work inspires me personally—to draw closer to those who are here with me, and to reach, in spirit, those who are far away, back home.
Lately, I must admit, I’ve been feeling a certain soft emptiness—a quiet distance that stretches between me and them.

I don’t quite know how, but I know that art has the power to reveal pathways of human closeness with those we love, despite the reality of separation and distance.
This is what inspired me to share this image — Shards of a Homeland — for it captures this reality from my own perspective.

And now, I extend the thread to my dear friend Rabab in South Lebanon — beyond my personal affection for her bright and sincere spirit, I remain deeply grateful for her ability to capture beauty amid hardship and fragility.

That blend — of aesthetic grace and the intimate, truthful portrayal of lived reality — is what always draws my eyes to art that speaks sincerely.

With warm regards, Ameera, and wishes for a vision that continues to craft beauty.
And my greetings to you, dear Ahmad — thank you for creating this space.

With love,
Hashim

Beirut, 18th October 2025

Dina,

I extend this thread to you, knowing that ours stretches far back in time.
In all our years of friendship, I never imagined that photography would one day become one of the ways we connect. Nor did I ever think of the word border between us — yet in recent years, a burning desire to cross checkpoints to meet again has often visited me.

My turn to analog photography arose from a discomfort I felt toward video after the Aqsa Flood. I felt foolish, prolongedly observing my mother’s roses on our porch, indulging in tenderness amidst the struggle of our people for liberation. Analog photography, on the other hand, allowed me during the war to point and shoot — tenderness made practical, tenderness perceived and set aside, tenderness urgently archived.

In this correspondence, I want to share with you some thoughts about lemons that have accompanied me throughout the war. I’ve always imagined that the lemons in Palestine are lighter in color than ours in South Lebanon — a gentler, childlike yellow, the very first shade of yellow in its becoming.

These reflections on lemons in Palestine and Lebanon brought to mind someone who cared for ours during the war. In Hanaway, my village in South Lebanon, the man who supplied water stayed behind to water the trees and provide water to the fighters. Every few days, he would message my mother to reassure us that our house was still standing, even as neighboring homes were struck by the Zionist occupation.

There came a day when my mother asked him if he could water our lemon trees if he happened to be nearby. Hassan replied, “هول الليمونات رح يدعولك يا حجّة”.
A few days later, he was killed by the occupation while performing وُضُوء on his balcony.

Upon returning home after the ceasefire, among the first images I captured were the lemons that Hassan watered — which I now want to share with you.

This photo reminds me of a line from Darwish’s poem:
هنا أضاءَ لكِ الليمونُ ملحُ دمي

Hassan sacrificed his life quenching the thirst of the lemon trees, for the sake of life itself, and for the fighters who sought shelter and shade beneath them.

To capture this photo, I waited an hour or more for the sun to light this lemon. In that time, I looked, observed, and indulged in this sight, this tenderness that is the rawest resource of our land. I knew, with certainty, that all of this was rightfully ours to perceive with our eyes and hearts. If not us, then who? 

Thank you for reading me; I had long wished for a reunion to speak of photography, self, and homeland side by side. I hope this brings you a certain fulfillment, as it did to me… 

I want to thank you, dear Hashim, for extending this thread to me. Your way of being, and your work, speak to me on a very personal level.
Ahmad, thank you immensely for inviting me to take part in this beautiful correspondence.

With warmth, and in the hope that we meet between Akka and Naqoura someday,

Rabab Chamseddine

Ramallah, 19th of October 2025

Dear Yazan,

I don’t know if you know me, but I do know you.

I’m writing to you because I remember, at some point—somewhere, or maybe even in a dream—watching your work Landscape of Darkness. My memory of it is vague now, its details blurred, but something about it stayed with me.

When I was a child living abroad, every time we returned to Palestine, we would arrive at night. Those long roads lit by yellow light became one of the most imprinted images of my childhood. I think your work somehow intertwined with that memory—so much so that I can’t tell them apart anymore.

