Photographs of Palestinian Life (ca. 1896–1919)
Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green
Apr 30, 2024



Girls pose in ornately embroidered tatreez. Women hold cauliflowers stacked four heads high; men carefully consider the heaps at a watermelon market. Commerce thrives: olive oil soap factories pile their bars by the thousands; merchants grade glossy bushels of Jaffa oranges; and in the bazaars, cutlers sharpen sickles and farriers fit shoes. Domari speakers raise their hands toward the camera in a grove on Mt. Hermon; women hoist water pots in the Druze community of Daliyat al-Karmel; men wear the tarboosh and prepare a Passover feast of roasted meat. Recreation takes many forms, from gramophone cafes to concerts, nargilah sessions to calisthenics. Families dressed in white walk through a cemetery after Ramadan; mourners mass for the funeral of a rabbi in Jerusalem; mothers attend a bible class shoulder to shoulder in Bethlehem. A family pitch their tent high above the Dead Sea, and, with his feet firmly planted, a man stares out over the fertile olive groves of Gaza.
These images of Palestine before the British Mandate — all from stereograph collections held by the Library of Congress and Brown University — fall into two broad categories: stereoscope cards (made by overseas companies such as Keystone View and Stereo-Travel) and photographs produced by the American Colony based in Jerusalem (who would often provide stereoscope manufacturers with scenes). The vast majority of images produced by such organizations were intended to feed a “Holy Land” mania that increasingly obsessed the United States throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which only the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold books about Palestine. In addition to the rise of international tourism, this fixation was fueled by a wave of Christian thought in which Palestine was seen as a neglected Ottoman “backwater” in need of restoration, revitalization, and resettlement to facilitate the second coming of Christ. For those unable to make the transatlantic steamer, the “Holy Land” was brought home in the form of travelogues, photo books, theme parks, exhibitions, and, of course, through stereoscope cards, which — with their 3D technology — offered a unique form of sacred pilgrimage for the armchair traveler.
While most of the photographs focus on historical and biblical sites — with locals demoted to mere ornamental function — the frame occasionally falls on Palestine’s inhabitants, capturing daily routines and peak experiences alike. Many of these images, often assembled to hide all traces of modernity, still carry the air of scriptural reconstruction (if not actually staged as such, then created in retrospect through captioning and biblical citation). But in others, we witness a less filtered vision of the everyday. Though, of course, a partial view and still the product of an orientalist gaze, we are offered in such photographs a valuable glimpse of Palestine at the turn of the century. Beneath the surface of biblical fantasy, we can glean a land alive with history and potential, a populace immersed in the comings and goings of village, city, and family life — a vision of Palestine that is anything but, as the early Zionist slogan would have it, a “land without a people”.
Agrarian scenes predominate — when these photographs were taken, Palestinians were cultivating olives, cotton, tobacco, dura, sesame, and exporting barley to the United Kingdom, wheat to Italy and France, and Jaffa oranges around the world. In many of the photographs, women are shown at work: coffee gets ground with pestles; olives are gathered and pressed; wheat is measured, sifted, and eventually baked into bread. Of the roughly half a million residents in the Ottoman sanjaks that composed Palestine in this period, some seventy-five percent were farmers, living in more than seven hundred villages. The other twenty-five percent dwelled in towns and cities, making a living from education, commerce, government, religion, and artisanry. Joyful school scenes, coffeeshop conversations, shopkeepers and craftspeople hard at work, and ecstatic festivals all feature here. At the turn of the century, before the establishment of Mandatory Palestine and the large-scale increase of Zionist immigration, the Ottoman census recorded the population as roughly 85% Muslim, 11% Christian, and 4% Jewish. The stereoscope enthusiast would have contemplated scenes of religious and family life from all of these populations, and there’s a hint here at the kind of harmony and intermixing described in the memoirs and diaries of Jerusalem residents such as Wasif Jawhariyyeh and Yaakov Yehoshua, which detail Christians dressing up for Purim festivities, Sephardic Jewish musicians performing at Islamic weddings, and Muslim women learning the Ladino language of their neighbors.
How one views these photographs today will likely be colored by their knowledge of what was to come for the communities and land depicted. The end of World War I would see the Ottoman Empire dissolve, the Balfour Declaration signed, and the British Mandate begin. Waves of Zionist settlement — encouraged by favorable Mandate policies and spurred by the terror of antisemitism in Europe — led to huge shifts in demography and power. These were changes that would ultimately prove devastating to the Palestinian Arab population in particular, from the Nakba of 1948, through the Naksa of 1967, to the horrors of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. In Camera Palæstina (2022), Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi, and Salim Tamari argue, however, against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, they believe such images “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”. In Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024), Johnny Mansour speaks about what photographs like these mean to him: “I firmly believe that while the people of Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history. As one of the children, the survivors, of this people, I know how sincere our relationship is with the land, its past, its history, its images, its documents. Taken together, they return to us what we need the most: our homeland.”