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CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY

Michelle L. Woodward

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 Michelle L. Woodward

CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY

The role of archival practices in Lebanon and
Palestine

Contemporary institutions and practices in the Middle East are developing a new creative
economy. This essay describes the ‘‘archival impulse’’ that has developed over the past
decade among photographers and culture workers in Lebanon and the Palestinian
Territories. The focus is specifically on those groups along the edges, or outside, of the art
world who are assembling various types of photographic archives. The essay suggests that
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the appropriation of archival practices may be partially a response to a lack of collectively

agreed upon narratives of the nation’s or community’s past and the dearth of institutions
of communal remembrance. The archival impulse is also an attempt to deliberately reshape
the region’s image. Much of the Middle East’s history since 1914 has been shaped by
outsiders. Over centuries, Western artists and media have created a potent visual archive of
the Middle East that is largely made up of clichés of violence, chaos and Orientalist tropes
of exoticism. Contemporary photographers and culture workers are crafting new
mechanisms for memorializing history through photography as they and their fellow
citizens experience it, effectively creating an archive where they belong.

Since the 1990 end of the fifteen-year Lebanese civil wars, there has been a
compelling, and internationally well received, wave of conceptual art reflecting on
experiences of war. The most widely celebrated Lebanese visual artist is Walid Raad
and his Atlas Group Archive. The archive is a collection of fictional and historical
artifacts, notebooks, films, and photographs documenting the wartime history of
Lebanon, which he draws upon for exhibitions and performances. Raad’s work tells
sometimes fanciful, though realistic and highly specific, stories about wartime
Lebanon. These narratives pose questions about what experiences are deemed worthy
of inclusion in a country’s official history. Through the act of creating a fictional
archive (out of often non-fictional materials) he prods viewers to think about the way
in which national memory is constructed.
For example, in ‘‘Let’s be honest the weather helped’’, notebooks attributed to
Raad document the bullets and shrapnel he picked up from the streets of Beirut in the
1980s. Black and white photographs of each location are splattered with colored dots
corresponding to different types of ammunition to mark the holes they have made in
the landscape. The result is a sad commentary on the incredible destruction of Beirut
by competing militias but is also comical; whole façades of ruined buildings, a tree,
and in one photo, just the curb of a sidewalk, are cheerily covered in dots of multiple
colors. The accompanying text states: ‘‘It took me 25 years to realize that my
Photographies Vol. 2, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 21–35
ISSN 1754-0763 print/ISSN 1754-0771 online ß 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/17540760802696930
 22 PHOTOGRAPHIES

notebooks had all along catalogued the 23 countries that had armed or sold
ammunitions to the various militias and armies fighting the Lebanese wars, including
the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, Switzerland and China’’ (http://
www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeA.html). His documentation makes present the
insidious transnational nature of the networks that sustained the wars and prompts one
to wonder whether any ‘‘real’’ Lebanese archive would be impartial enough to record
it.
Raad is not alone in his fascination with the power of archives to shape a national
history. Young contemporary artists and culture workers in Lebanon and the
Palestinian Territories are embracing the processes of assembling archives and
repurposing local historical photographs. For example, Akram Zaatari’s Madani
Project investigates and re-presents the archive of a commercial photographer who has
worked in Saida, Lebanon since the 1950s. Groups such as Lens on Lebanon,
Photo48, and Cinemayat encourage marginalized communities to represent
themselves and their histories visually. These uses of photography explicitly seek to
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create, expand, and diversify representations of the region, both locally and for
outsiders.
Curators and critics have already described an ‘‘archival impulse’’ in the work of
numerous artists in the Middle East, often in regards to a particular (and tightly
connected) group in Beirut.1 I do not intend to discuss themes already covered by this
existing body of literature, but instead want to investigate an engagement with
archival practices as it stretches beyond the art world.2 In examining archival practices
in Lebanese and Palestinian photography, Hal Foster’s notion of the archival impulse
in contemporary art provides a useful framework. Foster has identified four main
characteristics that he attributes to the archival impulse among contemporary artists
that I will explore in relation to the role of photography in a number of recent
Lebanese and Palestinian projects. First, ‘‘archival artists seek to make historical
information, often lost or displaced, physically present’’, such as in Raad’s work
described above (Foster 4). Second, ‘‘the work in question is archival since it not only
draws on informal archives but produces them as well’’ (5). Although not all the
projects discussed here create physical archives, they act like archives. In the same way
that archives attempt to explain a certain group or phenomenon through the
accumulation of pieces of evidence, these archives imply that the individual
photographs, when brought together, add up to a bigger and more meaningful picture
of a community or history. Third, ‘‘archival art is rarely cynical in intent … on the
contrary, these artists often aim to fashion distracted viewers into engaged
discussants’’ (6). Many of these projects literally engage the public by asking for
contributions of materials to the archive. Finally, Foster explains: ‘‘these private
archives do question public ones: they can be seen as perverse orders that aim to
disturb the symbolic order at large’’ (21). In every project discussed below, the
archive functions to question and disrupt the prevailing visual status quo of
representations of the Middle East by the West and by dominant groups in the Middle
East.
Why this interest in archival practices by contemporary Middle Eastern
photographers and artists? I propose that the appropriation of archival practices into
the work of contemporary photography may be partially a response to a lack of
 CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY 23