Warmest regards,

Ahmed 

Ramallah, September 2, 2025

Dear Omar, my friend,

I hope you are well and in good health, and that Damascus has begun to catch its breath toward better days. I cannot hide how much I long to visit! Our meeting in Amman this spring still lingers in my memory—the immense energy radiating from you. Does it still accompany you? I hope so.

That day, I was struck by the contrast between the Crow project you shared with us and the energy you carried in your body… as if they were two faces of the duration between captivity and liberation. God willing, we will all taste the moment of relief.

I write to you because I remembered how near and far we are at once. I imagine the scene in Syria, in Damascus and Aleppo… does it resemble Palestine? In my garden, there is a rare Aleppo pistachio tree, said to have been brought to Palestine by a Syrian family from Aleppo. It feels as if the tree itself bridges the distance between us.

How I wish you could visit us in Palestine, even though the Zionist project tries to occupy both the land and the people, planting its flags in our hearts and over our soil. And yet, we continue to dig our roots deep into the earth and memory.

I wanted you to be part of this correspondence, to reclaim who we are and write our memory with our own hands. 

With all my love Omar,

And I hope to see you soon,

Ahmed

Damascus, September 3, 2025

Abu Hamid, my beautiful Palestinian friend,

How wonderful it is to be able to communicate with a friend from the occupied Palestinian territories without feeling fear… The Assad regime was such a heavy weight on our hearts, making us afraid of our phones, our emails, our messages at every moment… We felt we were being watched every second, and that we were threatened with arrest for the smallest act… Oh God, how beautiful it is to see this regime fall before our eyes… A regime that accused us of treason and collaboration simply for greeting Palestinians in the occupied territories… A regime that wants us to remain silent, asleep in our small private prisons, and that wants to kill us quietly, without anyone noticing. Yet we Syrians and Palestinians are known for our stubbornness…

Since the very first moment this Israel-aligned regime fell, I have been moving freely toward the Syrian Golan… the city where my father was born, only to be destroyed by the occupation… Unfortunately, I could not reach the destroyed city… I could not reach my own destroyed memory… The occupation constantly pushes its borders toward us… Yet I drew very close, inhaled its air, saw its hills and trees… How happy I was to approach the Golan… until suddenly a group of Israeli soldiers appeared, running toward me… My blood ran cold the moment I saw them… It was the first time in my life I had ever seen an Israeli soldier… I felt a new kind of fear… one I did not know… I could not resist taking a picture of them… I snapped it quickly and ran…

For the first time in my life, I faced what you face, my friend… We now have one enemy… clear and explicit… ugly and frightening… But one enemy… or, I hope, just one…
Freedom is to fight your enemy freely…

My greetings to you, in hope of a near meeting in Tiberias, God willing.

Your Syrian brother,
Omar, from the side opposite the occupation…

On the road between Jerusalem and the Negev, 25th September 2025

It’s now 12:18 noon.
On the way to Shaqib from Jerusalem,
in a bus that smells like settlers’ sweat.
And all I want right now is to reach the desert —
and stay there.

Ruba

Ramallah, 1st of September 2025

Dear Rotana

It has been some time now that our paths have intertwined, and with every passing day I come to realize how deeply your presence has reshaped me. The past year feels marked by your quiet gravity, as if you’ve bent the rhythm of my life into something new, something I had not imagined possible.

I write to you to remember. To call forth a landscape that lives inside me, one I wish I could place in your hands. A land biblical, holy, and scarred by occupation. A place painted in green and yellow, carrying the sharp perfume of first rain after dust. A place that offers serenity even where serenity should not exist.

Do you remember how excited I was in Greece? The way I kept pointing at hills and groves, whispering to myself: this is close, this is almost it. For a moment I believed I could show you a fragment of home, since the real thing is beyond reach. You’ve told me a thousand times that you already feel it inside you, that it runs as an extension of yourself—and still, it aches. Because some evil in this world insists on keeping us apart from the places we belong, from each other, from what should be simple.

Years ago, I gave my life to fighting that evil. I stood against it with all the strength I had, and yet today I often feel emptied out, my energy scattered. I try to translate what I see into images, into photographs, but they always betray me—they never hold the smell, the trembling of air, the silence of stones. What I wish for, more than anything, is a pause: a suspension of time, so that we could walk together through this soil that has been taken from us.

