Belfast Photo Festival is delighted to present the first solo exhibition and presentation of ‘Before Freedom’ by the photographer Adam Rouhana on the island of Ireland.

Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother from New York, Adam Rouhana was raised in New England, where he immersed himself in the Western canon. Despite this, he maintained a connection to Palestine, returning annually. As a teenager, Rouhana began to discern a dissonance between Western perceptions of Palestine and the collective consciousness of Palestinians.

Through this series of images, the work aims to reclaim representations of Palestine from Western perspectives. Over the past century, the Palestinian narrative has largely been shaped by foreign actors through an orientalist lens, often with the aim of exerting colonial influence. ‘Before Freedom’ offers a fresh interpretation of orientalism, presenting a narrative gestalt—a reimagining of images and politics through a reevaluation of geopolitical, socio-cultural, and historical contexts, manifested in aesthetic form.

Rouhana believes that by decolonizing the photography of Palestine, by embracing indigenous image-making, minds can be decolonized, leading to a more nuanced understanding of Palestinian reality. Drawing on Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, the work highlights how systems of thought are influenced by underlying cognitive structures, shaping the boundaries of understanding within a given context.

Referencing Robert Capa's assertion that “The truth is the best picture…”  For Rouhana photographs serve as landmarks of social thought—declarations of what we, as a society, deem is worth our attention. We navigate the truth through images that delineate the boundaries of our collective consciousness. These pictorial guide posts codify into moral, ideological, and intellectual norms that we use to structure our national narratives and authorise social representations of reality’s past, present, and future. 

‘Before Freedom’ asserts that the Israeli narrative, intertwined with American discourse, seeks to marginalise and dehumanise Palestinians under the guise of “objectivity” and “balance.”

For Rouhana, his intention is to transgress beyond the logic of settler-colonialism by simply imagining something else—by seeing something else; in his own words “something that frankly all of us Palestinians see: Palestine as our homeland.”

‘Before Freedom’ presents a certain truth: a truth of the reality in Palestine that moves beyond rolling news and biassed, outmoded documentary photography and photojournalism. 

Artist Bio:

Adam Rouhana (b.1991, Boston, MA, USA) is a Palestinian-American artist and photographer based between Jerusalem and London. Rouhana’s photography works to deconstruct Orientalism through his subjective lens within the broader context of Palestine. Through his investigations, he questions his positionality as a Palestinian behind the camera, both as Westerner, having grown up in America, and as Arab. Rouhana received his master’s from the University of Oxford. Through the introduction of new narratives, Rouhana’s work embraces themes of the past to create a contemporary Palestinian visuality characterised by representations of Palestinian lives that embody an active ethic of self-determination. He is often inspired by scenes of his grandmother’s fruit orchard and domestic life from his early memories in Palestine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Aperture, and Dazed Magazine, among other publications.