Occupied Pleasures in Palestine

TANYA Habjouqa tells the story less told about the four million people who live in crowded and dangerous conditions in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Her photography essay, Occupied Pleasures, captures the region’s people having fun.

Instead of photographing youths throwing rocks, or hands raised in the victory sign, or the grief of the bereaved, she’s pictured people goofing off. They include girls practicing javelin throwing for their university team, a bunch of parkour guys tossing themselves with abandon around a graveyard, and a young man lighting up a cigarette at dusk on the last day of Ramadan. What makes the photo striking is that he’s sitting inside a car with a sheep he has just bought.

The germ for the project goes back to 2009. Habjouqa had just finished a project on women in Gaza, and was following up on a story about a woman who’d been smuggled through underground tunnels for her wedding. Habjouqa sat with the woman’s husband, “a total romantic”, who told her about how the pair fell in love on Skype, as he couldn’t leave Gaza because of the siege.