Photographing Palestine

Palestine has long been a fascinating subject for photographers. And not just native Palestinians. From 19th century American missionaries eager to capture the Biblical Holy Lands to contemporary photojournalists seeking to put a human face on the ongoing tragedy, photographers the world over have traveled to Palestine. Below are some particularly key photographers in the history of photographing Palestine. Some are Palestinian, some are not, all have captured remarkable images.

Parkour

(Photo by Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

(Photo by Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

(Photo by Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

(Photo by Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

(Photo by Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

26-year old Mohammed Salem is a Gaza-based Palestinian photojournalist. Salem has covered the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 2003 for Reuters and won several awards, including the Dubai Press Club and the 2004 China International Press Photo Contest. In the above photos, Salem photographed Palestinian youth practicing Parkour – a French-developed form of stylized movement influenced by military training obstacles (Le parcours means “the course” in French) as participants jump from one place to the next – in the Shejaia neighborhood east of Gaza City, which was heavily damaged by Israeli bombardment during Operation Protective Edge in July-August 2014. Photographs were taken on October 1, 2014.

Khalil Raad

Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

Khalil Raad's studio on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem.

Institute for Palestine Studies

Considered Palestine's first Arab photographer, Khalil Raad (1854-1957) grew up in Jerusalem and opened his studio on the city's Jaffa Road in 1890. Through his lens, he witnessed the end of Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem, the British Mandate of Palestine, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In 1948, Raad's Jerusalem home in the neighborhood of Talbiyeh fell under Israeli control and was emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants. His collection was rescued by an Italian friend through a series of nighttime forays after Jaffa Road became a "no man's land" during the fighting. After the war, and denied by Israel permission to return to his home, he left for the village of his birth, Bhamdoun, Lebanon, but eventually returned to live in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate complex in the Old City of Jerusalem (then under Jordanian rule), where he passed away in 1957. Most of his photographs are housed by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut and many of them may be seen in the book Before the Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians by Walid Khalidi.

Read more about Khalil Raad:

The War Photography of Khalil Raad: Ottoman Modernity and the Biblical Gaze.

by Salim Tamar

Khalil Raad - Jerusalem Photographer.

by Badr El-Hage

Palestinian Refugees

The Palestinian Museum

Naher al-Bared refugee camp, near Tripoli (Lebanon)

UNRWA

Palestine refugee men in Nahr el-Bared camp in Lebanon

UNRWA

Myrtle Winter-Chaumery (1915-2008), was a photographer for Life magazine when in 1951 her editor sent her to Jerusalem and she witnessed for the first time the refugees camps around the eastern half of the city. Palestinians who had been forcibly displaced from their homes and villages during the 1948 war by Israeli forces craving out a Jewish state and subsequently denied the right to return now numbered in the hundreds of thousands as refugees (today, the number has grown to millions). Winter-Chaumery became Director of the Information Center at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN body assigned to manage the camps, and spent the next 30 years photographing the lives of Palestinian refugees.

The Institute for Palestine Studies has published a collection of her work with essays on Winter-Chaumeny and Palestinian refugees: I Would Have Smiled: Photographing the Palestinian Refugee Experience.

Photo above: A Palestine refugee family waits to receive a tent, Burj el-Shemali camp.

"Lady Photographer"

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Karimeh Abbud

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Karimeh Abbud (1986-1955) was a Palestinian photographer and artists self-dubbed the “Lady Photographer.” Born to a pastor, Abbud spent her early life growing up in the village of Beit Jala and the city of Bethlehem while attending school in Jerusalem. She took an interest in photography after her dad gave her a camera for her 17th birthday. In the 1930s, she opened a studio in Nazareth and stamped her photographs “Karimeh Abbud - Lady Photographer” in English and Arabic. In 1932, a Palestinian newspaper called her the “only national female photographer” and she may have been the first professional Palestinian photographer in Palestine. Abbud moved to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but eventually returned to Nazareth, where she passed away in 1955.

Read more about Karimeh Abbud

Early Local Photography in Palestine: The Legacy of Karimeh Abbud.

by Issam Nassar

The American Colony

(American Colony Photo Dept.)

The Mughrabi Quarter, Wailing Wall and Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, 1934-1939

(American Colony Photo Dept.)

(American Colony Photo Dept.)

Zion Gate, Jerusalem.

(American Colony Photo Dept.)

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Palestine.

(American Colony Photo Dept.)

(American Colony Photo Dept.)

The American Colony was founded in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City (and later moved to the Pasha Rabbah al Husseini home in East Jerusalem) as a Christian missionary utopian society in 1881. As part of its philanthropic and commercial ventures, the American Colony Photo Department was established in 1898 and its studio was housed in the Vester & Co. American Colony Store on David Street near Jaffa Gate; named after Frederick Vester and his brother-in-law John D. Whiting, the former the son of German-Swiss missionaries who came to Palestine in the mid-1800s and the latter the first child born in Palestine among the American Colony founders after 1881.

“An important commercial niche that the American Colony photographers shared with other professional photography businesses in the Near East was the production of images of allegorical “biblical” scenes. Like other photographers needing to remain commercially viable, they took photographs of sacred sites, such as the Mosque of Omar and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But they also went beyond the standard images well-known to tourists to create extensive documentation of mosques, churches, architectural sites, city-scapes and village homes and streets in greater Syria. An American Colony Store catalogue flyer of American Colony Photo Post Cards available in 1934 featured nearly 300 selections, catalogued geographically, with more than 50 of them Jerusalem scenes. American Colony “typology” studies of unnamed working Jerusalemites included photographs of a water carrier, a porter, and a rabbi (perhaps a model posing as a rabbi), each indicated in the catalogue as signifying specific verses from the Bible. The generic anonymity of these subjects implied a timeless arc from ancient times to the present, and made the humans featured into symbols of their respective cultures and ways of life, much as the architectural typology of holy buildings symbolized entire faiths.”

Read more: The American Colony Photography Department: Western Consumption and "Insider" Commercial Photography.

by Barbara Bair

Palestine Photo Bank

Palestine Book Bank

Palestine Photo and Image Bank

Palestine Photo and Image Bank

Palestine Photo and Image Bank

The Palestine Photo and Image Bank was founded by Palestinian artists Steve Sabella in 1998 to "consciously promote a positive image of Palestine and its people," as proclaimed in its Mission Statement.

The project's purpose is to challenge the image some may have of Palestinians as merely victims constantly buffeted by turmoil, if not, even worse, "terrorists." Although most Palestinians still living in historic Palestine do live under a harsh Israeli military occupation and the rest suffer the indignities and discrimination of second-class citizenship in Israel, "there is more than what has been constructed and portrayed."

Sabella has included other native Palestinian photographers in the project, which continues to grow every year. "This is one way to counter the negative construction of the image of Palestine and Palestinians," Sabella has said.

The photographers seek to capture the vibrancy of Palestine and the Palestinian people today, just as the photographers of yore.

To learn more about Palestinian history and culture visit the Institute for Palestine Studies.

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