And that is why I deform. I told you this once—how distortion is my quiet form of resistance. To deform is to refuse erasure, to push back in soft but persistent ways. It is my way of insisting that we belong, that I belong, that you too are tethered to this earth though they have tried to strip us of every sensory thread that connects us to it. Exile is not always physical—it is also the deprivation of touch, of smell, of the horizon line itself.

Still, I write to remember. And I write to keep you within that memory.

Yours, 

Ahmed 

Riyadh, 7th of October, 2025

Dear Ahmad, 

I’ve written many letters to you in the past. Some that I’ve shared with you and others that you may never see. So instead of sharing those, I’d like to respond to you with my thoughts about the images of the Palestine I’ve seen through you. 

Palestine grew in my mind from fragments. From still-shot images in news article posts on Instagram, from the paintings of an older generation of artists, from descriptions whose source I can’t even pin down. 

But Ramallah and its surrounding areas became animated in my life through you: your stories, your analogue images, and the corners of it which I glimpse from behind your head on facetime calls. They stitch together to form an incomplete picture. You once sent me a video on a rainy day of you running errands, and although you’ve told me how hilly the city is before, it only then struck me then that my mental image up to that point had been so flat — a reflection of the cities that I traverse, not the reality that you live. This video made me jolt suddenly with the realisation that as familiar as I thought I had grown with it, I may never know how the rain feels on those hilly roads, my image will always be partial. 

So many cameras have been pointed at this land, yours included.  And so many images have been made, real and imagined. 

A lot can happen between the lens and the land. 

I think of Ariella Azoulay’s writing which I am reading at the moment. And of the book I recently bought which I can’t wait to start about ‘Photography and the Future’. 

Can there be a link between my land and yours? A future where the images are not just in my head? 

Yesterday, my mother picked up an almond fruit in her garden and pointed to the almond trees around us. I hadn’t noticed there were so many before. And in that moment, I remembered the day that through my little screen you showed me your almond trees in your garden and how you got the nut out of the fruit. I felt strange about my limited vision, how did I only recognise my own after seeing yours?

see you soon,

Rotana 

London, 3rd of September.

Dear Mohammad, 

I received this message from someone dear to me, I think you met him once briefly before in Jeddah. It is a part of a project that he started with Palestinian photographers but has now expanded to the wider Arab world. And I am glad it has because since the moment he told me about it, I had you in mind as someone to share this project with. 

Both of you have shaped my understanding of what it means to live a creative life, but especially of photography and images, profoundly and as I navigate the world around me, I see more through your lenses of what it means to witness, to document, to alter, to annotate and to distort these documents in an effort to tell some sort of story, to encase within them kernels of truth or to expand them beyond the limits of the visual experience. 

You’ve especially ingrained in me the way in which the camera was a tool for you to connect with the world around you, with people, with animals, with the environment, and through it you introduced me and so many others who have the privilege to know your work to the nuances of Al Hasa, your home. A place I only visited once but that through your images, videos, and stories, had come alive in my mind. 

We were in London last summer when we started looking through them on your old hard drive in the courtyard at Delfina. I use my camera roll to jog my memory of when exactly.

I am in London again now! 

On our last phone call (was it last week?) we caught up briefly about some ideas we’d been discussing before, during, and since your exhibition… and I mentioned a book that I’d recently finished reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. 

I picked it up at a bookstore in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago as a gift for my sister without reading the blurb. She never ended up finishing it and for some reason it lingered in my mind over these couple of years before I finally borrowed it for myself this summer. 

It is a novel that tells the story of a Sri Lankan photographer as he navigates the afterlife, and through it reveals stories about not only his life, but the messiness of the Sri Lankan civil war and perhaps some questions about what it means to witness. I wanted to share a passage with you but I’m afraid I’d ruin the ending. I think you should read it. I often read it in the park. 

Although I myself am not a photographer, I have been touched by photography in a profound way and see myself as a little link on this chain that holds moments and memories and images and words. I write to invite you into this thread and to ask you to pass this forward as well, to see what worlds and stories can come together. 