collectively agreed upon narratives of the nation’s or community’s past and the dearth
of institutions of communal remembrance.3 In Lebanon there are almost as many
competing histories as there are confessional groupings (eighteen officially recognized
ethnic-confessional groups, including Catholic Maronites, Shia and Sunni Muslims,
and Druze, share power in parliament in proportion to their populations). Reflecting
this fragmented society of sectarian groups, there exist numerous interpretations of
the events that led to the outbreak of civil war, divergent accounts of culpability for
horrific incidents such as massacres of Palestinians in refugee camps and even
disagreement on whether Lebanon is an Arab country. The state is still struggling to
create a unified secondary school history textbook that can reinforce a common
Lebanese identity. Ruins across the downtown area from the Lebanese civil wars are
being erased and built over by the public–private company Solidere in an architectural
style of nostalgia for an earlier, prewar, history of prosperity. As a result of the
widespread trend of fostering forgetfulness about the recent past by all communities,
Lebanon does not have accessible, recognized national archives or museums that
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present a coherent, unifying modern history.4 The cosmopolitan generation of

Lebanese artists and photographers involved in the archival projects I discuss below
appear to be asserting a belief that confessional divisions must be transcended and a
broader, more inclusive, Lebanese identity constructed.
Palestinians, who lack sovereignty, statehood and unity, suffer from occupation
by Israel, and are dispersed around the globe, are thus unable to produce robust
national institutions to collect or memorialize their experiences as a people.
Fragmentation also exists physically in the separation between the West Bank and
Gaza Strip and politically between the two main parties of Fatah and Hamas. In
contrast, Israel has highly developed national photography archives, such as those
located at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and the National Photo Collection of
the Government Press Office in the Office of the Prime Minister.5
Those inspired to create and mine visual archives may also be responding to the
sense that much of the Middle East’s history since 1914 has been shaped by outsiders.
External powers are still deeply involved in the fate of the Lebanese and Palestinians
today. Over centuries, Western artists and media have created a potent visual archive
of the Middle East that is largely made up of clichés of violence, chaos and tradition
and Orientalist tropes of exoticism and repression. Indigenous artists, culture
workers, and intellectuals seem motivated by a desire to craft mechanisms for
memorializing the history of their countries as they and their fellow citizens
experience it, to create an archive where they belong. In an age when images circulate
rapidly and easily through new technologies, practices that introduce new
photographs into the global flow make good sense in the struggle to shape one’s
own image and identity. Younger artists, whose educational and career paths are now
often transnational, are confronted directly with foreign understandings of the region
that do not reflect their own realities. The lack of national image archives to refute the
stereotypes makes it perhaps even more urgent for them to create their own.
Before going on to discuss some of the recent archival projects by Lebanese and
Palestinian photographers in more detail, I want to clarify a number of issues around
the archive in photographic discourse. I use the term archival not only to refer to a
collection of documents or the place where documents are kept but also to the
 24 PHOTOGRAPHIES

collation of materials by an organizational structure (which varies from archive to

archive) that operates within a certain discourse, or way of seeing the world. In the
academic study of photography, criticism of the archive became an important theme in
the early 1980s (Krauss; Sekula; Afterimage). The archives studied were usually
institutions that cataloged the ‘‘other’’ for the purpose of exerting power, such as
state authorities documenting criminals. The projects I examine here are not the work
of official institutions such as government bodies, corporations, police departments,
or medical and scientific organizations – those institutions that are most often
associated with archives. Instead, these are small groups that are using the practices of
collecting and storing images to produce a narrative counter to the dominant state,
religious or media discourses.
While there is a growing literature about the reclamation and reuse of
photographs from the colonial archive in postcolonial societies, particularly in Africa,
India and Australia, little attention has been paid to how photography is being used
within the Middle East (Pinney and Peterson; Firstenberg).6 The existing scholarship
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overwhelmingly examines images created by foreign visitors to the region in genres

