Landing in Palestine: Colonial Landscape and Anti-Colonial Image

The Palestinian writer and photographer Maen Hammad's first photobook is entitled Landing. The genre-bending book (which will be for sale at the event, hot of the press) combines memoir, reportage, and poetry with his striking photographs of the West Bank. Palestinian skateboarders, and their landscape, are the center of Hammad’s attention. The actor and skateboarder, Aram Sabbah takes center-stage in the book, as the manager of the organization SkatePal, which works to provide skateboards and places to skate for young Palestinians. Hammad will be joined in conversation with Stephen Sheehi, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary, and the world’s leading scholar of Arab photography (he is author of The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 and co-author of Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine) and Tamara Abdul Hadi, a brilliant Iraqi photographer who is currently the Jackman Humanities Institute's Artist in Residence.

Sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, Hearing Palestine and the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. With support from Huwawa Books.