Stories of Hope
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Muhammed Muheisen has spent two decades documenting the lives being lived just outside the frame of standard news images.
By India Stoughton
Muhammed Muheisen was nine years old when he first encountered his grandmother’s Polaroid camera. “I used to call it a magical box,” he recalls, “because at every family occasion we used to have this box, you press a button and there is a moment that we could come back to.” The magic of freezing time never left him. Today, Muheisen is a two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist, National Geographic photographer and founder and chairman of Everyday Refugees Foundation. His path was shaped by his own childhood and the desire to help other children living in adverse circumstances.
Jordanian but born and raised in Jerusalem, Muheisen grew up against a backdrop of political tension, sporadic violence, and endless news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Born in 1981, by the time he discovered photography he was living through the first Intifada. “A childhood when you’re born in a conflict zone is different than a child who was born in a safe country. The priorities are different,” he says. “Finding that tool gave me something to make me dream, something to make me hopeful.”
In 2001, after graduating in journalism and political science, he got a job with The Associated Press, one of the world’s biggest news agencies. His career has taken him all over the world to cover some of the defining moments of the past two decades, including the wars in Iraq and Syria, the funerals of Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela and the capture of Saddam Hussein. But his passion has always been to tell stories that are smaller, but no less important—those of the ordinary people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster.
“For the last 22 years, I have been travelling the world with my camera to document the stories that matter,” he says. “Most of these are stories of hope, stories of courage, stories of resilience but, most importantly, stories of people who are forced to leave everything behind and go search for a safe home.”
Opening image, Syrian refugees are wrapped in thermal blankets to protect them from the cold. They have crossed the strait between the Turkish coast and the Greek island of Lesbos by dinghy. Top, Zahra Mahmoud, aged 5. A Syrian refugee from Deir ez-Zor, Zahra lives with her family in a tented settlement near Mafraq, Jordan. This image was UNICEF’s 2017 Photo of the Year. Above, Muhammed Muheisen explains to Afghan refugees how a camera works, in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Driven by a desire to effect change, Muheisen’s work is a world away from the stark, utilitarian images captured by many breaking-news journalists. Characterised by rich colours and soft light, his photographs are intimate and arresting, capturing quiet moments of human connection and unexpected scenes of playfulness. His portraits, as carefully composed as classical paintings, convey a rare depth of emotion, creating a sense of direct connection between viewer and subject.
“If you go back 20 years, the only way to be recognised was to be dodging bullets,” he says. “I jumped from Baghdad to South Africa, to Serbia, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan. But I never forgot that part of me that just wanted to take beautiful pictures—pictures of joy, fun, hope.”
To achieve the trust and intimacy that shine through in his photographs, Muheisen has developed strong moral and ethical codes. “I have to step out from being just a photographer and remind myself before everything that I’m a human being,” he says. “I have to imagine myself on the other side of the camera. To gain someone’s trust you need to spend time, you need to become part of their environment. Then you’re allowed to show the real image, the deep image. If you stay on the outside, your picture will be only on the outside.”
Much of his work focuses on children, whom he sees as the main victims of conflict. His images of children in war zones and refugee camps, chasing balls or flying high on swings, remind people thousands of miles away that the only difference between children in Kabul or New York, Syria or Sharjah, is the circumstances they find themselves caught up in. “I wanted to raise the voice of these children,” he says. “I wanted to have them remembered or recognised not only as Afghan or Syrian refugees. I wanted them to be remembered by their names, by their ages, by their hopes.”
He credits a single photograph with planting the seed of an idea that would change his life—and the lives of others. In Pakistan, where he spent four years documenting Afghan refugees, he set up his camera one gloomy day in a slum neighbourhood on the outskirts of Islamabad, watching a horse roam the muddy ground beside a cluster of roughly built huts.
Top, Zawar Khan, an Afghan refugee, chases bubbles on the outskirts of Islamabad. Muheisen credits this photograph with planting the seed of an idea that would change his life—and the lives of others. It led him to found Everyday Refugees Foundation. Above, a Syrian man feeds his daughter while sitting in front of his partly damaged house in Azaz, close to Aleppo, Syria. Muheisen is passionate about telling the stories of ordinary people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster.