such as art, photojournalism, travel photography, and – from the nineteenth century –
military surveys and archeological expeditions. A number of indigenous Middle
Eastern photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have been
identified, though not studied in depth. Later twentieth- and twenty-first-century
photographers are now occasionally included in the international fields of art and
journalism.7
One reason for this unbalanced view of photography in the region may actually be
traced to a problem of archives in the region historically. The vast majority of
historical photographs available to scholars are in institutional archives, many of which
emerged out of Victorian and Edwardian colonialism. However, these are located
outside the Middle East, often in the United Kingdom and France, and contain
primarily photographs taken by Europeans. State authorities in the Middle East tightly
control access to government archives in the region, while non-governmental
photographic archives barely exist. Western collections do hold photographs made by
Middle Eastern photographers, but they are usually studio images created specifically
for tourists and are rarely personal, governmental or commercial photographs taken
for local consumption. The most well known body of indigenous photography
currently in Western libraries is Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s photographic
albums of 1893 depicting modernization efforts throughout the empire. The
photographs were taken by Middle Eastern commercial photographers and assembled
for European consumption (Allen). In commissioning the photographs, the sultan
remarked that ‘‘Most of the photographs taken [by European photographers] for sale
in Europe vilify and mock Our Well-Protected Domains. It is imperative that the
photographs to be taken in this instance do not insult Islamic peoples by showing them
in a vulgar and demeaning light’’ (Deringil 156). After being exhibited at the World’s
Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the albums were donated to the Library of
Congress as evidence of Ottoman progress (Gavin).8 The spirit of the sultan’s
complaint remains relevant today and is echoed in the work of archival projects within
the Middle East that seek to influence how the region is understood. As in 1893, the
preferred method is to push new, and now also newly discovered, self-representations
 CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY 25

into global circulation. Instead of diplomatic channels the dominant distribution

systems now are art exhibitions, books and the World Wide Web.
Contemporary institutions and practices in the Middle East are creating a new
creative economy, much of it transnational in nature. While I am not in a position to
fully evaluate this emerging network or to assess its extent (undoubtedly fairly elite
and minor) within the scope of this essay, it is clear that there is an overlapping system
developing of artists, non-profit cultural groups, publications, galleries, cinema
spaces, art buyers, educational programs, festivals, bloggers, curators, exhibits and
funding (often from Europe). Much of this could justly be called the ‘‘art world’’, and
not all involves photography. My focus here is on one phenomenon within this
creative economy (not confined to the work of artists) – the circulation of
photographs and practices that specifically engage with archives and archival impulses
to deliberately reshape the region’s image. While the larger creative economy
mentioned above covers much of the Middle East from North Africa to the Gulf, the
interest in archives seems to be concentrated in Lebanon and the Palestinian
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Territories. Some of these projects pull images out of the archive, family album, or
commercial studio, in the process changing their value and meanings from their
original usage. I will begin with a description of projects that are finding new uses for
old photographs and conclude with a discussion of the various projects that are
creating new photographs. In both instances the significance of these archival practices
is in their attempts to create new and diverse narratives through the medium of
photography to counter the long history of narrow, biased representation of the
region’s populations by numerous outsiders and internal elites.

New uses for old photographs

The establishment of the Fondation Arabe pour l’Image (Arab Image Foundation or
FAI) in 1996 by Raad and other artists is an example of the archival impulse as
described by Foster. The archive acquires, restores and categorizes amateur,
professional and anonymous photographs from about 1860 to the 1970s produced by
residents of the Middle East and North Africa. The collection now stands at greater
than 75,000 photographs. Its work has fed a growing interest in discovering and
conserving photography produced in the Middle East.9 By archiving a range of images,
from the serious to the frivolous, the commonplace to the unusual, the FAI is also
attempting to disrupt the mainstream media cliché of the region as homogeneous,
violent and static.
Nineteenth-century photographs that originally circulated among tourists, within
families, or through the offices of bureaucracies now move through the world via art
exhibits, academic works, picture books, websites, online databases, and the practices
of collectors and professional archivists. A family photograph that was previously
precious only as a depiction of a particular individual or familial group is now coveted
by an archive such as the FAI for its description of everyday Middle Eastern life in a
particular historical moment. The family photograph’s new value is conferred by the
desire to resurrect representations of quotidian life that had been submerged under
the overwhelming weight of predominantly Western visual themes of an exotic,
 26 PHOTOGRAPHIES

