In Landing, skaters fly across the landscapes of the occupied West Bank. From 2015 to 2022, on terrain that is choked with checkpoints and ringed with soldiers, Maen Hammad photographed his friends landing tricks and street skating around ugly buildings thrown up in the years since the Oslo Accords — symbols of privatization, debilitating loans, and the failures of neoliberal state making. Drones, wire fences, and surveillance cameras are visible throughout. “I don’t ever think skateboarding is going to free Palestine,” he told me from his home in Ramallah, “but for those of us who do it, it’s the most free we feel that day.”
Hammad left Palestine as a baby and grew up in America, where skateboarding was always a source of “peculiar freedom,” just to “have free will on the concrete and not be so jammed into a scheduled day.” At home, “the walls had paintings of Palestine, the news and the TV were speaking of Palestine,” but his neighborhood was “bougie, upper class, white suburbia.”
After college, he returned to Ramallah, where he photographed his new skate crew as a way of “integrating into the scene and also kind of integrating into Palestine.” He began to think of skateboarding in terms of purposeful freedom for “this very small crew of skaters against a very, very violent headspace that’s forced upon us because of this very disgusting settler colonial reality that we’re under. And skating not only gives you that feeling like you’re above the city or above the world almost, but does so in a place where the theft of your land is part and parcel of how the regime thinks.” When we spoke, he was trying to organize a trip to a skate park. Instead of the 40-minute drive it could’ve been, it was likely to be a two to three-hour navigation of checkpoints.
“They want us to be fragmented and separated,” he said, with the options reduced to “try to fight us and we will kill you” or “sit in your room and lose your imagination” or “buy an expensive car and get indebted.” With skateboarding, he says, “I’m actually going to entertain myself with my community in a way that is liberatory for that hour or two, when I know I’m being infiltrated by the phantoms of this settler regime for the rest of my day.”
That community is also international — skating knows no language — so when it came time to publish the book, Hammad worked with Roï Saade, a designer based in Lebanon, to create something that would live outside the normal orbit of gorgeous and untouchable art books. In the DIY spirit of skaters everywhere, they rejected U.S. publishing offers, self-published with artist-led house Huwawa, launched the book in Toronto and New York, and have been carrying copies by the dozen to Lebanon, Palestine, and other locations in the region. In New York, skaters gathered for a teach-in on Palestine and made a zine for Hammad to take back to skaters in Palestine.
Back home in Ramallah, skating is getting a very different reception than it does in New York. Because it’s a new sport, there are no negative associations with it, like “oh, those skaters messing up private property.” Hammad says it’s more like, “whoa what is that thing? I want to try it. I’ve had 50-year old dudes super eager to try it. Little kids who will pick up the board and run.”
Maen Hammad is a documentary photographer and writer. Landing was released in April 2025 as the inaugural publication of artist-led publishing house Huwawa, which foregrounds anti-colonial and cultural counternarratives from the Middle East and North Africa.
Roï Saade is an independent visual designer working in both graphic design and photography from Beirut, Lebanon.
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