Image Transfer and Visual Friction: Staging Palestine in the National Socialist Spectacle

Abstract

Abstract This article highlights modes of image transfer between photographers in Palestine and photo agencies and editors in 1930s Europe. It argues that Jewish photographers—who had shaped the central European photographic and photojournalistic scene before 1933, and were now excluded from it—continued to influence the international news and press market through their works. Palestine, a place to which several of these journalists fled, had been known in the European spectacle as the timeless ‘Holy Land’; now, through political upheavals, it entered the news. The photographic documents of the clashes between Arabs, Jews, and British troops during the 1930s and taken by German-Jewish photographers in exile became valuable commodities internationally and entered a plethora of national markets, including that of National Socialist Germany. Many of the photographers who had been banned from the German photojournalistic scene in fact remained part of the visual discourse negotiated in German illustrated newspapers. The experience of exile of the photographers and photo agents involved in the international image transfer of photographs from Palestine can be seen as a catalyst for the contingencies in international photo trade, the loss of control of news photographs, and ultimately the crossing of the aesthetic and artistic borders of National Socialist Germany, which were believed to be closed to outside influences. The various views and the ways in which they were used trigger questions about the nature of the photographic gaze and the possibility or impossibility of distorting visual content via textual frameworks in photo essays and newspaper articles.