backward, traditional and violent social and geographical landscape. The FAI enables
the circulation of previously little seen images through its exhibits, publications,
collaborations and searchable online database. Many family collections are on loan and
stored in temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions. Culled from the family
photo album, scanned and uploaded to the website, a snapshot is then well situated to
move through museum displays, gallery exhibitions and published monographs,
studied by researchers, and used by artists. Photographs such as those assembled by
Akram Zaatari from the FAI archive for the book The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of
Transition in a Modernizing Society, for example, were first taken in the context of
gatherings with family or friends, travels, and commercial portraiture. Brought
together in a book, these images of people with cars, trains, and planes take on new
meanings beyond their original referents, and illuminate the entwined histories of
photography and modernity in the lives of early to mid-twentieth-century residents of
the Middle East (see figure 1). The volume also acts to refute the hackneyed vision
of the region as being at odds with the modern world.
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Writers for international magazines and newspapers profile the foundation and its
collection, thus spreading the images to a general public. Art journals like Camerawork in
San Francisco visit the FAI for inspiration. The Spring/Summer 2007 issue, titled ‘‘Not
Given: Troubling Gender in the Archive’’, focused on images in the FAI collection
(Camerawork). In this case, the writers selected images that appealed to their sensibilities
and goals, using them to explore curatorial ideas about the representation of Arab
women, identity, and classification systems. Although the photographs’ meanings slip
away from the FAI’s control when assembled by others, new images of Arabs as everyday
people laughing, dancing, wrestling and posing, have entered, however marginally, into
the Western imagination. Putting into circulation images of playfulness and joy helps
create an alternative vision that counterbalances the much more common image found in
Western media of people in the Middle East as stern, repressed, and aggressive.

FIGURE 1 ‘‘Not always on a camel, also on the BMW.’’ The photographer’s fiancée Samar, and
Tamara el Mufti sitting on the photographer’s BMW car. Jericho, Palestine, 1963. Photo credit:
Hisham Abdel Hadi. Collection: Abdel Hadi family/AIF. Copyright ß Arab Image Foundation.
 CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY 27

But the FAI’s main concern is not simply addressing the misconceptions of a
Western audience. It works for the ‘‘preservation and exhibition of [FAI’s]
photographic collections, for the study of Arab visual culture, and for the promotion
of contemporary Arab cultural production and analysis’’ (http://www.fai.org.lb/
CurrentSite/english/fset-presentation.htm). The FAI does not approach the photo-
graphs as art objects or strictly historical evidence. Instead, they are understood to be
vernacular cultural products, which deserve further research and study for what they
can reveal about photography’s role in Arab society. The collection has itself been
assembled through the art practices of its members, which include Akram Zaatari,
Walid Raad, Fouad Elkoury, Lara Baladi, and Yto Barrada. As they travel on personal
or professional business they follow up on leads and work to acquire historical
photographs from individuals and defunct commercial studios. Although acquisitions
of new material appear to have slowed in recent years, the circulation of FAI
photographs continues through the artists’ own work: Baladi has incorporated
photographs from the collection into her collages, while Zaatari’s recent work
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revolves around creatively presenting commercial studio photographs by Hashem

