سبتمبر 9, 2026

Fann w Fenjen: Baha Suleiman"

Michelle Eid

Where Water, Land, and Belonging Meet

For Baha Suleiman, photography has never been separate from the question of where and how he belongs. A Palestinian Jordanian documentary photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist, Baha began taking photographs as a way of documenting the people, places, and everyday moments around him, building a visual record that felt closer to the Amman he knew than the city he saw represented elsewhere.

Over time, that instinct to document became intertwined with larger questions of land, water, borders, and inherited memory. From his complicated relationship with Amman to the waters separating Jordan from Palestine, Baha’s work traces the ways geography can shape identity, and what it means to feel deeply connected to places that can, at the same time, feel distant or inaccessible.

Now based in Cape Town, that distance has brought new questions into focus. In conversation with Al Rawiya, Baha reflects on building an alternative archive of Amman, growing up Palestinian in Jordan, his uneasy relationship with water, and what leaving home has revealed about the work he wants to make.

Photo of Baha by Deborah Howett, courtesy of Baha Suleiman.

So, how do you usually introduce yourself? Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Baha Suleiman, a Palestinian Jordanian documentary photographer and filmmaker/visual artist. My work represents a lot of my identity and self-existence. Currently, I’m studying film, politics, and religion in Cape Town, South Africa.

How did your early experiences shape the way you see the world through your camera?

I think it has always been as much about documenting as it has been about taking pictures. I knew I wanted to document my existence, my family’s existence, and my story, but I didn’t necessarily think photography would be the specific tool I would use.

Photography came from a big influence within my family. There are always pictures, and there’s always a camera in every family’s house. But what I loved was that the pictures in my family’s house felt quite artsy compared to a lot of the other family photographs I saw. That inspired me to find something in between: I wanted to document and take pictures that looked like my family’s photographs, but I also wanted to make artistic images.

Photography became the visual tool I use to document my story and my identity, which is a story similar to that of six million people, if not more. Growing up around photographs, but also lost documents, lost identities, and lost stories, made me feel that these traces of your history and your family need to be documented somehow. I think I just felt like it was my turn to document.

What are usually the subjects and themes of your photography? What do you wish to capture through your photos?

I would say the main themes in my work are water, land, and belonging. Those are probably the broad three, and I think they come from things that a lot of people with experiences similar to mine struggle with. They’re also three things I’ve always felt a certain awkwardness or discomfort around.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized how much we struggle with our relationship to land and with belonging: who we belong to, but also, on a more personal level: Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? And who will I become?

Water came into that through growing up in Jordan, quite far from large bodies of water. A lot of my work explores what it means to engage with and rebuild your identity around something that has, in a way, always been taken from you. It made me think more about how so many colonized places are by the sea, and about how both sides of my family come from places connected to water.

My mother’s family is from Yaffa, while my father’s family is from Al-Qalqilya in the West Bank. After leaving Palestine, both families went to Kuwait, where both of my parents were born. So water was always present in our family’s geography. But when it came to my generation, that relationship was lost because we grew up in Jordan. Water almost shifted from being associated with the ocean and something beautiful to becoming a border.

That’s where those three things began to tie together for me: bodies of water, land, and belonging. Water became connected to questions of land and borders. As a Palestinian Jordanian, I find myself asking: Where do we belong within all of this land and water? Who gets to say, “This is yours” or “This is not yours”?

It also makes me question why I feel so awkward around water. I’ve been living in Cape Town for more than a year and a half now, and I still feel that awkwardness around the ocean. I don’t have this beautiful or romantic relationship with it. I’m still trying to understand where I belong in relation to water, and how I’m supposed to interact with it.

“Palestine from afar.” 2023. Dead Sea, Jordan. Photo by Baha Suleiman.

Do you think part of that discomfort comes from feeling like you missed an experience you were supposed to have with water?

Yeah, I think of it as a missed experience, but I also think it took away a part of my identity. Most of the stories I grew up hearing from my family were, to some extent, connected to water. So I grew up with this idea that water is beautiful and amazing, that life comes from water—your body is even around 70 percent water. And yet, for me at least, being around it feels so awkward. It’s like, what do I do?

