Camera Palaestina Nassar, Issam; Sheehi, Stephen; Tamari, Salim
08/2022
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Camera Palaestina is a critical exploration of
Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904-1972) and his ...seven
photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of
Palestine . Jawhariyyeh's nine hundred images narrate the rich
cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine.
Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture
between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social
history of Palestine. Shedding new light on this foundational
period, the authors explore not just major historical events and
the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle but a social field
of vision of Palestinian life as exemplified in the Jerusalem
community. Tracking the interplay between photographic images, the
authors offer evidence of the unbroken field of material,
historical, and collective experience from the living past to the
living present of Arab Palestine.
This chapter briefly examines the photographic collection of the Jerusalem diarist Wasif Jawharriyeh (1897–1972), whose life in the city spanned the last two decades of Ottoman rule and the British ...Mandatory period in Palestine.¹ In 1948, following the fall of his neighborhood in the western suburbs of Jerusalem to Israeli control, Jawharriyeh left Palestine and ended up in Lebanon, where he passed away in 1972. Although he was a well-known figure while living in Jerusalem, he fell into oblivion until his diaries were discovered and published some thirty years after his death.² Although his reputation as the “storyteller of
Over the past decade, histories of Late Ottoman and especially Mandate Palestine have moved away from the political framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict to consider questions of social and cultural ...history, as well as, increasingly, adopting new frameworks such as environmental and medical history. One of the most important voices in this movement, as a scholar and as a mentor of others' work, has been Salim Tamari. This volume brings together both new and established researchers on Late Ottoman and Mandate-era social and cultural history, many of them Palestinian, to showcase the kind of work inspired by Tamari's legacy, to reflect on the development of these themes in the historiographical context, and to contribute to the decolonisation of Palestinian history. The contents range from considerations of tourist souvenirs and artisanal manufacture to the social history of Gaza, and from debates around cosmopolitanism in colonial Palestine to the socio-economic roles of Palestinian women.
This chapter, and the entire book, is devoted to the study of the photographic albums fashioned by Wasif Jawhariyyeh as the photographic history of Palestine. Although Jawhariyyeh wrote his memoirs ...and left us his song book, entitled al-Safinah al-Jawhariyah, the albums are seen here as standing on their own as objects, both in themselves and as articles of visual representation of the life and times of Jawhariyyeh in Jerusalem. However, it is important to keep in mind that for Wasif, they were part and parcel of his overall project, which he himself called “the Jawhariyyeh Collection,” and which includes the
The photographic oeuvre of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1897–1968), if one may call it that, is no longer unknown. His albums, ostensibly titled Tarikh Filistin al-musawwar or the “Illustrated History of ...Palestine,” have been explored by a number of different scholars in an array of venues, largely focusing on representing historic Palestine “before the diaspora.”¹ With a large handful of notable exceptions, most of the images themselves, as we will see in this book, were produced by marquee indigenous and expatriate studios and, therefore, can be found elsewhere. As such, the photographic bricolage that structures these albums (individually and if approached
Epilogue Tamari, Salim; Nassar, Issam; Sheehi, Stephen
Camera Palaestina,
08/2022, Letnik:
5
Book Chapter
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A Palestinian prisoner sits on the threshold step of a doorway of, what one might assume to be a jail, surrounded by three British soldiers (fig. 6.1). His name is Karam bin Saba al-Shamma’. We know ...little about him. We do not know why he is there. We cannot discern what he has in his hands. Is he a political prisoner? Aren’t all prisoners under colonial rule political prisoners? We do not know the reasons for the rather informal, over-exposed, vertical photograph, likely taken by an amateur photographer. We only know al-Shamma’ because Wasif Jawhariyyeh included this photograph in his
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