Ali Asfour 

I am a Palestinian analog film photographer based between Ramallah and Bethlehem, and Amman. My work is shaped by living under conditions where movement is regulated, memory is contested, and history is continuously rewritten by those in power. I photograph from within these conditions—not to translate them for an outside gaze, but to preserve what persists despite fragmentation, surveillance, and erasure.

I work slowly, on film, because slowness is not an aesthetic choice for me but a necessity. It allows time to remain present in the image: time as accumulation, as residue, as something carried rather than resolved. My photographs are attentive to the everyday—homes, streets, barbershops, landscapes, gestures, moments of waiting and intimacy—spaces where identity is not declared but practiced. I am interested in how Palestinian life continues in the ordinary, away from spectacle and crisis-driven representation.

Central to my practice are questions of identity, memory, oral history, and the archive. I am drawn to what is spoken rather than written, to stories passed down through repetition, contradiction, and silence. Much of what I photograph exists because it has been remembered by someone else first. My work does not seek to complete an archive, but to intervene in it—to expose its gaps, its biases, and its violence. Photography, for me, is a counter-archival act: not proof for institutions, but a refusal of disappearance.

I am deeply conscious of the ethical weight of image-making in Palestine. I resist extraction, sensationalism, and the aesthetics of suffering that dominate representations of our lives. My work is built through proximity, trust, and collaboration, grounded in belonging rather than access. I do not photograph as an outsider or observer; I photograph as someone implicated, accountable, and bound to what appears in the frame.

Alongside exhibitions, my work circulates through publishing and collective platforms. I have contributed to EBB Zine, engaging photography as a space for critical discourse rather than consumption. I have collaborated on visual and research-driven projects with artists and writers, including a project with Rasha Al Jundi, where image-making became a site of dialogue rather than authorship. I participated in a residency with the Goethe-Institut, documenting and engaging with interdisciplinary workshops that brought together sound, moving image, and collective production, expanding my practice beyond still photography and into shared processes.

My work has been featured by ZONE Magazine, and selected for The Palestine Print Platform, a collaboration between Gulf Photo Plus and Magnum Photos, situating my images within a broader conversation on circulation, authorship, and responsibility in contemporary photography. These platforms are not milestones to me, but sites where the work is tested—where it encounters different publics, frictions, and interpretations.

My photographs have been exhibited locally and internationally, including my solo exhibition The Promise of Liberty at New York’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, and Where Is My Childhood? at Enjoy Gallery. My work has appeared in GQ Middle East, Atmos, The New Arab, Waastaa, Dazed Middle East, and Nowness Asia. Across these contexts, I remain concerned with how Palestinian presence is framed, diluted, or commodified, and how to retain political clarity without sacrificing anything from our stories.

Sound is not separate from my visual practice. I am a DJ and music selector, working with music as another form of archive—one that carries memory through rhythm, repetition, and migration. I host SADAA: Echoes of the MENA, a monthly radio show on Mutant Radio, where I trace musical lineages across the region and its diasporas. The show is a listening practice: attentive to what survives displacement, what mutates in exile, and what refuses to disappear. Like my photography, it is concerned with transmission, continuity, and the politics of who gets to be heard.

Across image, sound, and publishing, my practice asks persistent questions: How do we remember under conditions designed to make us forget? How do stories survive when records are destroyed or denied? And what does it mean to insist on presence—not as spectacle or nostalgia, but as an ongoing, unfinished act?