Refracted Gazes: A Woman Photographer during Mandate Lebanon

Abstract

While conflicting thoughts on women’s activities and their status within their communities were debated in journals that circulated in the Middle East during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century (Baron: 1994, Booth: 2001, Slim and Dupont: 2002, Thompson: 2000), Marie al-Khazen seized every opportunity to use her camera to capture stories of her surroundings. She not only documented her travels around tourist sites in Lebanon but also sought creative experimentation with her device by staging scenes, manipulating shadows and superimposing negatives to produce different effects in her prints. Within the frames of her photographs, Bedouins and European friends, peasants and landlords, men and women, comfortably share the same space. Al-Khazen is a Lebanese photographer who lived between 1899 and 1983. Her photographs were mostly taken around the 1920s and 1930s in the North of Lebanon. Her work includes a collection of intriguing photographs portraying her family and friends living their everyday life in the village of Zgharta in the North of Lebanon. Most of al-Khazen’s photographs suggest a narrative of independent and determined Lebanese women. These photographs are charged with symbols that can be understood, today, as representative of women’s emancipation through their presence as individuals, separate from family restrictions of that time. Images in which women are depicted smoking a cigarette, driving a car, riding horses and accompanying men on their hunting trips counter the usual way in which women were portrayed in 1920s Lebanon. The photographs can be read as a space for alKhazen to articulate her vision of the New Woman or the Modern Girl as described by Tani Barlow in The Modern Girl Around the World. In this anthology, authors like Barlow point to the ways in which the modern girl “disregards the roles of dutiful