Tsawwar… Abdo Shanan

"I don't remember anything about how this photo came to be except that moment when I felt the urge to shoot it. I never think about the photograph; I just take it. My process is based on intuition and on my need to feel a sense of belonging – to people or to places – even if only for a brief moment. This image is from my upcoming book, Diary: Exile, which is a journal of belonging, loneliness, anger, becoming, and meeting myself in places where I have built ties on my own terms, tracing the edges of familiarity in unfamiliar places. This project was born 11 years ago from my refusal to vanish into a crowd of broken dreams or to merge with the grays. At the time, I felt as though I was constantly battling with ideas, and with the people around me. I pushed myself into exile in a place within, thinking it will protect my dreams and who I am. But exile comes with a price: it is surrounded by solitude, disappointment, and fear of time ticking by, of growing older, and accomplishing nothing but a broken version of myself. Now that this work has come fll circle, I ask myself: was it worth it to hide? Then I look at myself and see bruises and wounds. I see that I had no shield and that the exile was an illusion.”

Abdo Shanan (b. 1982, Oran) is an Algerian-Sudanese photographer exploring memory, identity, and post-independence histories. A former telecommunications engineer, he co-founded @Collective220 and @akaTAWLA , and his projects Dry and The Right to a Memory have earned international recognition, including the CAP Prize (2019) and a Magnum Foundation grant (2020).

Tsawwar is an ongoing visual series in Daftar which explores the stories behind a photograph, taken in the region or by an Arab photographer, written in their own words.