Imaging and Imagining Palestine

Karène Sanchez Summerer is Associate Professor at Leiden University. Her recent publications include a volume edited with Sary Zananiri titled European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and a volume edited with Inger Marie Okkenhaug titled Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in The Middle East, 1850-1950: Ideologies, Rhetoric, and Practices (Brill, 2020). Sary Zananiri is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden University. He completed his Ph.D. at Monash University (2014). His recent publications include European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited with Karène Sanchez Summerer.

"What, one might ask, is the relevance of old photographs to international affairs, or indeed International Affairs? The short answer is that images, like words, have political and social contexts—and when the issue in question is Palestine, an image is seldom just an image. Focusing on the 30-year period of British rule, the contributors to this edited volume have drawn on a remarkably wide range of sources. Readers of the standard literature on Mandate Palestine may be familiar with the photographs of the American Colony in Jerusalem, which feature in two chapters. But they may not know how it used photography to drum up support for the girls’ orphanage it ran in the aftermath of the First World War in conjunction with a Christian weekly in New York. Nor are they likely to be aware that the École biblique et archéologique, run by Dominicans in the city, built up a collection of 30,000 images (now in the process of digitization) which recorded their scholarly work while also reflecting the political turbulence that swirled around them. Or, to take a very different example, that in its massive photographic archive in Washington DC,National Geographic magazine has 3,000 black-and-white images—both published and unpublished—of Mandate Palestine."- Roger Hardy, University of Oxford, UK, in International Affairs 98: 1 (2022).

• ForewordSalim TamariAcknowledgmentsList of FiguresNotes on ContributorsNotes on Transliteration1 Imaging and Imagining Palestine: An IntroductionSary ZananiriPart 1: In and out of the Archives: Photographic Collections and the Historical Case Studies2 ‘Little Orphans of Jerusalem’: The American Colony’s Christian Herald Orphanage in Photographs and NegativesAbigail Jacobson3 Swedish Imaginings, Investments and Local Photography in Jerusalem, 1925–1939Inger Marie Okkenhaug4 The Dominicans’ Photographic Collection in Jerusalem: Beyond a Catholic Perception of the Holy Land?Norig Neveu and Karène Sanchez Summerer5 Bearers of Memory: Photo Albums as Sources of Historical Study in PalestineIssam NassarPart 2: Points of Perspective: Photographers and Their Lens6 Resilient Resistance: Colonial Biblical, Archaeological and Ethnographical Imaginaries in the Work of Chalil Raad (Khalīl Raʿad), 1891–1948Rona Sela7 Open Roads: John D. Whiting, Diary in Photos, 1934–1939Rachel Lev8 Documenting the Social: Frank Scholten Taxonomising Identity in British Mandate PalestineSary ZananiriPart 3: After Effects: Methodologies, Approaches and Reconceptualising Photography9 Edward Keith-Roach’s Favourite Things: Indigenising National Geographic’s Images of Mandatory PalestineYazan Kopty10 Decolonising the Photography of Palestine: Searching for a Method in a Plate of HummusStephen Sheehi11 Urban Encounters: Imaging the City in Mandate PalestineNadi Abusaada12 EpilogueÖzge Calafato and Aude Aylin de Tapia