Unsilencing Palestine 1922–1923: hundred years after the beginning of the British Mandate – the Frank Scholten photographic collection revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACT This piece presents an interview conducted by Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri with Salim Tamari and Yair Wallach about the Frank Scholten photographic collection (now available with Creative Commons access), discussing the archive's significance and use for researchers of the history of Mandate Palestine.During the turbulence of the period after the First World War, Dutch photographer Frank Scholten (1881-1942) travelled to Palestine with the aim of producing an ‘illustrated Bible'. He arrived in Palestine in 1921, where he stayed for two years. While the bulk of his photo collection consists of images of Palestine, his camera lens gives a snapshot into modernity in the Eastern Mediterranean more broadly. The entire Frank Scholten collection, consisting of 12,000 negatives and 14,000 prints, represents a work in progress towards a 16-volume set of books on the ‘Holy Land', only two volumes of which were ever published.One of the hallmarks of Scholten’s collected work is the thoroughness with which he imaged Palestine. His images of people cut across religious and confessional lines, ethnic backgrounds, and class and urban-rural divides. He imaged people at work as well as in their leisure time, but most of all, he imaged people in the context of their daily life, rather than divorced from the landscape.