In Tel Rumeida, the Palestinian quarter of Hebron, eight families live at the centre of a city that has been cut into guarded sectors, its historic streets broken by checkpoints. Hebron is the only place in the West Bank besides Jerusalem where Israeli settlers live inside a Palestinian city, and daily life there unfolds under surveillance, restricted movement, and the threat of harassment. Palestinian women in particular are seldom seen or heard outside the home; reporting on the conflict tends to show men fighting or suffering. Their perseverance, and their ordinary days, go largely unrecorded.
’Om (Mother), published in 2024 by The Eriskay Connection, is a collaborative photography project by Barbara Debeuckelaere and the women of those eight families. The women took up cameras themselves to photograph their lives, their homes, and their immediate surroundings, asserting an agency that the circumstances of the occupation routinely deny them. What results is not photojournalism about a conflict but a body of images made from within it, attentive to domestic space and its ambiguities. The book takes its title from the Arabic word for mother, and carries a line from Mahmoud Darwish: “Mother, I will not name you a woman, I will name you everything.”
The photography is credited to ’Om Abdul, ’Om Ahmad, ’Om Emad, ’Om Hazem, ’Om Muntasser, ’Om Tamer, ’Om Wisam and ’Om Yusuf, together with their families, alongside Debeuckelaere’s own contribution; Adam Broomberg contributes an essay, and Debeuckelaere and Carel Fransen edited the volume. Its 320 pages are held in a small 115 by 165 millimetre format, bound as an exposed selfcover with a dust cover, with design and cartography by Fransen.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this structure as much as in any single image. A long sequence in a small trim makes the reading of the photographs an intimate, cumulative act, closer to a household record than a documentary survey. The collaboration places authorship in many hands, and the design gives that multiplicity a clear physical form. The result is a considered, ethically careful publication that asks the reader to understand home as something contested, defended, and daily remade.