el-Madani in exhibitions and books.
Akram Zaatari is best known for his video work, but for the past five years has
been deeply involved with the archive of a studio photographer, Hashem el-Madani.
His research on Madani’s studio, Studio Shehrazade, founded in Saida, Lebanon in
1953, has taken the form of several books, exhibitions and events. Zaatari is not
primarily interested in the aesthetics of Madani’s photos but rather in investigating the
social relations and identities reflected in and produced by the photographs and the
practices of this studio in particular. Zaatari’s motivation for his video work, which
can be extended to his archival art, is partially explained when he states: ‘‘Alternative
histories written by many ordinary people are needed because diversity is the most
important factor in resisting collective misrepresentations, stereotypes, and so on.
Focusing on individuality thus becomes a political mission’’ (Hojeij 83–84). The
Madani Project, and other photographic collaborations such as the exhibition and book
Mapping Sitting, work to bring forth the uniqueness of individual experience to a
Lebanese and international audience. In 2007 Zaatari mounted an exhibition of
reprints from the Madani archive in a variety of small stores and workshops around
the old city of Saida (see figure 2). Each photograph depicts a shopkeeper in his place
of work that had been taken in the location where it is now exhibited, with a few
exceptions. Maps are available for navigating the alleyways, and each shop with a
photograph bears a signature red ‘‘m’’ in Arabic.
By bringing the photographs out of the archive into the streets and everyday shops of
Saida, Zaatari physically restores the images to the community from which they
originated. The photographs’ description of the social fabric around 1950 that is changed
but not lost is enriched through their dialogue with the contemporary landscape. Zaatari
and Madani engage the community but have also found a unique way to bring in
outsiders, often from a different social class, such as gallery-going Beirutis, who might
not normally frequent this part of town with its crumbling buildings, spare cafés, hole-in-
the-wall barbershops, cobblers and household goods stores. The treasure hunt experience
of searching for the photographs created encounters between local denizens and the
visitors, beyond the usual passive observation or commercial interaction.
 28 PHOTOGRAPHIES

FIGURE 2 A Hashem el-Madani photo (right) in a household goods shop, part of Akram Zaatari
and Madani’s exhibition of photos in Saida, Lebanon, 2007. Photo credit: Michelle Woodward.
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The artist Emily Jacir distills the Palestinian experience of displacement into
politically astute conceptual art. Living and working in both New York City and
Ramallah, she constructs paths to lost, or inaccessible, places and memories with words,
rough materials (such as newspaper, thread and tent canvas), and photographs. Her
project ‘‘Material for a Film’’ won the Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.
In this installation she reconstructs the story of the Palestinian poet Wael Zuaiter and his
assassination in Rome by Israeli agents in 1972 through historical photographs, video, and
materials from his life. In constructing the installation, Jacir took on the role of
researcher and archivist. She interviewed people who knew Zuaiter personally, visited
the apartment building where he lived and was shot twelve times, as well as traveled to
his family’s home in Nablus. Jacir also read letters and personal correspondence between
Zuaiter and his friends and family, and examined items kept by his friends. When Zuaiter
was shot, one bullet lodged in an old Arabic book of 1001 Nights, which he was
translating into Italian. Jacir photographed all the pages that were marked by the bullet.
She also learned to fire a .22 caliber pistol, the gun used to assassinate Zuaiter. She then
shot one bullet through every one of 1,000 blank white books. These were put on display
with the photos of the scarred 1001 Nights volume and other materials she had gathered
during her research. Jacir has thus assembled an historical archive to revive the memory
of Israel’s policy in the 1970s to assassinate leading Palestinians involved in whatever way
with the nationalist movement. By documenting his life as well as his death in English and
in prominent art venues she critiques this brutal policy while also recuperating a
Palestinian poet for especially Western viewers.
A large, though largely inaccessible, historical photography collection in the Middle
East is located at the Beirut office of the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS). An
independent non-profit organization, the IPS’s primary work is documentation, research
and publication on Palestinian affairs in Arabic, French and English. The photographic
collection consists of almost 10,000 images of Palestinian life, many from before the
establishment of Israel in 1948. Over 400 of these were published by the IPS in Before Their
Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876–1948 by Walid Khalidi in 1984.
However, since then the collection has remained essentially dormant and underused as an
 CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY 29

archival resource.10 A key feature of the archive is a collection of photographs by Khalil

Raad, a leading professional photographer in early twentieth-century Jerusalem. While
there is interest within the IPS to make the photographs accessible via the Internet, lack of
funding and institutional priorities have been stumbling blocks.
The IPS collection’s motivation to collect pre-1948 photographs is attested to in
Before Their Diaspora. Through photographs of agriculture, higher education,
politicians, architecture, social events, craftsmen, religious life, and more, the
viability and long-term presence of Palestinian society in what is now Israel and the
Palestinian Territories are documented. The archive consciously refutes claims that
Palestinians as a community did not exist pre-1948, as well as notions of the
Palestinians as fanatics or terrorists.

