In the still tension between documentation and poetry, Adam Rouhana’s photographs move with a quiet urgency. His ongoing project, Before Freedom, resists the spectacular, turning instead toward the understated — gestures of everyday life in Palestine that rarely enter the global image stream.
The works alternate between light and shadow, intimacy and rupture. Large-format portraits of children at play, of limbs in motion, of water and dust and laughter — paired with smaller, darker images that echo from the edges: a bloody handprint, a dim corridor, the residue of violence unspoken but not unseen.
Raised in Boston, working between Palestine and the U.S., Rouhana navigates the tension between inherited visual language and the search for new ways of seeing. He does not stage suffering. He turns the camera toward the daily, toward that which continues in spite of occupation — games, rest, ritual, tenderness. His gaze is neither neutral nor reactive. It is present.
At Checkpoint 300 — a passage ground between Bethlehem and Jerusalem — his lens captures moments just before dawn. One image unfolds as a long, uncut strip of film. The left edge is burned by light; the scene gradually resolves into a figure scaling a fence in silence. The imperfections of the frame — light leaks, blur, scratches — speak to the rawness of the moment and the fragility of the medium.
Another photograph emerges from a broken shutter. A streak of white light winds through scaffolding and iron gates. The accident becomes metaphor — a rupture in the architecture of control, a possibility not yet fixed.
Rather than offering resolution or clarity, Before Freedom invites the viewer into a kind of visual reorientation. It refuses the dominant tropes of war reportage, but does not turn away from the political. Instead, it enters into the slow process of unlearning and re-seeing — an attempt not to define, but to witness from within.
In a world saturated by images of suffering, Rouhana’s work insists on something else. Not the absence of pain, but the persistence of life.
