Unsilencing Palestine 1922-1923: hundred years after the beginning of the British Mandate -the Frank Scholten photographic collection revisited (original) (raw)

This piece presents an interview conducted by Karène Sanchez Summererand Sary Zananiri with Salim Tamari and Yair Wallach about the FrankScholten photographic collection (now available with CreativeCommons access), discussing the archive’s significance and use forresearchers of the history of Mandate Palestine.During the turbulence ofthe period after the First World War, Dutch photographer FrankScholten (1881-1942) travelled to Palestine with the aim of producingan‘illustrated Bible’. He arrived in Palestine in 1921, where he stayed fortwo years. While the bulk of his photo collection consists of images ofPalestine, his camera lens gives a snapshot into modernity in theEastern Mediterranean more broadly. The entire Frank Scholtencollection, consisting of 12,000 negatives and 14,000 prints, represents awork in progress towards a 16-volume set of books on the‘Holy Land’,only two volumes of which were ever published.One of the hallmarks ofScholten’s collected work is the thoroughness with which he imagedPalestine. His images of people cut across religious and confessionallines, ethnic backgrounds, and class and urban-rural divides. He imagedpeople at work as well as in their leisure time, but most of all, heimaged people in the context of their daily life, rather than divorcedfrom the landscape.