“Moment of escape”: Maen Hammad’s defiant West Bank skate photos

Hailing from Ramallah, Palestine, photographer Maen Hammad moved with his parents and brother to Troy, Michigan, at the age of 2. Amid the bourgeois trappings of suburban life, his home became a sanctuary of Palestinian culture and cuisine. But for Hammad, there was no closing the divide between two worlds; instead, he discovered he could simply navigate it on skateboard.

Skating provided an escape and fostered a sense of belonging, inspiring Hammad to take up photography as a youth. ​“We always had cameras around and a little VHS to film clips to put in a montage for a hypothetical ​’sponsor me’ tape,” he says. ​“Skating indoctrinated me into seeing the world; the street becomes a canvas.” 

After graduating college in 2014, Hammad returned to the Occupied West Bank for the first time in 10 years, to spend the summer with his family while studying Arabic. He originally planned to start law school in the fall, only to discover home was the land under his feet. ​“With my grandmother and uncles, I got a taste of this life that I never had,” he remembers. 

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Hammad abandoned the American Dream and returned to his roots, finding his place as a photographer uniquely poised to navigate the exclusion of Palestinian artists from the canon and industry alike. With his first monograph, Landing (Huwawa Books), Hammad teamed up with designer Roï Saade to create a textured portrait of Ramallah through the lives of local youth Aram, Kareem, Kilani, and Zaina who make up its nascent skate scene. 

Walking the streets at all hours of the day and night, Hammad saw Palestine as a lived reality, rather than an idea crafted from artifacts of diasporic identity. The earliest work in the book dates back to 2015, but it wasn’t until 2020 that he began to imagine Landing proper. Following the Uprising of Dignity, also known as the ​“Unity Intifada” in May 2021, where Palestinians revolted at police stations in Akka, Haifa, and Lydd, everything came into focus. 

“Skateboarding gives Palestinians this moment of escape in the midst of colonial violence from the Israeli régime,” Hammad says. ​“For that hour or two with your friends, you’re free. You can build a crew and have that process of creating together, as opposed to being fragmented and ripped apart in the way that the occupation tries to do to us psychically. But none of us were skating during this uprising.” 

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Landing is an intricately crafted story of the inextricable bond between people and place, of a continuous indigenous history that has shattered the fragile myth of Western ​“civilization” for 77 years. For Hammad, the story is both collective and personal. While in Palestine, he heard whispers that his father had been a political prisoner. In 2020, he returned to Michigan and sat down with his father, who shared his memories of being arrested at age 16 for attending a 1974 student protest. He spent four years in Israeli prisons before being released at the end of 1978. 

“My father never told me or my siblings that he had been arrested,” Hammad says. ​“Without many prompts he opened up and felt comfortable to speak about the experience. My dad is a huge part of the reason I am in Palestine. Because he was a refugee, growing up I had an understanding of Palestine not just as a place, but as a cause that is so important to our identity that it’s unshakeable.”

Landing by Maen Hammad is published by Huwawa Books.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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