Images I thought that were not good enough cuz of light leaks, composition, developing issues but who cares.
Ramallah Coffee house, 2024
Jerusalem, 2024
Ramallah, 2024
Jerusalem, 2024
Beit Sahour, 2025
Stars street, Bethlehem, 2025
Jalazon, 2023
Wadi Al Qilt, 2024
Ein Qinia, 2023
? 2026
Taken on different types of film
Palestine St, Ramallah. Fahed smoking his argileh مقهى الشرق
Qalandiya.
We are like mannequins at this point.
For the past year, they’ve bee carving the land open, around Jaba’a, Al Ram, Hizma, and many other areas stretching roads wider, smoother and faster obviously not for us, but for settlers to pass without seeing us. For us it’s to be rerouted, delayed, restricted and contained more.
The land is bleeding.
The Martyred hero, Ma’an Abu Qare’.
A new Martyr everyday.
Written on the wall: “The human Issue” or “Human Issue” or if it’s something we’re fighting for is “The Human Cause”. I guess we’re always undermined with all these terminologies.
What is freedom of movement for us ?
“A fundamental part of existence is the presence of imperfection. If what we perceive as imperfect did not exist, then existence would be imperfect and lacking.”
By Ibn Arabi.
The martyred hero Shireen Abu Aqleh.
The owner of Ramallah cafe.
Images taken with different types of film. Ramallah, Qalandia, Bethlehem.
Image #10 not photographed by me.
Attention photographers ‼️ We are awarding micro-grants support revolutionary storytellers who prioritize stories that align with Photographers Without Borders' mission and vision. This includes decolonized conservation, land/water protection, land back, intersectional environmental justice, and more.
Rasha Al Jundi and Ali Asfour were recipients of one of our Micro-Grants.
With these reflections, visual storyteller Rasha Al Jundi embarked on a collaborative exploratory journey with fellow Palestinian photographer Ali Asfour through the multimedia project "What did you see?" or “She Shufet" in Palestinian Arabic. The project combines Asfour's black and white analogue images of occupied Palestine and Al Jundi's hand applied Palestinian tatreez and short reflections as text to selected prints. 📸 and words by @rashaa_jv@ass.four
Visit the link in our bio to become a member and apply for our Micro-Grant.
#morethanphotographers #photographerswithoutborders #storytellingforchange
For this mix I wanted to lean into some of the releases I keep returning to artists whose work has been sitting with me lately: @abbzah & Saint Abdullah, @ramiabadir & @__sarapersico , @yuniiiiiiiss@zulimusic , @_ma_ral_ & @elkontessa_ , @djgawad , @jamesmassiah , @mrf1313@pierre_pepe_____
Big ups for @drownedbypublic
It opens slowly, ambient layers, loose textures, things still forming. Then the weight starts to shift. ZULI’s heavy, cut-up sampling pushes the mix forward before it lands in hip-hop territory with DJ Gawad, MrF13 & Pierre Pepe, and James Massiah.
Just a small constellation of sounds I’ve been circling around recently.
🕛 12–1 PM CET
🇵🇸 Jerusalem: 1–2 PM
🇯🇴 Amman: 2–3 PM
🇬🇪 Tbilisi: 3–4 PM
Photo taken by: @nicolas__maximilian
AGFA APX 100
The record always begins where the state begins.
It spins at 33⅓ revolutions per minute and tells you this is Palestine.
What does it mean to press a land into vinyl while its people are being pressed out of it?
In 1949, as the smoke of the Nakba had barely lifted and more than 400 Palestinian villages lay emptied, destroyed, or repopulated with colonial settlers, a record was produced under the title ‘Music of Palestine’. It proposed to document the sounds of a land. It proposed to capture its ethnic diversity. It proposed to preserve something fragile. But preservation is never neutral. Not in a year when Lifta was already hollowed. Not when Deir Yassin had been turned into ashes. Not when the majority of the land’s Indigenous population had become refugees across borders drawn by force.
To call a record Music of Palestine in 1949 is not an innocent act of ethnography. It is an intervention in belonging.
And yet — before 1948 — Palestine was not silent, not folkloric residue waiting to be salvaged by outsiders. It was sonically alive. Cafés in Yafa hosted orchestras that grew from five musicians before the First World War to sixty by the 1930s. Al-Hamra Cinema stood luminous in Yafa, its stage carrying touring Arab stars and local ensembles alike. Jerusalem’s Al-Quds al-Kabeer Cinema, theatres in Akka, halls in Haifa, were not peripheral outposts but nodes in the wider Arab Nahda. Musicians moved fluidly between Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem. Records were pressed by Baidaphon and Gramophone. Radios broadcast live orchestras. More than a hundred newspapers circulated, advertising concerts week after week. This was not a vacuum. It was a modern musical ecosystem.
Which makes 1948 not a “turning point,” but a severance operation.
Continued below…
A selection of photos from the archive, taken on different types of films around Bethlehem, Palestine.
1- Cactus.
2- Shohada’ Al-Aqsa STR (Taken in Amman, Jordan. Zarqa Refugee Camp).
3- Rooted Evidence.
4- Palestine: This area is under 24/7 CCTV surveillance.
5- Somewhere around Nablus.
6- Dr. Kholoud Al-Ajarma.
7- Al-Makhrour.