I also think there’s something about the exclusivity of water. If you want to swim in a clean, comfortable body of water, you often have to pay for access.

And how does access—or the lack of it—shape that relationship with water?

We also have the Dead Sea. What’s also funny is that the Dead Sea is dying, and it has been shrinking since the 1980s. In another 20 or 30 years, it might not exist anymore. It’s strange to think that for a lot of people in my generation, by the time we have kids, the Dead Sea as we know it might no longer exist.

The problem is also tied to Israel. Like many countries in the region, we have a water problem. Jordan specifically has very little water, especially drinking water. Israel faces water scarcity as well, and one of the methods it has used is taking water from these shared water sources.

The Dead Sea gets its water through a larger system that begins around Jabal al-Sheikh. When the snow melts, the water flows toward Lake Tiberias, then through the Jordan River and eventually into the Dead Sea. But Israel has diverted and disrupted that flow over the years, and the Dead Sea has continued to shrink. Its water level has dropped dramatically. You can physically see how much it has receded.

It’s crazy to think that even the Dead Sea, which is honestly a terrible body of water to swim in, is being taken away from us.

Then there’s the Red Sea and Aqaba. I’ve always been fascinated by Aqaba and by how you feel when you’re there. Jordan is a country of around 11 million people, and we have such a small stretch of coastline—maybe 100 kilometers, probably much less. Then, within that, you have all the hotels and private properties, so there’s very little public access to the water.

I became really fascinated by what that limited access does to our relationship with water, particularly in Jordan, where so much of the population is Palestinian. I started asking people I knew about their experiences in Aqaba, and so many of us shared the same feeling: being at the beach feels weird and uncomfortable because we’re simply not used to it.

When I moved to Cape Town, I also started thinking about this historically. For a long time under apartheid, beaches were segregated. There were beaches designated for white people, and you can still find photographs of signs that said “Whites Only.” There were specific beaches where Black people were allowed to go.

I started seeing a similarity in the way access can shape your relationship with water across generations, and it’s similar to Palestinians’ experience. A lot of Black people here don’t know how to swim because their parents couldn’t swim, and their grandparents couldn’t swim. There can be this inherited fear or unfamiliarity around water because generations of people were denied the same access to it. I can’t swim either, and a lot of people in my family can’t swim.

Baha by the sea. Photo by Saleh Saadi, courtesy of Baha Suleiman.

At what point did you start seeing water not just as water, but as a border? And how did that change the way you think about the horizon?

When I started looking at borders, I realized that there was often water. And then, when I started thinking about water, I realized that it was also always about borders.

Because of that, I think the idea of the horizon didn’t really exist for me. Often, when you’re looking out at water from Jordan, you’re also looking at land, and that land is Palestine.

Something actually happened recently. I was exhibiting at the Cape Town Art Fair in February, which is one of the biggest art fairs in Africa, with around 50,000 people attending. One of my photographs, shot in Aqaba looking out toward Palestine, was being exhibited.

I don’t know if you know this, but Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, which is around seven kilometers off the coast of Cape Town. An older white woman came up to me at the fair, looked at the photograph, and said, “Wow, you looking out onto Palestine really reminds me of Nelson Mandela looking out from Robben Island toward Cape Town…”

It was funny because it’s actually quite a similar distance. Even over the past few years, I would go with my friends to swim and find myself just staring out at Palestine through this misty cloud.

I remember in 2018, Yayha Sinwar spoke about walking along the shores of Gaza and seeing teenagers staring at the horizon, imagining what might be beyond it. I thought about that a lot because I’ve always been interested in this idea of the horizon and what exists beyond it.

But in Jordan, there was no horizon. There was always something blocking it. You looked across the water, and there was land—and that land was Palestine.

In your old photos, Amman is a pretty prominent character. It appears in your work through very ordinary, mundane things, capturing mundane life. What does Amman mean to you and what’s the story you’re trying to showcase about Amman through your photography?

