Tasweer Awards 2024: Palestine and Sudan's forlorn photos among winners

Tasweer Awards, on World Photography Day, were given to photos and projects that went “beyond the frames,” a juror told Doha News.

Photographers documenting life under occupation in Palestine and the struggles of Sudanese people under the ongoing war were among the winners of the Tasweer Photo Festival’s awards on Monday.

Mahmoud Abu Hamda’s ‘The Journey of Survival’ and Musab Abu Shama’s ‘Tadween’ were among the ten winners of the Tasweer Project Award at the Fire Station Museum on Monday.

As one of the three winners from Palestine, Mahmoud Abu Hamda said: “Photography remains a powerful tool for documenting truth,” after winning the award.

“I dedicate this victory to the brave people of my nation, who deserve to have their stories told and their voices heard,” he wrote on Instagram.

A picture from Hamda’s winning project, “The Journey of Survival”. Credit: Mahmoud Abu Hamda.

Other winners in the project category came from Iraq, Morocco, and Egypt. Each winner is awarded 30,000 QAR to further develop their existing project or start a new one.

Ismail Zaidi’s ‘The Family’, shot on a Samsung Galaxy S5 phone, won the award for showcasing the ‘colours of Morocco and the bond that exists in a family’, followed by another Moroccan project “Untitled” by Iman Jamil.

Winning projects from Iraq, Muhannad Al Sudani’s ‘Al Ahwar’ and Tamara Abdel Hadi’s ‘The Euphrates’, spanned both “geographically and temporally” to represent the country, the jurors of the category said.

Wafaa Samir Mohy Sayedalahl’s project ‘The Heritage’ and Lina Giouchi’s ‘Trailblazers’ were the winners from Egypt, with the latter using photos to “question the public’s perception of the prevailing power of patriarchy,” by embodying female figures largely forgotten by history.

Two other projects from Palestine were Adam Rouhana’s ‘Before Freedom’ documenting nuances of daily life under occupation and Shadi Nael Al-Tabatibi’s aerial images of Gaza before October 7 which offered a “unique vantage point” to the ongoing crisis.

‘Beyond the frames’

Twenty single images were also awarded 2,000 QAR each in the event organised to mark World Photography Day.

Among 2,387 submissions from Western Asia and North Africa, nine photos from Egypt, three from Yemen, two from Iraq, and a photo each from the UAE, Libya, Palestine, Turkey, Oman, and Qatar made it to the winner’s list.

“We were looking for pictures that express something beyond what was in the frame,” Khalid Ismail, one of the jurors in the single image category, told Doha News.

Ismail, a documentary street photographer, said his personal choices for the award were inspired by a quote from German historian Helmut Gernsheim’s book A Concise History of Photography, ‘Of what use are lens and light to those who lack in mind and sight?’.

“We got a peek at new approaches and vision that this region’s new generation of photographers carry. There was a unique thought process to every image,” he added.

Winning photographs will be part of Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar’s online and public programmes in the future.

Turkish photographer Nese Ari’s submission was one of twenty winners in the Single Image Category. Credits: Tasweer

Tasweer ‘off-season’ activities

Tasweer Photo Festival has also announced plans to conduct discussions, photo walks and workshops during its ‘off-season’ under its new venture Tasweer Dialogues.

The Dialogues will run from August 19 to December 13 and will feature events that are “first of its kind” such as astrophotography, its organisers added.

Tasweer’s signature biennial programme of exhibitions, awards, commissions, collaborations, presentations and workshops is scheduled for 2025 during its “on-season” in Spring.

Mashael Al Hijazi, a Qatari photographer and former Artist in Residence at the Fire Station, started Tasweer Dialogues with a talk expanding on her project ‘Tawtheeq’ and her 2023 exhibition titled ‘My Mother Lulwa’s House’ on Monday.

Starting her photography career by capturing her grandfather’s house in Msherib, Al Hijazi now specialises in documenting old and slowly perishing neighbourhoods in Doha and seeks to discover alternative photographic processes and eco-friendly ways of developing her photos.