There is a kind of courage that makes no noise. It does not announce itself, it does not seek applause. It is the courage of those who pick up a camera, of those who continue documenting even when there is no light, even when there is no internet connection, even when colleagues are being killed one after another.
From May 3 to May 17, 2026, at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, as part of the LIFE festival by Zona K, the exhibition by the Activestills photography collective, Documenting life, death and resistance in Palestine, curated by the Prospekt Palestine Project, will be on view.
Founded in 2005, Activestills emerged from a group of activist photographers with a clear intention: to document and support Palestinian popular resistance in the face of Israeli colonial violence. Over time, that small core expanded to include Palestinian, international, and Israeli photographers united in their rejection of the Zionist colonial project. Their online archive now contains more than 56,000 images: a living, expanding collective memory of what takes place under apartheid.
The exhibition arriving in Milan is a selection spanning more than twenty years of work: the attacks on Gaza and the ongoing genocide, the systematic ethnic cleansing throughout Palestine, the remains of villages emptied by Zionist forces in 1948. But also — and this is where the deepest strength of the project lies — the faces, bodies, and stories of people who are not simply victims. They are individuals. They are a people with their own agency, capable of resisting, acting, and choosing.
Since October 2023, Israel has banned international journalists from entering Gaza without supervision. This means that the work of Palestinian photographers is not simply important: it is the only existing documentation of an ongoing genocide. More than 240 Palestinian journalists, photographers, and media workers have been killed by the Israeli army since the beginning of the conflict, often in deliberately targeted attacks. The genocide in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in contemporary history.
Among the photographers featured in the exhibition is Mohammed Zaanoun, who joined Activestills in 2018 and has documented the genocide since day one. He has been displaced multiple times. He dug through the rubble of his home with his bare hands to save his children. He witnessed colleagues die. After managing to leave Gaza with his family, two more Gazan photographers joined the collective: his brother Yousef Zaanoun and Doaa Albaz, who lost all her equipment during repeated displacements and now continues photographing using only her phone.
Also featured in the exhibition is Ahmad Al-Bazz, who documented Palestine between 2021 and 2023, photographing what remains of the villages depopulated during the Nakba of 1948: destroyed cemeteries, mosques turned into stables, abandoned churches, homes sealed with concrete. His work is an act of memory and resistance against erasure, because telling the story of 1948 means refusing the idea that history begins elsewhere, from a more convenient point of view.
Prospekt Palestine Project, which curates the exhibition, was founded in 2025 by a group of photographers from the Prospekt agency with the aim of countering the distortion of public debate around the Palestinian issue, supporting local professionals, and building permanent educational and research infrastructures. A form of solidarity that does not stop at outrage but transforms into structure, into a project, into continuous action.
Seeing these photographs is not a neutral act. It means choosing not to look away, refusing to surrender to the “compassion fatigue” that the endless stream of social media imagery seems determined to impose on us as destiny. Activestills’ photographs do not ask for pity: they demand presence, awareness, and responsibility.
The exhibition is free. It is at Fabbrica del Vapore. And there is no reason not to go.
