Landing: a skateboarding photobook on claiming space in Palestine

Skateboarding is a language, a refusal, a movement. In Palestine, it’s also a kind of landing, both in the sense of a trick meeting pavement and the impossible desire to root oneself to the land while also searching for a brief sense of relief from the harsh reality. Under occupation, land is both home and a shifting ground, a place to claim but also a place from which one is displaced. Maen Hammad’s first photobook Landing documents the Palestinian skate scene, interrogating what it means to claim space, resist, and all while knowing that escape is never quite possible.

The title itself carries weight. “Landing has both a metaphorical and literal meaning,” Hammad explains, alongside partner Roï Saade. “If you look at the first few pages of the book, the letters grow bigger and bigger, hinting at the way we see things from above, as if from a plane, before they come into focus, closer and closer to earth, to land.” For Hammad and Saade, landing is about risk. “It’s the risks you take trying to jump into something unknown. It’s about taking the risk and trying to be courageous in a place that is harmful and unfair.” But it’s also about permanence, the impossibility of it. “Landing insinuates that it’s in process,” he says. “It’s not done.”

Landing moves between stillness and motion, featuring photographs of skateboarders in mid-air, bodies defying gravity, but also landscapes that stand silent and frozen. Some of these landscapes belong to occupied land. Others exist in the minds of the skaters themselves, built through the freedom of movement, however temporary it may be. However, it is not only a photography book, but also a layered composition of storytelling, poetry, and dialogue, one that refuses to be confined to a single form. This chaotic blend of mediums reflects the reality it seeks to capture; fragmented, nonlinear, in motion. There are quiet moments of reflection, visceral images of movement, and bursts of raw emotion in text, sometimes in the form of unstructured poetry, other times as diary-like entries, and at moments, even through dialogue with friends left unpolished and unstructured.

“The whole book was always around this idea of my own internal monologue with myself and the skaters around me in Palestine about skateboarding’s role in providing an escape,” Hammad explains. “And what this escape, in theory, is important for.” He describes skateboarding in Palestine as a kind of “purposeful escape,” a temporary reprieve from the oppressive reality of occupation. “For two or three hours, you can build a community in space amongst your friends, instead of being stuck in the headspace of violence.”

That violence isn’t abstract. Hammad, who recently moved back to Palestine after years in the U.S., sees it everywhere. “It’s incredibly difficult and unsustainable to have a skate scene here. To go skate with my friends who are 20 miles away is actually impossible right now. To have a plot of land to build a skate park is a thousand times harder.” The constraints that shape Palestinian life shape Palestinian skateboarding. But within those constraints, there is defiance.

“Skateboarding is centred around community. It’s not a competitive sport. You’re not skating against someone, you’re skating with them,” he says. In Palestine, that sense of solidarity takes on an even deeper meaning. “It’s a form of resisting together. Struggling together.”

Landing begins with movement but ends with something quieter. Hammad describes the moment of throwing his skate shoes over a telephone wire; a signal of exhaustion, of hitting a wall where escape, even in its most symbolic form, fails. “That image is a realization,” he says. “That maybe escaping isn’t always possible. That resistance and survival aren’t always a choice, but a necessity.”

Still, Landing is not about defeat. The book’s cover, designed by Saade, is a close-up detail of a battered skateboard, its scars deep from years of impact, worn from landing tricks over and over again. The image was taken from a photograph Hammad sent him of his favourite skateboard, then printed, rhizo-printed, scanned, and enlarged. “I wanted it to be abstract, almost like a painting,” Saade explains. “But at the same time, it represents the world of skating, this piece of wood that is used and abused again and again.”

Order a copy of Landing here