Adam Rouhana: Before Freedom
Before Freedom, the first photobook by the Palestinian-American photographer Adam Rouhana, grew out of a project begun in 2022, when he started returning to Palestine for extended periods and photographing everyday life. The pictures move between Jerusalem, Jericho, Haifa, Hebron, Bethlehem and other places across historic Palestine. What they offer is a view rarely given space in the news: children at play, families picnicking, friends meeting by the sea to share a meal — scenes of being together, here and now.
Those moments are never sealed off from the conditions around them. Soldiers appear, checkpoints have to be crossed, and the wall that divides the land comes into the frame. Rouhana works against the grain of conventional photojournalism. Rather than follow the news cycle or a strictly documentary brief, he uses a mix of social realism and a more abstracted, often painterly attention to light and gesture, in order to hold together questions of territory, cultural identity, and a present that always seems on the verge of breaking.
Time, in these photographs, feels suspended. Bathed in natural light, the images put forward a counter-narrative: Palestinian life that continues, and a community seen from within, at a distance from the usual clichés. Varied geographies, attachment to the land, a persistent cultural plurality and a strong collective spirit run through the sequence. The photographs function as a form of resistance to a visual regime that has long reduced Palestine to a single, narrow story. Rouhana has spoken of a dissonance he felt as a teenager, between the way the West pictured Palestine — including a familiar vocabulary of reportage — and what it meant to be Palestinian. Early on he tried to remake those images; later he set them aside, in order to look at what was actually around him, and at what it might mean to picture a past, a present and a possible future. “I started making this body of work in 2022,” he has said. “Before Freedom looks at the current moment we are in today in Palestine — the moment before we are free.”
The French edition is produced by Atelier EXB with the support of the Fondation Antoine de Galbert and includes three essays: by novelist Ahdaf Soueif, poet and scholar Mosab Abu Toha, and photography historian Taous Dahmani. The Kaph edition, intended for the Arab world, is bilingual (Arabic and English) and features a text by Soueif alongside writings by Rouhana. An English-language edition will be published by Aperture in January 2027.
About the Author
Adam Rouhana was born in 1991 in Boston, United States, to a Palestinian father and an American mother, and lives and works between Jerusalem and London. He grew up in New England and has kept a close connection to Palestine throughout his life, returning often. His photographs set out to dismantle Orientalist ways of seeing and to put forward contemporary representations of Palestinian life. He received a Master of Public Policy from the University of Oxford in 2023. Since 2022 he has worked under the long-term mentorship of Magnum photographers Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli. He is currently the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was selected for Foam Talent 2026. His work has been published in Aperture, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Dazed.
