Frank Scholten set out to produce an illustrated Bible, instead returning with captivating documentation of the modernist transformations and intimate views of Palestine from 1921-1923. He documented Palestine as the British Mandate was formally being established, with a taxonomical and ethnographic eye, relating to the modern world he photographed through Biblical passage to explain the complexity of social life of the ‘Holy Land’.
Palestine in Transition. Frank Scholten’s Visual Archive of the British Mandate retraces the importance of Frank Scholten’s documentation of the transformations of the British Mandate period. By taking a geographical approach to the collection – like Scholten himself – this book effectively revisits his incomplete project by presenting different regions through discrete chapters by scholars specialized in each field, a century after his visit and the dramatic social, cultural and political upheavals that the ‘Holy Land’ has undergone since then.
By taking a geographical approach to the collection—like Scholten himself—this book revisits his incomplete project by presenting different regions through contributions by scholars specialized in each field, a century after his visit and the dramatic social, cultural, and political upheavals that the “Holy Land” has undergone since then.
List of Figures Map of main places Scholten visited between 1921 and
1923 Beyond the Frame: Window into the Unseen Histories of Palestine
Introduction. Revisiting Palestine Illustrated
1. "A Frivolous Affair": The
Pilgrimage to Nebi Rubin
2. A Transformed Rural Landscape: Scholtens Visual
Representation of Coastal Palestinian Villages Destroyed in 1948
3. A Middle
Eastern Photosphere: 1920s Tel Aviv as Space, Statement, and Idea
4. Echoes
of Daher al-'Omar: Land, Labor, and Architecture in Scholtens Galilee
5.
Part of the Palestinian Landscape: Jews in Scholtens Photographs of 1920s
Palestine
6. Capturing Urban Modernity: Architecture and Agriculture in
Modern Jaffa
7. In the Southern Jordan Valley with Frank Scholten: Sacred
Topography and the Revival of Jericho
8. Scholtens Transjordanian Journey: A
Kaleidoscopic Perspective on a Modern Holy Land I ndex
Karène Sanchez Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern studies at Groningen University and co-director of the Centre for Historical Studies. Her publications include (with Sary Zananiri) Imaging and Imagining Palestine- Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (19181948) (2021).
Sary Zananiri is an artist, cultural historian and Senior Lecturer at Monash University. His research interests sit at the intersection of nationalism, colonialism, religious narrative and visual culture, with a particular focus on photography.
