Palestine Before 1948
Not Just Memory: Khalil Raad and the Contemporary Gaze
Twelve years ago, the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) presented an exhibition on the pioneering Palestinian photographer Khalil Raad (1854–1957), first shown in Beirut and later in Ramallah. Today, in collaboration with IPS, the Palestinian Museum revisits this landmark exhibition to reflect on why Raad’s work and the questions it raises remain urgent. Photography, as both documentation and interpretation, does more than capture a moment: it shapes how a place is remembered, how a people’s presence is affirmed, and how histories are contested. In the face of ongoing colonial erasure, Raad’s images endure as visual testimony to a Palestine whose landscapes, cities, and people were profoundly transformed by the Nakba of 1948.
Raad’s photographs, dating from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s, move between the staged and the spontaneous, the biblical and the contemporary to his time, revealing a Palestine at the crossroads of a fading Ottoman world, British colonial rule, and the intensifying Zionist settlement project. While early works drew on the conventions of Western “Holy Land” imagery, his lens increasingly turned toward the lived realities of Palestinians in the fields and markets, at festivals and protests, by the sea and in the street. These images are not simply historical relics; they are part of an ongoing conversation on cultural hegemony, identity, and memory.
This new iteration of the exhibition, which draws on images from the Khalil Raad Collection of the Institute for Palestine Studies Archives, retains the historical breadth of Raad’s work while extending its dialogue into the present. As in the earlier exhibition, a contemporary dimension offers critical re-readings of the archive. Palestinian photographer Adam Rouhana’s installation Permission to Narrate uses the same large-format techniques that defined Raad’s practice but turns them toward street portraiture in today’s Palestine. Rouhana’s work not only echoes Raad’s visual language but also reframes it for a moment marked by continued fragmentation, now intensified by the war on Gaza and ongoing attempts to sever the interconnectedness of Palestinian life and material culture.
The persistence of the photographic image, whether captured over a century ago by Raad or today by Palestinian photographers in Gaza, is part of its enduring power. Even amid genocide, images continue to bear witness, to preserve memory against deliberate erasure. By placing Raad’s early 20th-century images in conversation with contemporary work, this exhibition confronts enduring questions: How do we represent ourselves? What does it mean to document a place in the midst of transformation or colonial destruction? And how can the photographic image remain a site of both resistance and reimagining? As Edward Said reminds us, we are not mere photographic subjects: we are also observing our observers.
Biographical Note on Khalil Raad (1854-1957)
Khalil Raad was one of Palestine’s first “local” photographers, and most likely the first Arab (i.e., non-Armenian) to take up the practice professionally. In a career that spanned over a half century, he produced some of the most memorable photographs that exist of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, with a rich archive that ranges from landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits to scenes of rural and urban life to religious commemorations and political events.
Born in 1854 in the mountain village of Bhamdoun, Raad as a young child moved with his family to Jerusalem, where he studied at the Bishop Gobat (Protestant) School. He received his photographic training from Garabed Krikorian, who had learned his trade in the unique photography “school” within the Armenian compound of Jerusalem’s Old City. Krikorian was also credited with establishing the first commercial studio in Jerusalem, on Yaffa Road, in the 1870s.
Raad established his own studio on Yaffa Road, across from that of his former teacher, in 1890, inaugurating a fierce competition that was to last for over two decades. It ended in 1913 when the two studios formed a partnership, sealed by a marriage between the two families. In keeping with the understanding reached at the time, Raad would focus on political events and daily life, and Krikorian would focus on portraiture.
In the months preceding the outbreak of World War I, Raad travelled to Switzerland to study the new photographic techniques being pioneered by the Swiss photographer Keller and became engaged to Anne Muller his assistant; separated by the war years, which Raad spent in Palestine, the couple eventually married in 1919. They settled in the south-western Jerusalem suburb of Talbiyeh (which, interestingly enough, became the site of a number of photographic workshops and studios after its capture by Israel in 1948). Though now residing in the “New City,” Raad continued to work at his Yaffa Road studio.
During the 1948 war, the Yaffa Gate area just outside the city walls became part of the “no-man’s” land between Arab Legion and Israeli forces when the Jerusalem fighting ended in May, making Raad’s studio inaccessible. Fortunately, much of Raad’s archive was saved thanks to the daring of a young Italian friend who, during a number of nighttime rescue missions, smuggled the negatives out of the zone which he accessed by scaling the walls of the Old City (in Arab hands). Meanwhile, Talbiyeh, like the other mixed neighborhoods in what is now West Jerusalem, was seized by Israelis forces and emptied of its Arab inhabitants.
Losing both his studio and his home, Raad and his family lived for a time in Bhamdoun, the village of his birth. At the war’s end, however, he returned to the city that had become his own. Responding to the invitation of Jerusalem’s Greek Orthodox Patriarch, he and his wife took up residence inside the Patriarchate’s complex in the Old City, where he died in 1957. The bulk of Raad’s collection eventually ended up in the archive of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut.
Khalil Raad's photographs engage in dialogue with both artists and writers: Adam Rouhana, Vladimer Tamari, Hoda Barakat, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli, Rasha Salti.
