In this book launch for Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918-1948, Salim Tamari, Issam Nassar and Sary Zananiri will talk about the social, cultural and political aspects of photography in British Mandate Palestine. From iconic images like the surrender of Jerusalem that were published across the globe to private images from family albums, local photography tells us much about the period from within Palestine. The many photographers who visited the region give us a different insight into how the world saw Palestine. This session will discuss all this and more.
Panelists
Salim Tamari
Salim Tamari is Professor of Sociology (Emeritus), Birzeit University; Research Associate, Institute for Palestine Studies; Editor, The Jerusalem Quarterly. Recent Publications: Mountain Against the Sea: A Conflicted Modernity (UCP, 2008); with Issam Nassar, The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (Olive Branch Press, 2013); Year of the Locust: Erasure of the Ottoman Era in Palestine; The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine (UC Press, 2018); with Munir Fakhr Ed Din, Landed Property and Public Endowments in Jerusalem (Mu’assasat al-Dirāsāt al-Filasṭīnīyah, 2018). Camera Palestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (UC Press, forthcoming).
Issam Nassar
Issam Nassar is an historian of photography and the Middle East at Illinois State University. Nassar taught at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006; Bradley University in 2003–2006 and al-Quds University in 1998–2003. He is associate editor of Jerusalem Quarterly (Arabic: Hawliyat al-Quds) and author of a number of books and articles, among them: Different Snapshots: The History of Early Local Photography in Palestine, European Portrayals of Jerusalem: Religious Fascinations and Colonialist Imaginations, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Gardens of Sand, edited with Clark Worswick and Patricia Almarcegui, TrunerPhoto Middle East, October 2010. I Would Have Smiled: Photographing the Palestinian Refugee Experience, co-edited with Rasha Salti (Jerusalem: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2009).
Sary Zananiri
Sary Zananiri is an artist and cultural historian. He co-edited European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948. Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) with Karène Sanchez Summerer, and exhibits and curates widely, most recently Frank Scholten: Archaeology and Tourism in the ‘Holy Land’ at the Rijksmuseum Oudheden (May–October 2020). He produced a short documentary with Maartje Alders Frank Scholten Photographing Palestine. He recently received a research grant from the Palestine Museum for the project ‘Orthodox Aesthetics: Christianity, Solidarity and the Secularisation of Palestinian Religious Art’. He is also producing a digital humanities project Mapping the Mandate: Frank Scholten in the ‘Holy Lands’. Sary is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher on the NWO funded project CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948 and the Netherlands Institute for the Near East at Leiden University.
Book Synopsis
Imaging and Imagining Palestine is the first comprehensive study of photography during the British Mandate period (1918–1948). It addresses well-known archives, photos from private collections never available before and archives that have until recently remained closed. This interdisciplinary volume argues that photography is central to a different understanding of the social and political complexities of Palestine in this period.
While Biblical and Orientalist images abound, the chapters in this book go further by questioning the impact of photography on the social histories of British Mandate Palestine. This book considers the specific archives, the work of individual photographers, methods for reading historical photography from the present and how we might begin the process of decolonising photography.
" Imaging and Imagining Palestine presents a timely and much-needed critical evaluation of the role of photography in Palestine. Drawing together leading interdisciplinary specialists and engaging a range of innovative methodologies, the volume makes clear the ways in which photography reflects the shifting political, cultural and economic landscape of the British Mandate period, and experiences of modernity in Palestine. Actively problematising conventional understandings of production, circulation and the in/stability of the photographic document, Imaging and Imagining Palestine provides essential reading for decolonial studies of photography and visual culture studies of Palestine." - Chrisoula Lionis, author of Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film
" Imaging and Imagining Palestine is the first and much needed overview of photography during the British Mandate period. From well-known and accessible photographic archives to private family albums, it deals with the cultural and political relations of the period thinking about both the Western perceptions of Palestine as well as its modern social life. This book brings together an impressive array of material and analyses to form an interdisciplinary perspective that considers just how photography shapes our understanding of the past as well as the ways in which the past might be reclaimed." - Jack Persekian, Founding Director of Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem
" Imaging and Imagining Palestine draws together a plethora of fresh approaches to the field of photography in Palestine. It considers Palestine as a central node in global photographic production and the ways in which photography shaped the modern imaging and imagining from within a fresh regional theoretical perspective." - Salwa Mikdadi, Director al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art