I think, again, it depends on who you ask. I grew up in Amman within a specific background and identity—being Palestinian, and also being Palestinian from a particular class. Amman is probably similar to places like Beirut or Cairo, where you have this love-hate relationship with the city. But there’s also this feeling that the city itself has some hate toward you.

When you’re Palestinian, you grow up experiencing racism and with this idea that Jordan doesn’t necessarily want you as a Palestinian. It’s quite an insane thing to grow up with as a kid because you don’t really understand it. You think, we look exactly the same, we speak the same language, so how can you be racist toward me?

So there’s always been this strange relationship with Amman where I think: This is all I know. This is where I grew up. This is where I was born. My family is here. Everything I love is here. Everything I see and do is here. But at the same time, it feels like this place doesn’t want me here. Why?

So I started trying to build things that would make me love Amman, miss Amman, and feel excited about Amman. Photography became a way for me to document my day-to-day life there. I wanted the world to see us from a different point of view.

A few years ago, I went to an exhibition of historical photographs of Jordan. It was an archive, and most of the photographs had been taken by British, German, and American photographers. There was this very colonial point of view to the images. Historically, photography has been used as a tool—and at times almost as a weapon—in the region and throughout wars.

You could also see it in the relationship between the photographer and the subject. In many of these photographs, the subjects seemed almost shocked by the person taking their picture because the photographer was clearly a Westerner.

And they photographed very specific things. Jordan became the desert, the ruins, Petra—these particular subjects that were used to define the place. In that process, the city and the country lost some of their identity because everything was reduced to these recognizable landmarks. It’s kind of like Beirut and the Raouché rocks. Like, who cares about that damn rock?

“Pray”. 2023. Amman, Jordan. Photo by Baha Suleiman.

What did you want to show about the city that you weren’t seeing elsewhere?

I wanted to take pictures of things that felt familiar to the people who actually live there or come from there, things they could look at and recognize. So I started creating something called the Alternative Amman Photo Archive. It was always meant to be a never-ending project.

The idea was to ask: What is this city? What does it actually look like? How do young people see it? I wanted to move away from this very colonial point of view and create a different perspective on Amman.

“Where is the sea?”. 2024. Aqaba, Jordan. Photo by Baha Suleiman.

I wanted to make this archive because I loved Amman, but I never really felt rewarded for that love. It always felt like the city was fighting back. That relationship translated even more into my work when I started photographing a lot of the protests in the streets.

Now, I actually struggle to take pictures. I think leaving made me realize how much of my work is tied to Jordan. I don’t actually care about other shoots or other subject places in the same way. I just want to photograph this one specific thing, and that thing is Jordan. More specifically, it’s Amman.

And I think Amman is such a Palestinian city, which is strange in itself—to have a city built around the displacement of people. Jordan is one thing, but Amman specifically was built to accommodate Palestinians. For me, that history is inseparable from what the city is and from how I photograph it.

“Resistance from a far”. 2024. Amman, Jordan. Photo by Baha Suleiman.

Tell us a bit about the photography community in Amman. What does this community look like? Did you find a space for yourself there? Do you feel like there’s something still missing in that scene in Jordan or Amman specifically?

I started shooting film photography specifically around 2017 or 2018, and at the time I was developing my rolls at these old studios in Wast al-Balad. Eventually, when I started taking pictures of my friends—who maybe looked a little different—a lot of the guys working at these studios would look at the photographs and be like, “What is this? Who are these people?”

Then, Darkroom Amman opened in 2018 and really became established around 2020. It’s been very important in my photography career. In 2021, I started developing my photographs there and Lina Khaled, one of the founders, called me one day and said, “Hey, we like your pictures. Do you want to work at the Darkroom?” I immediately dropped everything and started working there.

I’m incredibly thankful for that, for Lina, and for the number of people I met through the Darkroom. The whole idea behind it was to build a sense of community around photography. What the Darkroom was trying to create was a place where amateur photographers, or really anyone interested in photography, could feel like they were part of something.

