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Ali Asfour علي عصفور

@ass.four

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A Massacre of the Olive Trees

A few weeks before the olive harvest, the trees in Ni’lin were uprooted.

Not cut. Not damaged. Uprooted.

When I saw them, I could not accept what I was looking at. They were not dead. They had been murdered.

Trees that had stood for decades were dragged from the earth, their roots exposed, on land where families have planted, worked and harvested for generations. I kept thinking about قهر — with no exact translation. It is grief, rage, humiliation and helplessness at once: being forced to watch something belonging to you being destroyed while standing on your own land.

For years, the olive harvest across the West Bank has been attacked: farmers beaten or driven from their fields, crops stolen, trees burned, cut and uprooted. Now, as the harvest approaches, the attacks have already begun again in Ni’lin, Beit Rima, Deir Nidham, al-Mughayyir, Burqa and elsewhere.

The violence does not always arrive as a bulldozer. Sometimes it is fire. Sometimes a road cut through agricultural land.

Sometimes an outpost beside a field. Sometimes a gate that closes and a farmer who cannot reach his land. The tree may stand, but the harvest is taken away.

That makes this larger than a crop. An olive tree carries years of labour and years that have not yet happened. Destroying it before harvest means destroying this year’s livelihood and decades of possible harvests. It is an attack on continuity: on the ability to plant, remain, inherit and return.

This violence has entered how we move, work, sleep and imagine tomorrow. It is felt before it is seen.

Today, 7 October, three years since October 7, 2023, the West Bank is living through a violence that has become ordinary and much more intensified: another road, another fire, another tree, another family watching.

What happened in Ni’lin is a massacre of the landscape: the killing of what is there and the destruction of what was supposed to remain.

The olive tree was supposed to be harvested.

Instead it became another body of evidence. by @ass.four

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10 hours ago

Do you have a finished project that needs funding? Are you looking to be in community with a cohort of revolutionary storytellers? Do you feel called to make an impact with your storytelling talents?

We are pleased to let you know that we have several opportunities that you may be interested in.

You can learn more by clicking the link in our bio, or by visiting photographerswithoutborders.org

📸 ”What Did You See? (Shu Shufet?)” by Rasha Al Jundi @rashaa_jv and Ali Asfour @ass.four

#morethanphotographers #photographerswithoutborders #grants by @ass.four

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a day ago

Digital frames from the last weeks.

1- Hirbawi Kufiye factory - Alkhalil

2- until when? / Aida Refugee Camp

3- Hirbawi Kufiye factory - Alkhalil

4- Al Jib Northwest of Jerusalem

5- Khalid from his horse stable - Al Jib Northwest of Jerusalem by @ass.four

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8 days ago

“I Was Three Meters Away: I took this photograph near Shuhada checkpoint in Hebron’s Old City in September 2025. I was three meters from the soldiers. A child stood between us, looking up at them.

Three meters is not a metaphor. It is breath, reach, the time it takes a body to cross space before thought can intervene.

Their rifles were not raised. They did not need to be. They hung casually, already doing their work. Nothing theatrical was happening, and that was the point. Occupation had become routine: soldiers shifting their weight, a market learning to arrange itself around imposed violence.

I lifted my camera knowing how unequal the exchange was. They did not turn away. They carried the ease of people who knew the image could not endanger them. I framed, focused, and waited as I had been trained to do. I hated how calm my hands were and how cleanly the shutter obeyed.

Every Saturday, settlers move through the Old City under military protection. This photograph would not stop the next Saturday. It would not protect the child in the frame, or me. I do not believe photography is resistance by default. An image can confront power, but it can also reveal how little power fears being seen.

I return to this photograph, and it refuses to settle. Some days it feels like evidence. Some days it feels like failure. Some days it feels like the only honest act available when looking away is easier, and refusal carries a cost.

The photograph did not save anyone. It did one thing: it stayed, not as proof of photography’s power, but as a record of its limits, and of the distance between those who can leave the frame and those who remain inside its conditions.”

#Tsawwar by @ass.four

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23 days ago

I drove from Ramallah to Bethlehem yesterday and I barely recognized the road.

Not because the road had changed overnight, but because I suddenly saw how much has been changed while we were busy trying to manage living.

Everywhere: construction. Roads being widened. New roads being cut through the hills. Gates appearing at the entrances of villages. Roads being built to serve settlements, connecting them to one another while cutting through ours. Heavy machinery tearing into the land. And the ‘Israhelli’ flags standing along the main roads between our cities and villages, at junctions, on hills, beside roads that were once simply roads.

