Mahmoud Abu Hamda, Palestine
Mahmoud Abu Hamda is a Palestinian photographer based in Gaza who has been working professionally since 2011. His work encompasses various subjects, with a recent focus on documenting conflict, displacement, and humanitarian crises. Mahmoud’s photography has been featured by Magnum Photos and TRT World, earning him awards including the Lucie Awards Impact Award in 2023. He collaborates with organizations to share Gaza’s reality and his own experiences within the crisis serve as powerful testaments to resilience, despair, dignity, and humanity.
At first glance, it may seem surprising to award a peace prize to images depicting a childhood in Gaza. After all, in recent years there has been hardly any other place where children in particular have suffered so terribly from bombs, destruction, displacement, hunger, fear, injuries and the loss of parents, siblings and friends.
And yet, even here, even amidst the rubble, children can be seen laughing; a boy plays the violin; boys and girls swing and run about; they sit happily together, carve out little spaces for carefree fun, look after a pet, carry on with their lives even in the darkest of places, and play. Childhood here, as the Palestinian photographer Mahmoud Abu Hamda shows in his moving pictures, has not completely disappeared, has not been entirely wiped out. It simply has to hold its own under immense pressure. This requires bravery, and certainly also the ability to forget and to push things to the back of one’s mind.
Mahmoud Abu Hamda has titled the images in this series ‘The Wings of Childhood and Peace’. Wings which, at least on the surface, are neither burnt nor broken – but can still carry one away, even from the midst of war. And to a place where human dignity remains inviolable.
Hamda, aged 36, trained in multimedia at the University College of Applied Sciences and later held a teaching post in photography at the University of Gaza. He devoted himself to nature photography and food photography, and, until the outbreak of war, to all facets of everyday life in Gaza. Then, however, he experienced displacement and hardship within his own family and was himself injured during the Israeli Air Force’s bombing of a high-rise building. He photographed hunger whilst he himself was starving.
Magnum, the world’s leading photography agency, has already honoured Hamda with a major publication. His work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, amongst other places, and was awarded one of the prestigious Lucia Awards in 2023.
The images of carefree children – perhaps Hamda sought them out partly because, as he once said in an interview with Magnum, amidst all the misery he sometimes needed a place to rest. “To breathe.”
(Laudatio by Peter-Matthias Gaede)