#BEOPENHands was the first global call for visual responses BE OPEN launched back in 2015. It was dedicated to the notion of hands and served as the preamble to “The Garden of Wonders. A Journey Through Scents” project.
Hands have been chosen as the subject for the open call because they are the primal tools: powerful, practical, sensitive, spiritual. Kant described a man’s hands as his “outer brain”, while Jung remarked: “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” Hands convey our moods, give emphasis to our speech; they allow us to grasp life, literally and figuratively.
Mohammad Ibrahim Hammada was the author of the winning picture: "The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word hands is EXPRESSION. I feel that hands are the second expressive part of the body, apparently the face is the number one. That is why I focus on hands when I take my photos, they can tell my message clearly, and that is why I participated in this BE OPEN project.
"I am from Syria, a pretty old country, in which so many handcrafts were found and exported to the world. People there still enjoy the handcrafting and even prefer it over the modern manufacture. They say that the machine can not make perfect things as the human hand can."
