Imaging and Imagining Palestine Open Jerusalem Edited by Vincent Lemire (Gustave Eiffel University; Centre de recherche français in Jerusalem) Angelos Dalachanis (French National Center for Scientific Research, Institute of Early Modern and Modern History) VOLUME 3 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/opje Imaging and Imagining Palestine Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918–1948 Edited by Karène Sanchez Summerer Sary Zananiri LEIDEN | BOSTON This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Cover image: Untitled c. 1921–23, Frank Scholten, Frank Scholten Legacy, Courtesy of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sanchez-Summerer, Karene, editor. | Zananiri, Sary, editor. Title: Imaging and imagining Palestine : photography, modernity and the  biblical lens, 1918-1948 / edited by Karène Sanchez Summerer, Sary Zananiri. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Open Jerusalem, 25430211 ; vol.3 Identifiers: LCCN 2021009329 (print) | LCCN 2021009330 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004437937 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004437944 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Israel—History—20th century. | Documentary photography—Israel. |  Photographic industry—Israel. |  Palestine—Social life and customs—20th century. Classification: LCC TR646.I75 I33 2021 (print) | LCC TR646.I75 (ebook) | DDC 770.95694—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009329 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009330 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2543-0211 ISBN 978-90-04-43793-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43794-4 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by the Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Foreword vii Salim Tamari Acknowledgments x List of Figures xi Notes on Contributors xxi Notes on Transliteration xxvi 1 Imaging and Imagining Palestine: An Introduction 1 Sary Zananiri Part 1 In and out of the Archives: Photographic Collections and the Historical Case Studies 2 ‘Little Orphans of Jerusalem’: The American Colony’s Christian Herald Orphanage in Photographs and Negatives 31 Abigail Jacobson 3 Swedish Imaginings, Investments and Local Photography in Jerusalem, 1925–1939 66 Inger Marie Okkenhaug 4 The Dominicans’ Photographic Collection in Jerusalem: Beyond a Catholic Perception of the Holy Land? 97 Norig Neveu and Karène Sanchez Summerer 5 Bearers of Memory: Photo Albums as Sources of Historical Study in Palestine 157 Issam Nassar vi Contents Part 2 Points of Perspective: Photographers and Their Lens 6 Resilient Resistance: Colonial Biblical, Archaeological and Ethnographical Imaginaries in the Work of Chalil Raad (Khalīl Raʿd), 1891–1948 185 Rona Sela 7 Open Roads: John D. Whiting, Diary in Photos, 1934–1939 227 Rachel Lev 8 Documenting the Social: Frank Scholten Taxonomising Identity in British Mandate Palestine 266 Sary Zananiri Part 3 After Effects: Methodologies, Approaches and Reconceptualising Photography 9 Edward Keith-Roach’s Favourite Things: Indigenising National Geographic’s Images of Mandatory Palestine 309 Yazan Kopty 10 Decolonising the Photography of Palestine: Searching for a Method in a Plate of Hummus 340 Stephen Sheehi 11 Urban Encounters: Imaging the City in Mandate Palestine 359 Nadi Abusaada 12 Epilogue 390 Özge Calafato and Aude Aylin de Tapia Abstracts 398 Index 406 Foreword Salim Tamari The contributions of this volume are framed by the overlooked context of the British Mandate, providing a significant overview of photography and the social histories of the period. They cover a wide range of themes based on a re-reading of social history through several archival collections (American Colony, École Biblique, National Geographic), institutional records of service (mission schools, orphanages, monasteries and charities), family albums (Jawhariyya, Luci, Mushabek), portrait photography (Raʿad, Whiting, Scholten), urban- scapes and aerial photography (Scholten, Bavarian State Archive, Australian War Memorial). Added to the rich archival material, is the consideration of how we read and restitute images and their histories. This includes debates on methodologies for decolonising and indigenising photography as well as re-examining and ‘re-narrating’ photographs that have not been published. Reading social history through photography has been a crucial antidote to the absence and loss of Palestinian material patrimony through wars and con- quests. Alongside professional photographers, family albums constituted the portable artifacts of memory