8- Documenting Evidence.
9- Children Killers and Rapists.
10- On Going Nakba.
11- Coffee Seller.
12- Jerusalem Is The Eternal Capital Of Palestine.
13- Brotherhood.
14- Self portrait.
Tatreez takes one to the sun
Tatreez takes one to the land
…
Tatreez returned me to the land.
With these reflections, visual storyteller Rasha Al Jundi embarked on a collaborative exploratory journey with fellow Palestinian photographer Ali Asfour through the multimedia project Shu Shufet? (What Did You See?). The project brings together Asfour’s black-and-white analogue images of occupied Palestine with Al Jundi’s hand-applied Palestinian tatreez and short textual reflections on selected photographs.
At its core lies a simple question that arises in the mind of a Palestinian in exile when sitting with someone who has visited the inaccessible homeland. This visual collaboration offers partial answers while leaving space for personal interpretation, questioning what one truly sees, and fails to see, when visiting a colonised land whose rooted people refuse to be erased.
@rashaa_jv@embroidered_exile@ass.four
Ali Asfour is a Palestinian analog photographer based between Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Amman. His work is shaped by living under conditions where movement is regulated, memory is contested, and history continuously rewritten by those in power. Central to his practice are questions of identity, memory, oral history, and the archive.
Rasha Al Jundi is a Palestinian visual storyteller, curator, and embroidery artist based in Nairobi, Kenya. She illustrates stories she personally connects with, following a documentary approach that engages social, political, and cultural themes addressing colonial realities and their historical legacies. Descending from a lineage of traditional Palestinian embroiderers, she incorporates this visual expression into parts of her practice.
1 - Confined Arabian Horse, Aida Refugee Camp - Ali Asfour
2 - Um Mohannad, Abu Mohannad, Al Walaja - Ali Asfour
3 - NBO Diary 3, Rasha Al Jundi
4 - Souq Al Laban, Alkhalil - Ali Asfour
5 - NBO Diary 2, Rasha Al Jundi
6 - NBO Diary 1, Rasha Al Jundi
The archive always begins where the empire begins. It arranges its drawers according to power. It tells us that Palestine becomes legible in 1917, when Arthur Balfour signs a letter and the British Empire decides that this land may be promised to someone else. From that moment, the file thickens. The documents multiply. Reports, maps, intelligence briefings, commissions, memoranda. Palestine becomes a problem to be administered, a territory to be surveyed, a demographic equation to be studied.
But the archive rarely asks what existed before it began to look.
Before 1917, there were already women who understood that land was not an abstraction. In 1893, long before the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian women protested the sale of land to Zionist settlers under Ottoman rule. They petitioned. They intervened in legal processes. They mobilised social networks to pressure families not to sell. They were not yet called nationalists. There was no formal vocabulary of anti-colonial resistance in the modern sense. But they understood something fundamental: that land, once alienated, does not return. That dispossession begins quietly, transaction by transaction, document by document.
Where are these women in the official narrative?
1- Mahiba Khorshed (1921–2000) and Nariman Khorshed (1913–1994) founded the “Chrysanthemum Flowers” Society — Zahrat al-Uqhuwan — in the 1940s
2- Tarab Abdul Hadi (1890–1976)
3- Zulaikha al-Shihabi (1903–1992)
4- Fatima Khalil Ghazal (1886–1936)
5- Mariam Baouardy (1846–1878)
6- Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghattas (1843–1927)
7- Fatima al-Yashrutiyya (1891–1978)
8- Kulthum Odeh (1892–1965)
9- May Ziadeh (1886–1941)
10- Hayat al-Balbisi (1930–1948)
Continued below…
SADAA — Echoes of the MENA @mutantradiotbilisi — Episode 15: Egypt
Some trips change you. Others rearrange something inside you. Istanbul was the latter.
Moving from one vinyl shop to another, my first question was always the same: Do you have any Arabic records? Any cassettes? It became instinct — a way of checking if fragments of home had survived the distance.
Sometimes the answer was no. Sometimes confusion. And sometimes generosity — like the shop owner who handed me a Fayza Ahmad cassette as a gift, passing along a memory he didn’t fully know but felt needed to travel further.
Digging through crates while @lacarrier photographed me in that familiar trance — hands blackened by dust, eyes chasing names — I kept thinking about how our music lives in exile. Pressed in foreign factories, archived in foreign cities, rediscovered under foreign labels before we even know where the originals went. Our sound travels freely while our people struggle to cross borders. Songs migrate easier than bodies.
Then I stumbled on Metqal Qenawi — and Egypt opened differently.
Metqal didn’t sound like Cairo polish. His music comes from Upper Egypt — raw, percussive, alive. Mizmar horns slicing through the air, relentless tabla rhythms, wedding processions exploding into rhythm and dust. Music made for streets and celebrations, not salons. Music that sweats, shouts, gathers people into movement. It doesn’t ask permission. It summons you.
That discovery shaped this episode.
Episode 15 turns toward Egyptian sounds that often sit outside official narratives. Sounds carried by workers, by river communities, by Nubian migrations, by people whose music survives because it moves with them.
Tune in:
12 – 1 PM CET
Tbilisi — 3 – 4 PM
Amman — 2 – 3 PM
Jerusalem, Palestine — 1 – 2 PM
Continued below…