Looking forward to seeing you soon! 

all the best, 
Rotana 

Al Ahsa, 19th of September 2025

Dear Dimitris 

I think you will love this, a project by a Palestinian photographer to weave memory and witnessing through images and words and records. It was passed to me by my brilliant friend and curator Rotana Shaker whose attention to details and fleeting moments is very inspiring to me, thank you Rotana for thinking of me for this. 

I keep saying this to you Dimitris, but I truly think of you as a walking encyclopaedia of care. Your attention for the forsaken and forgotten is something we need in the world today more than ever, an antidote to the brutality that is flooding us now. The olive tree that survived the frost and stand as a monument of resilience, the broken and melted pieces of pottery on the shore which by your acknowledgment turn into incredible pieces of art.

Sacrifice, is something we believed we had to do to achieve what we wanted, what we needed. But how much is enough? Al Hussein bin Ali said to Allah “take until you are satisfied” during the battle of Karbala, where everything started to cry and bleed for him. Just like the Mastika trees in Chios.

But I do believe in a time where only tears of joy are shedded, and only pomegranate juice is spelled by children. David will always beat Goliath, and from the ashes nothing but greenery will grow. Maybe it’s very delusional to think this way, but it seems the only thing we have in the faces of great powers is to dream, to dream hard enough until it becomes a reality 

Will you dream with me? 

Looking forward to seeing you soon

Salam 

Mohammad 

Ramallah, 4th of December 2024

Dear Tamara

I wish I can come to Beirut! Please send pictures, I am so happy that the ceasefire took place. 

How was Neom? I am so intrigued. I met Ahed in Jeddah last months and she mentioned that it is joint program? 

anyway, I wanted to let you know that I’ve just shipped the book to you using the Palestinian Post. The package will arrive with some beautiful stamps, which I hope you’ll enjoy. They mentioned that the delivery time may vary, as it depends on the Israeli side—unfortunately, Palestinian packages are sometimes delayed intentionally as a form of inconvenience.  

I truly hope you’ll find the book meaningful. It is a deeply personal journey that reflects on what it means to live in Palestine, drawing from years of images, thoughts, and emotions. It’s an attempt to make sense of everything—at times to cope, to vent, and sometimes simply to ground oneself and find strength.  

The book ventures into conversations between me and my father, as well as with a dear friend I’m no longer in touch with. It also explores my journey to uncover meanings and symbols in a land that is over-symbolised (if that is even a word). These thistles in the book serve as vessels of memory.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I hope our paths will cross someday—or even better, that Palestine will be free, and you can visit us here.  

Until then, take care and stay safe.  

Warm regards,  

Ahmed Alaqra

Beirut, 17th of December 2024

Dear Ahmad,

I’m sorry for the late reply! You’ve been on my mind a lot. I’ve just been caught up finishing up this sculpture for the Islamic Biennale, I’ve been working on with a fabricator in Lebanon and I’ve finally been able to come post-ceasefire. It is now on its way to Jeddah and I feel as though my body is crashing after weeks, of even months of what feels like running. 

I wish you could come here! Weren’t you going to do a residency here next year? 

Neom was intriguing, I’d absolutely love to share with you the project I worked on there. It was definitely difficult to balance being present there while everything was unfolding in Lebanon, and ofc Palestine. It took me a long time to find a project I was genuinely interested in doing, but i think it brought up a lot of important questions along the way, in terms of my positionality in this context, and reshook, regrounded and remuddied my practice perhaps, which is nice. I do need some time to decompress, I’m hoping the next year will be slower, and more introspective in some ways. Smaller projects, many of which I’ve put on the back burner for these commissions and residencies. 

Thank you so so much for the description of the work and for the book itself, I get the over-symbolism, I perhaps find myself falling into it at times, but even then, maybe there is value in revisiting one’s own relationship to those big symbols, and sometimes there is a reason they are as such! Especially when it comes to ancestral plants. But I think there’s lot of value and beauty in expanding the lexicon of those symbols, reframing, adding and reimagining, the landscape we are a part of and construct. I’m not sure, but the plant looks super familiar from the landscape here in Lebanon. If you have a coloured image I’d love to compare. The ones here are purple. 

