In the dark years of the early nineteenth century, when the world was still dreaming of reconstructing itself after Napoleon, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre invented reality in the depths of their darkrooms. Photography became the most truthful representation of the world ever witnessed up to that day. Through a photograph, reality could be confined within a small frame and presented directly to the viewer without mediation – just as everyone had initially imagined.
In 1839, two French painters, hoping to photograph the land of the Pharaohs, set out for Egypt and from there reached al-Quds, becoming the first to capture the city’s religious landscapes. This marked the beginning of the wave of photography in the "Holy Land." In less than a decade, hundreds of photographers from across the world journeyed to Palestine; a land sacred to all the great divine religions.
Yet in these initial frames, no trace of the people appeared. These photographs were intended to narrate the eternal land of the Holy Book, not its living, moving inhabitants. Buildings and architecture took their place within the frame, with the people of Palestine largely absent from the picture. If a face occasionally did appear, it served only as a marker to display the grandeur of a structure.
In European frames, this land appeared as holy but devoid of human life. Against all expectations, these empty frames cemented a new narrative of the Holy Land in the global imagination: a land destined to remain forever in thought, without a nation, without faces, and ready for its next conquest.
The first frames: When reality was invented
The decades of the 1850s and 1860s marked the golden age of photography. The American Civil War had transformed photography into a powerful medium, yet in the Holy Land, cameras served a different mission: to seek tangible evidence for the stories of the Bible. From the very beginning, frames were constructed by erasing the people; photographers rose from the ashes of the Crusades to once again conquer this land frame by frame. Meanwhile, centuries of Ottoman rule over Palestine were drawing to a close.
Jewish migration had begun. The photographs, by failing to show the inhabitants, provided settlers with an image of the Holy Land. Within those uninhabited frames, the first narrative of “a land without a nation for a nation without land” took shape. Photography was thus transformed from merely recording reality into an instrument for seizing reality.
World War One, the monstrous force that devoured everything, culminated in the Balfour Declaration and the birth of the Zionist regime. British soldiers walked the alleys of al-Quds, and the shutters of European-Jewish cameras clicked once again. The new photographs displayed the same old landscapes, but this time with captions that altered their identity. Reality was inverted. People were erased, history was wiped away, and the frame itself became a colonial weapon.
Seizing the image, seizing the land
Yet in the very heart of al-Quds, during the final decades of the nineteenth century, a small school was established within the grounds of St. James Church, nurturing the first generation of Palestinian photographers. Garabed Krikorian, a diligent student of this school, founded the first Palestinian studio on Jaffa Street, where he photographed the people, their faces, their rituals, and their lives. Years later, a new generation of Palestinian photographers emerged: Fadhel Sabbah, Khalil Raad, and Karimeh Abbud. Unlike the previous generation, they stepped beyond the studios and used their cameras to safeguard homes and streets. For them, photography was not a pastime but a form of defense – a defense of a reality that had been erased in other frames.
Fadhel Sabbah, the photographer of rituals and of women drawing water from the spring of Ain il-adhra (Mary’s Well), restored life to the frame. A ritual that for the people of Nazareth symbolized fertility and renewal was, through his lens, transformed into a cultural expression of a nation’s continuity. Khalil Raad, the guardian of Jaffa’s orange groves, stood against the fabricated frames that presented the orchards as the product of Jewish settlers.
His photographs of Palestinian laborers and farmers offered a quiet, patient response to the seizure of the image. And Karimeh Abbud, the daughter of Bethlehem, became the first Palestinian female photographer to break taboos. With the camera her father had bought for her, she traveled throughout the cities of Palestine and captured the voices of the women and men of her land within her frames. When her brother lost his life under the torture of the British, Karimeh made the decision to continue taking pictures until her last breath. In her will, she stated that she did not want her camera to be buried with her; it was to remain, to witness the things that she would no longer see.
The eyes that awakened
After the Nakba, cameras in Palestine did not fall silent. Kegham Djeghalian, in the days of Gaza’s occupation, photographed from behind the blankets covering his window. He captured the displaced people, the food queues, and children playing amid the ruins. His frames were a living testament to the changing face of the cities – from joy to devastation. However, when the Palestinian narrative was ignored, Western cameras returned. Micha Bar-Am and the photographers from Life and Time magazines presented the world with frames of the Zionist regime’s victory. Color photographs of the Six-Day War and victory celebrations took the place of frames depicting suffering and displacement. Once again, reality was manufactured in the studios of power.
Yet amid this darkness, a new generation arose. Young people who had grown up in the camps now proclaimed their identity with stones and cameras. The Intifada was the uprising of eyes that had awakened. Osama Silwadi was among them. He began his photography with wildflowers and continued it with the blood and fury of the Intifada. His frames, capturing the confrontations between Palestinian women and Israeli soldiers, demonstrations, and the cries of the streets, reached the world. He was a photographer in the guise of a sniper: a hunter of the moments of life and death.
After years of collaborating with international news agencies, Silwadi realized his own dream: a press agency entirely staffed by Palestinians. Yet, the bullets that pierced his body left him confined to a wheelchair. Nevertheless, he continued to photograph, this time focusing on the heritage and culture of Palestine. He believed that if the enemy took the land, perhaps one day it could be reclaimed, but if identity and culture were eradicated, then everything would be lost.
A heritage of light and blood
Today, as the fires of war once again blaze over Gaza and Palestine, the world sees the images, but this time the narrators are the Palestinians themselves. Young photographers such as Fatima Shabeer, Mohammed Salem, and many others carry forward the legacies of Karimeh Abbud, Khalil Raad, and Kegham Djeghalian. Their frames continue the same history: images of children enduring the coldness of war, grieving mothers, crumbling walls, and orchards of oranges and olives. These photographs cry out: we are here, and this is our land.
Imam Khamenei described this spirit as follows: “It is wishful thinking to imagine that a nation can be erased from the pages of history and be replaced with a fake one! The Palestinian nation possesses culture, history, heritage, and civilization. This nation has lived in that country for thousands of years... There is no power in the world that can extinguish the motivation for the freedom and the return of Palestine to its rightful owners, neither across the globe nor in the hearts of Muslim nations, and especially not in the heart of the Palestinian nation itself.”
Palestinian frames are not merely photographs; they are the living history of a nation, a history inscribed in blood, light, and negatives. From the darkrooms of Paris to the ruined streets of Gaza, there exists a continuous path: the struggle to see, to remain, and to narrate. In a world that learned from the first frames how to construct reality, Palestinians learned how to reclaim it.
They still endure – in every image captured of the ruins, in every face peering out from the frame. It is as if the spirit of Palestine’s historical photographers has been breathed into the bodies of their children.
Amid the dust, a light still shines. And in every negative pierced by blood, a living image of the ancestral homeland is imprinted:
Palestine, with all its frames.
(This article is adapted from the documentary “Palestinian Frames,” directed by Saeed Faraji and produced in 2024 in the Islamic Republic of Iran.)
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