It is hard to explain what it does to you to watch your homeland being redesigned.

They do not only take the land. They redraw how you move through it. They decide which road becomes wide, which road becomes blocked, which village gets another gate, which hill gets another settlement, which landscape gets another flag. They build their permanence into the geography and then call it infrastructure.

And perhaps that is the most terrifying part: how normal it can look.

A CAT machine digging. Workers pouring concrete. Asphalt being laid. A new road opening. A flag rising. Another gate closing.

Nothing spectacular. Just the slow, brutal manufacture of a different Palestine.

I know these hills. I know these roads. I know what they looked like before they were widened, fenced, paved over, built upon. I know the land before all these signs of someone else’s presence were planted into it.

And I keep thinking about how easily the homeland can be made to look unfamiliar, not by erasing everything at once, but by changing it piece by piece until one day you are driving through it and realize they have been rewriting the place you love right in front of you.

My beloved Palestine is being changed constantly while all of us are here watching it happen.

So I look.

I photograph.

I remember.

Digital between Ramallah, Bethlehem. by @ass.four

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a month ago

Photos and words by Ali Asfour @ass.four
•
The photographs here were made digitally between Jordan and Turkey and have been sitting on my laptop for some time. I have barely been shooting digital lately, and there have also been periods when carrying a camera at all has felt difficult. Jordan in particular has complicated the way I photograph. I am physically here, yet often feel politically and emotionally distant from much of what surrounds me, and I have been trying to understand what it means to make images from inside that distance. Presence does not automatically produce intimacy, and I do not want to manufacture closeness with a place simply because I happen to be standing inside it.

Ali Asfour is a Palestinian analog photographer, writer, and researcher based between Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Amman. Working primarily with 35mm, medium-format film and digital, he photographs everyday Palestinian life under conditions of regulated movement, contested memory, and ongoing erasure. His practice moves through homes, streets, landscapes, oral histories, and family archives, attending to how identity is lived rather than declared. He approaches photography as a counter-archival act: a way of preserving what persists while questioning the gaps and violence through which official histories are constructed.

#everydaymiddleeast
#everydayeverywhere by @ass.four

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a month ago

We are pleased to share work by Ali Asfour in Palestine. You can follow him @ass.four. Stay tuned to seeing more of his photographs in Jordan as well in the upcoming days.

Ali Asfour is a Palestinian analog photographer, writer, and researcher based between Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Amman. Working primarily with 35mm, medium-format film and digital, he photographs everyday Palestinian life under conditions of regulated movement, contested memory, and ongoing erasure. His practice moves through homes, streets, landscapes, oral histories, and family archives, attending to how identity is lived rather than declared. He approaches photography as a counter-archival act: a way of preserving what persists while questioning the gaps and violence through which official histories are constructed.

#everydaymiddleeast
#everydayeverywhere
#palestine taken in Palestine by @ass.four

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2 months ago

⁨ ⁨ كتيّب مشروعنا التشاركي"شو شفت؟" متوفر باللغة العربية. عدد النسخ محدود وعليه خصم 10% ليصبح 22.5 يورو (غير شامل تكاليف الشحن إن وجدت).

الكتيّب يتضمن 20 صورة من فلسطين بعدسة علي عصفور وتطريز رشا الجندي، مع نصوص وقصص من اختيارهما.

هذة الطبعة الأولى، طبعت في ميلانو، إيطاليا. شكر خاص للفنان ميشيل جبارين للدعم بالنصائح المستمرة خلال عملية التصميم.

‪‪@michaelmjabareen‬‬

للطلب الرجاء التواصل على الخاص معي أو مع علي عصفور.
(الشحن خارج الأردن أو كينيا ممكن ابتداء من شهر أيلول).

#zine #selfpublished #photography #tatreez #collaboration⁩⁩ by @ass.four

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2 months ago

The photograph is no longer the end of the thought for me.

More and more, an image begins something that I need to continue elsewhere. It sends me toward conversations, archives, books, politics, food, memory, history, or some question I cannot quite leave alone.

That is a large part of why I recently started a Substack. I wanted a place for the things that continue after the photograph, and for the research and writing that have slowly become inseparable from the way I work. I’ll be much more active there, publishing two or three long-form pieces every month around whatever has been occupying me at the time, without trying to force everything into one subject or discipline. If you have been following the photographs, this is probably where more of the thinking around and beyond them will begin to appear in depth.

