Naima El Hawary remembers carrying her first digital camera everywhere. She was five when she received it, and some of the pictures she made still sit alongside the photographs documenting her childhood. A camera was a way to explore: to zoom in, discover and notice things she had not seen with her own eyes.
She also remembers the fascination of using her mother’s much larger DSLR, even when it was difficult to hold. Later, as life became busier and more familiar, photography moved towards the edges of everyday life. It became something she mostly did while travelling, when the unfamiliar made looking feel easier.
From travel photography to familiar places
A few years ago, that relationship began to change. Naima found herself wanting to photograph the known differently: to document familiar places and share how she saw them. Film became part of that return to curiosity.
Travel still draws her attention. She describes travelling in order to photograph as much as photographing to remember a journey. Architecture, buildings and patterns hidden in everyday disorder remain important subjects. But the reason to carry a camera no longer depends entirely on being somewhere new.
PolaWalk: learning to look with other people
Naima joined PolaWalk because she wanted to become part of a photography community. She was interested in how other people saw and captured the world, and in what their approaches might open up in her own.
The shared experience mattered as much as the equipment. Trying ideas together made room for experiments she might not have attempted alone. Her favourite Polaroid from the walk was an image made almost in passing. She recalls leaving it exposed to the sun longer than she intended and seeing an unexpected effect. What might have felt like a spoiled picture became the part that interested her.
It is a small example of a larger change in her practice: the finished photograph does not always need to match the picture imagined before pressing the shutter.
When the interruption becomes the photograph
Growing up with a DSLR, Naima had often treated photography as a search for a perfect result. She could repeat a shot, adjust it and try again, measuring success through how closely the picture resembled what she meant to capture. Film helped loosen that expectation. The less she required an image to be flawless, the more she enjoyed making it.
One photograph from the Red Sea holds that change particularly clearly. Standing on a pier, she spent several minutes trying to photograph a swimming ring, waiting for the angle and light to feel right. Just as she pressed the shutter, someone grabbed its rope.
The interruption became the reason she liked the picture. The photograph preserved an event she had not arranged, inside a composition she had carefully considered. For Naima, allowing that unpredictability has made photography more interesting, rather than less deliberate.
A camera that brings her into the moment
Photography can sharpen her experience of the present. Looking for something extraordinary within an ordinary scene makes her more aware of what is happening around her. At other times, the camera seems almost to disappear: she feels she is holding on to a moment with other people, rather than stepping outside it.
Close friends, people she admires and creative spaces keep bringing her back. These photographs are ways of sharing an attachment to something, not only records of what it looked like.
Returning to Germany with a different eye
Having moved to Berlin recently after several years away from Germany, Naima is still getting to know the city and the country again. She is trying to understand what has changed, and where she now fits within a familiar setting.
Photographing Berlin becomes part of that process. As she learns the city, she also discovers what is different about her own perspective. Familiarity is no longer the end of discovery; it can be the thing that makes a new way of seeing possible.
For her next step, Naima wants to spend more time with the ordinary. Much of her photography has followed what was new, exciting or extraordinary. Now she is interested in the realities and feelings closer at hand. Film has helped make each exposure more considered, and brought her back to a pleasure she remembers from childhood: finding something in the present worth looking at again.
Explore Naima’s photography on Instagram, @travelhawary.
Questions from the interview
Why did Naima join PolaWalk?
She wanted to find a photography community and learn how other people see. Sharing ideas gave her a reason to try things she might not have thought of alone.
What is Naima exploring through photographs of Berlin?
After returning to Germany, she is using photography to understand the city and her relationship with it. She wants to spend more time photographing ordinary places and feelings, alongside the travel photographs she already enjoys making.
Should a Polaroid be left in sunlight while it develops?
Polaroid recommends shielding a newly ejected photograph from strong light while it develops. Naima’s account describes her response to an unexpected result; it does not establish what caused every mark in that particular print.
Keep exploring
Camille Charlier also describes carrying a camera more often at home and reconsidering an imperfect roll. Continue with Camille Charlier on photographing Berlin and letting go of the picture she expected.
Based on a written interview for Developing Stories, Berlin Photo Studio’s series about the people and experiences behind photographs. Interview and editing: Emiliano Vittoriosi / Berlin Photo Studio.