I’m loving being in Beirut, and I pray we will witness a free Palestine. & I hope to visit regardless of whether it happens soon inshallah if/when things settle. What are your plans this year? I’d love for us to cross paths again! 

This is our apartment in Beirut. 

Some olds Lebanese coins dating back to the 20s I bought at this Christmas flea market. 

This gorgeous park/pavilion/fair space in designed by Niemeyer in Trablos that was never finished due to the war, but looks incredible regardless. 

I spent a night in Deir El Qamar in Chouf as a treat to myself and to get out of Beirut a bit.

I’d love to hear more about you! And to receive some images too. I hope you’re well and I send you lots of love and hugs 🫂 

Warmly,

Tamara 

Ramallah, 1st of September 2025

Dear Zara,

My beloved friend, I don’t know if you are in Amman or Paris now—or maybe in both at once, a city unfolding into another. I write to you from a place where time slips, where Paris and Ramallah collapse into one corridor of memory.

Do you remember how we met? That doomed illness that carried us into each other’s lives, as though sickness was only a door disguised as fever. Perhaps we would have met anyway, but quarantine braided us together—me, a stranger to you and Siwar, and yet you welcomed me like someone you had always known.

I remember our little photoshoot: burned film, images ghosted into dream, as though the camera itself knew we were living in the blur between chance and fate. Farah had spoken of you before, your brilliance, and suddenly there you were—real, luminous, yet already a fragment of a dream.

Then, I left Paris. And suddenly you arrived in Ramallah—your first crossing into Palestine—just weeks before October 7th, as if the world was holding its breath. You barely had the chance to see this place before the checkpoints reassembled themselves like walls made of shadows. Before the deaths, and the reoccurring death that keeps circling back.

I see you still, sitting in my living room, eyes wide open as the television flickered with breaking news—your presence at once here and there, Paris and Ramallah, two nights folding into each other.

I am writing so you can be part of these threads, these email chains that try to stitch together what resists stitching. I admire you endlessly. In the attached PDF you will find more—if you forward it on, I would be honored to have your presence ripple through it.

I love you; I miss you—always in two places at once.

Ahmed

Paris, 9th of September 2025

Sara,

When I received this thread, my mind immediately went back to when we first met in Amman, in the summer of 2024. At a time where it felt illegal to be happy, where every trace of hope was taken away, where laughter itself was a burden of guilt. 

The photos I chose come from one of the most unforgettable nights of my existence.  

Singing, laughing and loving in a world that constantly tried to break us.

Dancing through the ache as if our bodies could carry what our hearts could not.

It felt good to feel human again, to embrace our full humanity in a world that sought to take it from us.

It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we met because from the first moment it felt like we’d known each other forever. 

I love you; I miss you; I admire you and I couldn’t be prouder to call you, my sister. 

Yours, 

Zara

PS I just arrived in Paris xxx 

Ramallah, July 26, 2025

Dearest friend Lina,

While browsing the internet in search of visual materials that converse with the Palestinian landscape, I stumbled upon a photograph of you. I stared at it for a very long time. I spoke to it, wrote about it, and felt I should share what I wrote with you.

From afar, the hills appear like layers of ancient breath, each line a stillness drawn to the rhythm of light. In the photograph, nothing rises above the voice—everything carries its own distinct gleam. The shadows are dense, settling into depth.

And within the scene, the hills dissolve, the light withdraws like water receding from sacred stone. The contrast deepens—between sky and earth, between what was forgotten and what still waits to be written.

The road carves the land like a scar. It has no destination, only the trace of a crossing—one that never happened, yet is always about to. It passes through the hills as if they were terraces of waiting, each layer another time, another passage yet to come, a name never spoken.

The land is twisted. It appears still, yet staggers beneath the weight of silence. No houses, no bodies, no signs. And at the far edge of the image, where everything recedes, it seems the earth swallows its own voice—or perhaps holds its breath—awaiting someone who will listen.

Yours, 

Ahmed