Activestills – Documenting Life, Death and Resistance in Palestine.
A heartfelt commentary
August 15, 2025
Witnessing is an active form of human agency that artists, activists and journalists have often transformed into powerful expressions of testimony and archive, whether it be through photography, film or performance. But witnessing in the midst of war, occupation and unfolding genocide urges a deeper sense of care, risks, and responsibilities for how we depict human conditions truthfully and empathically, honor the incidental subjects of our gaze, and make sense of the very indescribable and extraordinary conditions they endure.
How do we engage in such witnessing courageously and compassionately to beg an active stance from the viewers? How do we empower the subjects we witness into agents of their own narratives? Finally, how do we transform such expressions and testimonies into “living” and timeless memory archives?
ActiveStills as a collective of documentary photographers has actively fostered a brave conviction for socio-political change in Israel and the Palestinian territories since its founding in 2005 into a powerful “living archive” of testimonial memory and civic action.
I began working with ActiveStills in 2006 when I met Anne Paq, a brave and endearing French human rights photographer (a founding member of the collective), during one of my regular trips to Palestine as I was developing a participatory youth media initiative called Voices Beyond Walls.
Over the years, Anne worked closely with me to co-teach photography and filmmaking workshops to young Palestinian children and youth in over a dozen refugee camps across the West Bank, East Jersualem and Gaza, while we co-produced several documentary films engaging their lives and struggles. The children we worked with taught us how to see Palestine with love, humor, whimsy and sensitivity; each of their photos a magical capsule of dreams, aspirations and difficult childhood experiences under occupation. Someday, I hope we’ll bring their photography and films to you.
What I learned from Anne and the ActiveStills collective was the deep commitment to witnessing as a selfless act of solidarity, the courage of convictions to take seemingly impossible risks in documenting both Palestinian struggles and Israeli human rights violations in highly precarious settings, and a commitment to the power of poetic photographic expression that reveals far more empathy, contradiction, and nuance than a momentary dispassionate gaze.
What you see in this retrospective exhibition is the difficult creative and political labor of this collective and a testimonial memory of Palestinian struggles in its most vibrant and expansive form than is often possible without the principled ethos, sustained solidarity, and gentle intimacy the collective fostered in its work. This is clearly manifested in each of the precious photographs that together constitute a comprehensive “living archive” (with over 56,000 photos) of witnessing, solidarity, and political action, stunningly curated here.
One of these precious moments captured by Anne Paq is a poignant scene of a young boy holding his handmade kite amidst the ruins of his home in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, after another bombing siege during the last war in 2014. Anne and I had been working on our documentary film, Flying Paper, about the culture of kite making and flying in Gaza for 3 years, after which she returned to Gaza to film our sequel, unexpectedly caught in the war. Instead of leaving right away, Anne stayed to work with our young Palestinian co-producer Abeer Ahmed to interview and photograph how Gazans were coping and surviving, their fears, aspirations, and steadfast resilience or “sumud” as captured compellingly in this photo, among the so many others you see in this extraordinary visual archive.
I want to thank the Finnish Museum of Photography for making this special retrospective possible and urgently bringing it to audiences in Helsinki. I especially wish to acknowledge the efforts of Haidi Motola, Jenna Jauhiainen, Orlan Ohtonen, ActiveStills, and everyone involved behind-the-scenes and “between-the-walls” in organizing this exhibition here.
While I share these words with you in absentia, I very much feel a part of the memories captured in this living photo archive around us. Anyone who has spent time in Palestine can hardly escape this reality, yet these photos together offer a far more interrogative, poetic, and relational narrative that feels very much alive in the daily struggles of Palestinians today. We must continue to engage in compassionate solidarity with the urgency demanded by those witnessing and being witnessed in these powerful testimonies.
On this closing note, I would like us to observe a moment of silence to commemorate the loss of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues killed in a targeted operation by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on August 10, 2025. Over 240 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began, the most of all wartime conflicts and a gross violation of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Their courageous witnessing and compassionate testimonies should never be silenced!
Thank you.
Nitin
Nitin Sawhney 