Archiving marginalized visions through creating new photographs

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Alongside the interest in using, collecting, and preserving historical photographs made
in the region, the archival impulse has extended to the archiving of new images, also
made in the Middle East. The primary focus of these projects is the collection and
distribution of images made by members of marginalized groups, such as Palestinian
refugees, Shia in Lebanon, and civilians in war. The Lebanese filmmaker Maher Abi
Samra, for example, began an archiving project called Cinemayat during the Israel
Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. It is a web portal described as ‘‘a space for the
expression of varying experiences of social and political crises (such as the war) and of
ambivalence, and the plurality of experience amongst communities and social groups
away from a simplistic black and white narrative’’ (http://beta.cinemayat.org/
?q5en/). Contributors can register and upload their photographs or videos. As of the
autumn of 2008 there have only been a few items archived online, including video
clips of a youth group called ‘‘We will Return’’ that formed in the Baddawi
Palestinian refugee camp after they were forced to flee their homes in Nahr el-Bared
camp during a siege of militants by the Lebanese army in 2007. One contributor took
portrait photographs in the style of identity pictures of young displaced people from
the south of Lebanon during the Israeli bombing who were finding shelter in Saida,
and another submitted photos of young women wearing the hijab, or head scarf,
playing exuberantly in the sea despite being fully clothed. Although its work as an
interventionist public archive appears to have stalled, this is an example of the
importance that Lebanese artists and intellectuals are placing on the act of narrating
their own experiences of war and everyday life (especially pronounced in video art).
The use of archival methods of collection and cataloging may not be systematic, but
the desire to construct a body of materials to counter the dominant view of the region
is clearly articulated.
The UMAM Documentation and Research Center, a Lebanese NGO with support
from foundations in the Netherlands and Germany, was established in 2004 to
maintain discussion about ‘‘civil violence and war memories’’, something many
Lebanese think is best forgotten. UMAM also strives to ‘‘provide a platform for public
access to, and exchange of, such memories’’ (http://www.umam-dr.org/). In
pursuit of these goals, UMAM invites the public to participate in the creation of the
 30 PHOTOGRAPHIES

center’s archive by donating documents, images and oral histories through various
events. Many of UMAM’s projects incorporate photography in an archival mode. For
example, ‘‘Collecting Dahiyeh’’ is a project that allows the public to contribute
photographs and oral histories related to the history of one neighborhood, Haret
Hreik in the Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, where the center is located and
where much of the firepower of the Israeli air force was directed in the summer of
2006. The aim of the directors, Lokman Slim and Monika Borgmann, is to counter the
perception that it is a monolithic Hizballah neighborhood.
Another project, through the center’s ‘‘Memory at Work’’ platform for truth and
reconciliation, is titled ‘‘Missing: Photo Exhibition in Progress’’. The exhibition
featured enlarged photographs of individuals who disappeared during the 1975–90
Lebanese civil wars mounted onto white gallery walls at the UNESCO Palace in April
2008 (http://memoryatwork.org/index.asp). Only a fraction of the thousands
missing have so far been included in this project. UMAM not only organizes events
and collects documents, it has also established plans to teach others through a
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workshop in January 2009 titled ‘‘Lest the Past Escapes Us: Archiving and
Documentation Techniques’’. The workshop description states UMAM’s goal as
working towards creating a national archive:

The lack of a single history text book that covers the civil war leaves a gaping hole
in the Lebanese educational system. Such documentation requires primary
sources from Lebanese history and highlights the absence of a national archive.
This workshop focuses on the skills, techniques and equipment necessary for
building archives of all kinds personal, institutional, etc. as a foundation for the
creation of a national archive.
(http://www.memoryatwork.org/
pageinformation.asp?id52&subId519&catid58)

After their collection of documents was damaged in the 2006 war, the directors
decided to digitize the archive for safekeeping and for greater accessibility. Through
exhibitions and numerous projects, UMAM is consciously creating an archive that
documents and publicizes what is often left unacknowledged in official or dominant
narratives.
Lens on Lebanon (LOL) describes itself as an ‘‘international grassroots
documentary initiative’’ established in July 2006 in response to the 34-day war
between Israel and Lebanon (http://www.lensonlebanon.org). It was founded by
Diana Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan and includes other Lebanese and international
journalists, designers and educators. With funding from Dutch, American, British and
Lebanese organizations, Lens on Lebanon holds media production workshops to teach
video, storytelling and photography to residents of areas affected by the war
(especially the south, the Beqa’a valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut). The
website acts as an archive of the workshops’ productions and as an amplifier of new
voices in line with the organization’s goal of ‘‘cultural enfranchisement’’ of previously
marginalized communities. Workshops have been expanded to Palestinian refugee
camps such as Rashidieh, where young people paired text with photographs to tell a
story about life in the camp. In this instance, one girl laments the presence of garbage
 CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY 31