that is used today to reconstruct the daily life of bourgeois quotidian. Among the case studies in this volume dealing with archival fonds and conceptual approaches to photography, it celebrates, and in one case, resur- rects from oblivion, the work of four outstanding photographers of Palestine. Lars Larsson, John D. Whiting, Frank Scholten and Khalīl Raʿad. Both Whiting and Larsson were pioneering photographers associated with the American Colony, and both traversed the Ottoman and Mandate periods. The leading figure in their photography was Lars (Lewis) Larsson, head of the photographic department in the American Colony and, later, the Swedish consul in Jerusalem. Larsson was the author of the iconic picture of the sur- render of Jerusalem by Mayor Ḥusayn Hashim al-Ḥusaynī in the hills of Sheikh Bader on 9th December, 1917 which was reproduced all over the world signal- ling the fall of Ottoman rule, and the capture of Palestine by the British. Biblification of these photographic collections is a major theme that is examined by a number of contributors. One of the richest of those compendi- ums is undoubtedly that of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, whose main focus has been the documentation of archaeological excavations and sites in the late 19th century and Mandate period. viii Foreword Figure 0.1 The Surrender of Jerusalem, 1917. Lars (Lewis) Larsson Image from the Wasif Jawharriyya album. Courtesy of the Institute for Palestine studies The launching of the Scholten collection from Leiden has been an opportune moment to examine the ethnographic work of the great Dutch photographer Frank Scholten. Less than one-tenth of that collection has been published in his seminal study of Jaffa life in the 1920s – a work which is imbued with haunt- ing and lyrical imageries.1 Scholten appears to have been forgotten, while his work, subsumed under the rubric of biblification of the Levantine landscape, was eclipsed by an ava- lanche of ‘Holy Land photographic albums’. In a genre that we might call a deconstructive biblification, Scholten’s uniqueness is derived from his excep- tional ability to combine landscape photography with intimate vignettes of urban life showing the varied communitarian makeup of Palestinian society that permeate his oeuvre. Scholten’s intimacy with his subjects is visible in much of his portraiture: leisurely groups frolicking in the sands of Nabī Rūbīn, seasonal celebrations of religious holidays, men and women of all walks in life in the marketplace. The ribboned girl holding an Easter egg is an iconic Scholtian image – a subject which reassesses his work within the context of biblification with which he was long associated and pigeonholed. In analysing local photography in Palestine, the case of Khalīl Raʿad shows a duality can be seen in his substantial involvement in the military photography 1 Frank Scholten and George Robinson, Palestine Illustrated. Including references to passages illustrated in the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran (London: Longmands & Co, 1931). Foreword ix Figure 0.2 Ribboned Girl with Easter Egg; Frank Scholten, Jaffa 1921–23 IMAGE Courtesy of NINO & UBL of WWI when he served as a publicist for the Ottoman war effort,2 as well as his immersion in Biblical theme photography during the Mandate period. This dual- ity perhaps best embodies the contradictions of modernity and biblification in the photography of Palestine during the shift from Ottoman to British rule. The albums of Wasif Jawhariyya likewise show him as a participant and observer of performative theatre (the shadow play – karagoz – and its earlier more primitive manifestations in sunduq al ʿajab – the wondrous ‘magic box’). His photographic collection preserves and immortalises a world that is no longer with us. Jawhariyya’s use of the photographic images to illustrate the transformation of the cityscape and to ceremonial processions (Nabī Mūsā, Sittuna Maryam, the Saturday of Light Easter parade) – all of which transcended their original religious content into public syncretic celebrations, capturing the impacts of political developments in Palestine.3 2 Salim Tamari, “The War Photography of Khalil Raad: Ottoman Modernity and the Biblical Gaze,” Jerusalem Quarterly 52 (2013): 25–37. 3 This is the topic of a collective project on Palestinian family albums that is undertaken by three participants in the Leiden conference, but which will appear in a separate vol- ume. Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi and Salim Tamari, Camera Palestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).