The photographs here were made digitally between Jordan and Turkey and have been sitting on my laptop for some time. I have barely been shooting digital lately, and there have also been periods when carrying a camera at all has felt difficult. Jordan in particular has complicated the way I photograph. I am physically here, yet often feel politically and emotionally distant from much of what surrounds me, and I have been trying to understand what it means to make images from inside that distance. Presence does not automatically produce intimacy, and I do not want to manufacture closeness with a place simply because I happen to be standing inside it.

That difficulty has made me question something very basic about the way I photograph. For years I have been instinctively attached to the 50mm because I love the proximity it demands. If I want something in the frame, I have to move toward it. Closeness became almost a language of its own. But what happens when you are somewhere and closeness itself does not feel available?

Continued below… by @ass.four

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2 months ago

1- Givat Hamatos settlement 🤮

2- Ruins of a demolited Palestinian house in Al Walaja, on top sits the “John F Kennedy” forest part of JNF green washing project

3- Israhelli colonial soldier sitting on top of the building in the old city of Hebron part of the routinic Saturday rampage that the settlers do

4- Visit Palestine, they did

5- Abu Mohammed, Born 1930. He was 18 years old when the Nakba happened. Hes from the exiled village Bayt Jibreen

6- The green goblin

7- Ali weaving wool

8- The Dead Sea between the two banks

9- Salt textures

10-12 @salhistud horses

13- May this wall burn

Shot on different types of film by @ass.four

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2 months ago

Ali Asfour | Photographing Against Disappearance

Selected for To Make in a Time Like This, this ongoing documentary project traces how Palestinian communities remain in relation to places shaped by occupation, displacement and continuous attempts at erasure.

Made across Palestine between 2022 and 2025, Photographing Against Disappearance moves through landscapes, homes, refugee camps and agricultural spaces, attending to the everyday as a site of memory, endurance and quiet insistence. Working primarily in black-and-white 35mm film, Ali Asfour returns to places over time, building a body of work that resists spectacle and instead stays close to what remains.

Made from within the conditions it reflects, the project is both a Palestinian record of what remains and an intervention against disappearance.

Ali Asfour is a Palestinian analog film photographer based between Ramallah, Bethlehem and Amman. Rooted in questions of identity, oral history and the archive, his practice approaches photography as a counter-archival act: not proof for institutions, but a refusal of disappearance.

Website: ali-asfour.cargo.site Instagram: @ass.four

Selected for To Make in a Time Like This, PLATFORM 2020’s open call for photographers and visual storytellers responding to what it means to live, endure and make during a time of rupture and uncertainty.

All images © Ali Asfour by @ass.four

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3 months ago

To write about Kegham Djeghalian is to write about a life lived inside the material aftershocks
of catastrophe. Born in 1915 the year the Armenian Genocide began, he entered a world
already collapsing. Family accounts recall his mother disguising him as a girl while fleeing
Ottoman massacres, hiding him from soldiers who targeted boys first. Whether memory
sharpened or mythologized these details no longer matters; the image contains a truth larger
than factual precision: survival, for entire peoples, often begins by becoming temporarily
illegible to power.

Long before the camera, the studio, or the archive, Kegham belonged to a generation
shaped by dispersal. His childhood was mapped across a constellation of exile, moving
through Syria, Lebanon’s Birds’ Nest orphanage in Byblos, and the mandated landscapes of
Jerusalem and Jaffa under the British Mandate. He carried the fragmented inheritance of a
people severed from geography and continuity. Survivors of genocide do not simply lose
homes; they lose chronology itself. Time breaks. Life divides into interrupted sequences that
never entirely recover coherence.

It was in Jaffa, while apprenticing at Studio Al Hamra, that Kegham learned photography. Yet
photography, in his case, feels less like a profession acquired than a condition he was
already moving toward instinctively. For someone born into historical erasure, the camera was never a mere trade it carried a distinct, defensive gravity.

Photography after a catastrophe is never innocent.
To photograph a person is to insist on their presence against the very forces rendering them disposable. A photograph says: this happened; this body stood here; this family loved each other; this city breathed before someone decided it should not.

This explains the compulsive nature of documenting throughout his life. He did not work
for newspapers or colonial bureaus; his archive was an involuntary reflex against disappearance, operating somewhere deeper than language. He gathered negatives the way a survivor stores rations, as if terrified that reality itself might dissolve without physical evidence.

Courtesy of Kegham Djeghalian Archive curated by @keghamdjeghalian by @ass.four

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3 months ago