everywhere she goes, two girls document the challenges and successes of disabled
people, and two boys narrate their efforts to start a dance troupe to preserve the
heritage of their grandfathers while balancing school and work duties (see figure 3).
Presenting these and many other stories on a website in English creates an archive, a
new body of images of Lebanese and Palestinian refugees for an international
audience. Of equal importance are Lens on Lebanon’s goals of shattering stereotypes
within Lebanon, where both the Shia residents of the south and Palestinian refugees
are often disparaged, and giving agency to those who are usually depicted as victims
not creators.
With the dearth of Palestinian state institutions, archives and museums, non-
governmental projects documenting Palestinian experiences and histories have
proliferated, particularly on the Internet. Unlike Lebanon where there is a relatively
stable, if fragile, infrastructure to sustain offices, communication and personnel, in the
Occupied Territories movement is severely limited and resources are scarce. A large
diaspora that is spread out across the globe also makes the use of the Internet for
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archiving purposes an attractive option. For example, Palestine Remembered is a

commemorative website in English with occasional Arabic where over 12,000
members from around the world upload their photos, video testimonies, and written
histories about Palestinian towns and villages. The focus is on recording the
experience of those who fled and were forced to flee in 1948, lost their homes, land
and possessions and became refugees. Although oral history is the priority, there are
over 15,000 photographs, the majority of which have been taken over the past fifteen
years and depict Israeli and Palestinian cityscapes and document traditional
architecture. Some of the photographs are historical images from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, often acquired as prints from the Matson Collection at
the US Library of Congress. Picture titles written by the members, such as ‘‘The
LOOTED HOUSE [sic] of Shukri Rezik in al-Ramla which currently houses the city’s
municipality’’, reinscribe the Israeli landscape with a history that is usually elided in

FIGURE 3 A handicapped mother in Rashidyeh camp caring for her daughter. Photo credit:
Sausan Said, courtesy of Lens on Lebanon.
 32 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Israeli society and international media (http://www.palestineremembered.com ).

Accumulating visual and oral testimony about Palestinian life, architecture, and
agriculture as it was before and after 1948, the website aims to develop community,
provide information to an international audience and to ‘‘amplify [the refugees’]
voices in cyberspace’’ (http://www.palestineremembered.com/MissionStatement.htm).
Another project to keep alive refugee memories is Photo48, the photography
component of the Nakba Archive, which consists of 500 oral histories on video of
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and is co-directed by Diana Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan,
who also founded Lens on Lebanon. The Archive is a collaborative project of Palestinian
researchers in Lebanon and academics from Harvard and the United Kingdom.11
Photo48 is a collection of the refugees’ personal photographs, which have been scanned
and returned to them (see figure 4). The Photo48 webpage explains the directors’ goals,
which includes publishing a book (currently on hold while funds are raised):

The importance of preserving these intimate remnants of a history now largely

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invisible within a larger global frame of reference, cannot be underestimated as

Palestine as a historical signifier is in danger of losing its signified … This book
proposal is the first to focus specifically on the photos and memories of
Palestinians from the camps (as opposed to photos of the Palestinian elite, about
which several books have been published).
(http://www.nakba-archive.org/photo48.htm)

This archiving project is thus countering two dominant discourses, a larger one which
sees no significant Palestinian history before 1948 and, within those discourses that do
acknowledge this history, a tendency to focus on elite experiences.

FIGURE 4 George Farrage from Katamon, Jerusalem (first on left) on a picnic with friends in the
1930s. Collection of George Farrage, courtesy of Photo48.
 CREATING MEMORY AND HISTORY 33