“There was a young boy who was annoying me, coming by, putting his hand on the lens, running away, doing it again,” he recalls. “A vendor selling bubbles from a wooden cart approached me and parked nearby. The air started to be full with these bubbles. Out of the blue, this boy came right in front of my lens.” Muheisen’s photograph captures the boy reaching up with both hands, arms open wide, as bubbles rain down from above him, caught in a moment of fascinated wonder. “It became this magical scene. And the kid who was annoying me became the hero of my story.
“It was published everywhere,” Muheisen recalls. “It was seen as a picture of hope amid chaos.” A few months later, he went looking for the boy. “I handed him the picture, he held it in his hand and started looking at it. He was very proud. It was priceless. That is when I realised it’s the first time he sees himself in a picture. This boy felt on top of the world at that moment and that is what got me thinking ‘What else can I do as a photographer to make a difference?’”
It was this unexpected moment of joy and connection that led him to found Everyday Refugees Foundation, a non-profit organisation that helps to empower refugees, local communities and internally displaced people. Based in Amsterdam, where Muheisen lives, the charity was founded in 2015, after he travelled to the Greek island of Lesbos to cover the arrival of thousands of refugees seeking asylum in Europe.
The foundation is now the main focus of his energy. Having left his award-studded career with AP behind, he still travels the world taking photographs, but his images are now part of his effort to raise awareness of and support for an organisation that has a concrete, day-to-day impact on thousands of lives.
Top, Pakistani girls, displaced from tribal areas, at a makeshift school close to Islamabad. The girls pray for five female teachers and two aid workers killed by gunmen in the country. Above, an Iraqi celebrates on top of a burning US Army Humvee in the northern part of Baghdad. Muheisen has covered some of the defining news stories of the past two decades.
One of Muheisen’s proudest achievements is Encourage, a school for Afghan refugee children—particularly girls—on the outskirts of Islamabad. “We started with 30 students and now we have 160—six classes, several teachers, all from the same community,” he says. “When the girl learns, she goes home [and] teaches her mum, she teaches her dad, the younger children.”
Another project close to his heart is Kalimat from Home, a library of Arabic-language books for Syrian and Iraqi refugees in an asylum centre in the Netherlands. The project is sponsored by Sharjah’s Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, who offered to ship the books to the Netherlands after meeting Muheisen at the Xposure International Photography Festival, which he attends every year. Most recently, he spent months in Romania, where the charity set up a common room full of toys and games for Ukrainian children living in a temporary shelter.
Muheisen continues to use photography to raise awareness of the hardships faced by people who have lost their homes through conflict, natural disasters, discrimination or poverty. “I made it my mission to keep telling these untold stories,” he says, “because if something happens and we don’t document it, it’s like it never happened.”
He shares his photographs and the stories behind them with his one million Instagram followers, as well as running takeover days on National Geographic’s account, which is followed by more than 250 million. In March, he will feature in a six-episode National Geographic docuseries, Photographer, airing on Disney+. Focused on seven of the world’s most extraordinary visual storytellers, the series will document Muheisen’s life and the work he does with the foundation. “It has a very positive message: nothing is impossible. It’s going to inspire a lot of young photographers,” he says.
One subject appearing in the documentary is Zahra, a Syrian refugee Muheisen met in 2015, when she was four years old and living in a tented settlement in Jordan with her family. By sharing her story, Muheisen hoped he could help make her dream of attending school a reality. But even after a portrait of Zahra aged five, pink bows in her hair and big brown eyes shiny with unshed tears, was named UNICEF’s 2017 Photo of the Year, resulting in her image being broadcast around the world, nothing changed for Zahra.
“She never managed to go to regular school,” he says. “She went to makeshift schools doing lower grades, [but] the age for a proper education is gone.”
Now a teenager, Zahra’s dreams have started to fade, but against the odds Muheisen remains positive. “I keep visiting her,” he says, “for eight years I have been seeing Zahra grow in front of my eyes, and my lens. I’m a very hopeful person. If that picture eight years ago didn’t make a difference, I’m not going to give up.”
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MUHAMMED MUHEISEN