I was very lucky to develop quite quickly because I was surrounded by amazing artists and people who were much older and more experienced than me. They were also incredibly open to teaching, giving, and passing on what they knew.

The Darkroom is still doing that. They’re still teaching photography, putting on exhibitions, and trying to build this community of people around analog photography.

Unfortunately, I think there’s still a certain ceiling within the arts in Jordan, and not just in photography. I’ve only been gone for a year and a half, but it often feels like the same cycle keeps repeating itself. You have an art residency, and then the same ten people do the residency again and again. The same people get the grants, and then the same people get the next grants. There’s a point where the opportunities and the people accessing them just keep circulating within the same relatively small group.

Photo of Baha by Tara Tarawneh, courtesy of Baha Suleiman.

We’ve spoken about photography and how closely it’s tied to your identity. When you step away from your work, what does the rest of your life look like?

I think, more and more over the past few years, I’ve lost some of my sense of identity because taking pictures was so tied to my identity and to how I understood my own existence. When you’re Palestinian, it’s hard to be anything else. Your entire life is characterized sometimes by proving yourself.

That became even more complicated when I moved to South Africa because you can become very tokenized. I also DJ, which is another creative outlet for me, and I DJ quite a lot in South Africa. After almost every gig, my friends will come up to me and say they overheard someone saying, “Oh my God, you know the DJ is from Gaza.” And I’m like, why is that necessary?

It’s difficult because you spend your whole life fighting for and holding onto your identity, but then suddenly you find yourself being reduced to that identity by other people. It’s hard to figure out how not to become only the identity you’ve spent your whole life trying to protect.

But speaking of DJing, I really love music, and I especially love Arabic music. I started DJing here with a friend of mine who is also Palestinian. We started DJing together because we wanted to create the feeling of an Arab party; they’re the best parties you’ll ever go to. But we wanted to bring that feeling here without making it too corny.

So we called it Azime, like an invitation or gathering.

The reason I brought up the whole “Oh my God, I heard the DJ is from Gaza” thing is because we actually tried to separate the project from that. We were very specific about saying, “This is not a Palestinian thing.” It’s broader than that. It’s very much about the ‘SWANA’ region—North Africa, the diaspora, the East—and people who are constantly tied to these different identities.

Outside of taking pictures and DJing, I walk a lot. I go on a lot of walks in Cape Town because it’s such a beautiful place.

I wish I did more things that separated who I am from what I am, if that makes sense. Unfortunately, I think I became so wrapped up in my own identity that my whole existence became part of it.

“Allah”. 2023. Amman, Jordan. Photo by Baha Suleiman.

Do you have any exciting projects you’re working on or looking forward to in the near future?

I can actually tell you a little bit about a project I’m working on. It still doesn’t really have a name, but the working title is Home From Afar.

I started developing it with one of my best friends, Zakaria Hussin. He’s half Palestinian and half American, so we grew up somewhat similarly and have very similar interests. We’re also both documentary photographers. The difference is that because Zakaria is half American, he can go to Palestine.

We started thinking about how so much of Palestinian identity—and specifically my own identity—is built through memories, stories, and photographs passed down from our grandparents and parents. So with this project, we’re trying to build new memories from the ground up through each other.

In a way, I’m using Zakaria to build new memories through his trips to Palestine. For example, I don’t know much of my dad’s side of the family. I don’t know my dad or much of his family, so a lot of the memories and stories I grew up hearing about Al-Qalqilya have been lost.

Now, when Zakaria goes there, I write him notes about things I remember hearing in family stories, and he tries to trace them or find them. Through the photographs and videos he makes there, we’re rebuilding these memories that I’ve only ever known through stories I overheard throughout my life.

We’re planning to make a short film around that, and that’s the project I’m working on at the moment.

Michelle Eid

Michelle is an editor, and researcher. Her research focuses on matters concerning socio-economic rights and development in the MENA region, such as the right to health, food sovereignty, agriculture and more. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Al Rawiya.