Maen Hamad is a documentary photographer and writer. He has been documenting the Palestinian skateboard scene for the last eight years, and engages in what he calls “reciprocal nourishment” with this community. Born in Palestine, Hammad was raised in the American suburbs of Michigan. Now based in Ramallah, in the Occupied West Bank, he is a human rights researcher and campaigner alongside his work with photography.

Landing is a collaborative project that looks at the purposeful escape skateboarding provides for Palestinian skaters in the West Bank. Shot between 2015 and 2022, Hammad’s photographs demonstrate the resourcefulness of Palestine’s small skateboarding community, who struggle to access boards, and must collectively self-build their skate parks. The work combines portraiture and documentary image-making with flashes of a broader landscape charged with meaning: ancient hills, olive groves and separation walls.

Weaving Hamad’s personal narrative with the voices of Palestinian skaters, Landing provides an intimate insight into the surreal juxtaposition of violence and joy for young people living in Palestine. Hammad proposes that this purposeful escape serves as a radical form of resistance in the context of Israel’s settler-colonial domination in Palestine. In presenting a community bound by their shared pursuit of freedom, Landing reveals the broader architectures of militarisation and control that the community must navigate. Through an interpretive dance of physical activity and built environment, imagery and text, the project presents a powerful counter-narrative—a taste of the Palestinian refusal to succumb. Against the backdrop of ongoing genocide and nearly a century of erasure, Landing is a testament to the tenacity, creativity, and decolonial struggle of this generation of Palestinians.