Photographer Misan Harriman gave lessons and equipment to young people who have fled Gaza – and the pictures they took are funny, revealing and often heartbreaking
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boy pulling a funny face, a sleeping pet, a grandfather in his chair – all ordinary scenes from life that many of us would take for granted. What makes these images special is they were taken by Palestinian children, refugees displaced to Egypt since Israel’s war in Gaza, making sense of their new, if hopefully temporary, home and what they have escaped from.
“It’s familial life, relationships, and although they’ve seen so much, you’re not seeing trauma, you’re not seeing the faces of people that have given up,” says the photographer Misan Harriman, an ambassador for Save the Children. “Even though none of these kids know what the future brings and there’s huge uncertainty, they are living in the moment. They’re doing their best to thrive and learn.” The camera, he adds, is “a seemingly inanimate object that can help you find answers to a world that is confusing, and even more confusing for some of these children.”
Harriman led a photography workshop in Cairo, run by Save the Children and the charity Choose Love, in which 10 Palestinian children from Gaza, between the ages of 11 and 13, were given a camera and taught how to use it. Over several weeks, they created their own images. It was fun and an outlet for creativity, but it was also about much more, says Harriman. These are children forced to leave their homeland. “They understand what bearing witness means,” he says. “They understand what preserving memories means, and hopefully taking pictures of friends, loved ones, possessions they love, it’s just a beautiful, maybe even cathartic experience for them.”
