Between the checkpoints and apartment blocks of the occupied West Bank, Maen Hammad photographs Landing, a seven-year record of Palestinian skateboarders turning occupied ground into their own.
Shot between 2015 and 2022, Landing gathers the lives of Palestinian skateboarders as they move through the layered realities of Israeli settler-colonial rule. Hammad, who grew up between Detroit and Palestine, returns with a camera and a 7-ply deck. The resulting book, published by Kehrer Verlag, reads less like reportage than like a held breath: an argument, image by image, that skateboarding here is neither sport nor subculture but a way of claiming space that the structures of occupation were built to deny.
The infrastructure of that occupation sits inside the frame without commentary. A precast concrete panel of the separation barrier, rust-bloomed and punched with two drainage holes, holds a single discarded sneaker balanced on its seam. A cylindrical watchtower rises from razor wire at dusk, its antenna red against the bruised sky. A pole bristles with brass loudspeakers, pan-tilt cameras and climate boxes, fastened to weathered Jerusalem limestone. Hammad photographs these objects the way a landscape photographer might photograph mountains, letting their weight register before a figure ever enters.
And then the skaters arrive. A young woman in a burgundy hoodie stands on a faded basketball court in Ramallah, one palm resting on the grip tape of her deck, her cream trousers catching the late light. A boy hangs upside down from the crossbar of a rusted goalpost, improvising a training rig out of what the yard offers. Three friends hold their boards on a timber ramp built from scaffold planks and steel pipe, one eating a sandwich, one mid-drop, one watching from the top of green-carpeted stairs. The apparatus is never purpose-built; it is found, lashed, painted over, reused.
Hammad's frames refuse the two stock images Palestine is usually allowed. There is no stone-thrower silhouette, no picturesque old city. Instead: a tethered horse nosing a concrete blast wall while tower blocks rise behind it, a couple asleep in the grass between two boards stickered with sunflowers and graffiti, a bare fig tree strung with fairy lights at night with a boy seated in its branches like a domestic deity. The pictures insist on a full life, lived in the open.
Colour does work here that language cannot. The long shadow of a skater carving down an empty Ramallah street pools into golden dust. Magenta and green disco projections wash across the rendered walls of a refugee-camp alleyway, graffiti-scored and hung with power lines, turning a corridor of daily surveillance into something briefly unreckonable. A skateboarder drops into a concrete underpass beneath Arabic shopfront signage for TUNISAIR, their shadow stretched long across polished terrazzo. Ordinary places, refused as ordinary.
Landing is Hammad's thesis on what he calls a Palestinian refusal to succumb. The book does not argue that a skateboard is a weapon, or a substitute for one. It argues, more precisely, that the body learning a trick on occupied ground is already doing political work: taking measurement of a place, claiming its surfaces, returning the next day. The photographs hold that argument without raising their voice.
