Imaging and imagining Palestine: photography, modernity and the biblical lens, 1918–1948

Abstract

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photographic archive in Washington DC, National Geographic magazine has 3,000 black-and-white images—both published and unpublished—of Mandate Palestine. Its work, too, was animated by Christian sentiment: a constant theme of the book is what the authors call ‘biblification’, the insistence on seeing Palestine through a distorting biblical lens.