Exploring the works of those who photographed Palestine, the way they understood and imagined it back then, this volume is a much-needed exercise to trace the visual history before 1948, and examine the making of Mandatory Palestine within the framework of biblification that reproduced Palestine as ‘a familiar site of European consciousness’, and Orientalism that imagined Palestine as the exotic other. In this opportune moment for the study of photographs, Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918–1948 offers a great invitation to rethink the British Mandate period through the works of professional and amateur photographers from different classes and communities. Particularly vernacular photography has emerged as a key area of focus that offers new and much more nuanced readings on socio-economic, cultural and political histories. In the past two decades, the field has seen a rise in scholarly work that deals with materiality of photographs, practices of photographic production, and circulation. Recent historiography looks at photographs as new primary sources, rather than accompaniments to written sources. Interdisciplinarity opens up the field, shifting the focus towards the study of photographs as objects of cultural analysis, beyond their use as mere illustrations. From heated debates on access and transparency of archives to large-scale digitisation projects, the field of photography witnesses an opportune moment with a wealth of new material being made publicly available.
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