Some organizations are using photography to record material culture that is in

danger of disappearing. In Ramallah, the West Bank, the architectural renovation and
conservation NGO Riwaq maintains a Registry of Historic Buildings in Palestine.
Begun in 1994, it has now cataloged the cultural heritage and built environment in
422 localities, documenting more than 50,000 historical buildings. The registry
includes 45,000 photographs (http://www.riwaq.org). Although not available online
in English, the registry has been published in three volumes. Similar to the projects
discussed above, comprehensively cataloging the material remains of an historical
Palestinian presence on the land is not only an effort to salvage heritage but is also an
act of resistance to the ongoing Israeli settlement project where Palestinian land is
expropriated for exclusively Jewish use and historical narratives.
The desire to correct prevailing views of the Middle East is, at least in part,
driving the retrieval of historical photographs for new uses and the creation of archives
of new photographs. The global circulation of these photographs and projects is
shaping the stories people can tell about the Middle East. These new practices, and the
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new histories they promote, may spark dialogue and complicate the picture of the
region, for residents and for outsiders alike. In the absence of unifying national
archives these projects are creating multiple archives and narratives, memorializing
diverse experiences. However, they cannot replace the work done by nationally
recognized repositories. Of course, national institutions can be used oppressively, like
in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to restrict the national narrative to the one sanctioned by
the state. Although never disinterested or neutral, national institutions for history
and memory can ideally provide a space for reconciliation and compromise among
formerly fragmented communities and provide them with common ground. The
archival impulse in Lebanon and among Palestinians thus appears to be signaling not
only an urge to confront visual stereotypes but also a deeper social and political need
for institutions to memorialize and include the experiences of all citizens and
communities into a wider unified national narrative. In the meantime, artists,
culture workers and intellectuals are using photography in an archival mode to fill
the gap.

Notes
1 For examples see Demos on the ‘‘Out of Beirut’’ exhibition at Modern Art
Oxford. Several Lebanese artists (Walid Raad and Lamia Joreige) were included in
the International Center of Photography’s exhibit ‘‘Archive Fever: Uses of the
Document in Contemporary Art’’ in New York City in 2008. An entire issue of
Art Journal (Summer 2007) was dedicated to art in Beirut. A good discussion of the
art scene and its interests from this issue is in Rogers.
2 These other projects are not completely separate from the art world; instead, they
are sometimes influenced by or connected to artists. Also, there are connoisseurs
of historical photographs in the Middle East and abroad who are amassing personal
collections. For this essay, however, I am interested in practices that are not solely
the expression of an individual vision.
3 For an excellent study of the folk practices of re-creating historical narratives of
specific geographic locales by destroyed and dispersed communities through the
 34 PHOTOGRAPHIES

compilation of collective memories (in the form of texts, photographs and hand-
drawn maps) into memorial books, see Slyomovics.
4 One possible exception, not yet realized, is the slated transformation of the
Barakat house in Beirut into a municipal museum that will retell some of the civil
wars’ history, at the least by leaving the physical traces of sniper activity conducted
from this building. See Agence France Presse, ‘‘New Beirut Museum Will Teach
Lessons of Civil War’’, The Daily Star 18 Oct. 2008.
5 See The State of Israel National Photo Collection (http://147.237.72.31/
topsrch/defaulte.htm ) at the Government Press Office and Yad Vashem’s online
photo archive (http://www6.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/photo?lang5en&
homepage5true ). The Ministry of Tourism also has a photo archive (http://
gallery.tourism.gov.il/pages/main.aspx ), as does the quasi-governmental Keren
Kayemeth LeIsrael – Jewish National Fund (http://www.kkl.org.il/kkl/english/
main_subject/kkl-jnf%20photo%20archive/photoarchive.x).
6 While it has become common for scholars to critique photographs produced both
by Westerners and Middle Easterners for their Orientalist misrepresentations of
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the region, little attention has been paid to the indigenous adoption and
adaptations of photography within Middle Eastern domestic life, business, art and
politics. For work that does address these uses, see Sheehi and Woodward. For a
study of art practices in Egypt, see Winegar.
7 For an exception, and overview of documentary and art photography in the
region, see Melis.
8 Another set of albums was sent to the British Museum. The original glass plate
negatives are housed in the library of Istanbul University.
9 The publication of Khalidi’s book Before Their Diaspora has also been influential in
inspiring the recovery and preservation of historical photographs in the region.
10 A second book drawing on historical photographs in the archive is also by Khalidi,
namely All That Remains.
11 Nakba Archive (http://www.nakba-archive.org). For a description of this project
by a co-director, see Allan.

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Michelle L. Woodward is an independent scholar with extensive experience living

and working in the Middle East, the photo editor of Middle East Report magazine (http://
www.merip.org/), a photographer and an instructor in photography in Baltimore, MD.
Published work includes ‘‘Photographic Style and the Depiction of Israeli–Palestinian
Conflict’’, Jerusalem Quarterly 31 (Summer 2007): 6–21.