Khalil Raad - Photographic Works

Photographic Works

Raad's photography documented political events and daily life in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon over the course of fifty years. He produced over 1230 glass plates which were rescued from his studio during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War by a young Italian friend who crossed no-man's land several times at night. Also in his studio archive were a number of negatives, some of which have yet to be printed. The entire archive was donated to the Institute of Palestine Studies and many of the photographs were published in the work, Before their Diaspora by the Journal of Palestine Studies.

A collection of postcards that bear Raad's signature are held by the Middle East Centre of Oxford University together with 40 prints of Ottoman soldiers in Palestine from World War I. Captioned in English, these photographs "had clearly been intended for use as propaganda by the Ottoman forces," according to Badr al-Hajj. Ruth Raad, Khalil's daughter, said that her father was a friend of the military governor of Syria under Ottoman rule, Jamal Pasha, who facilitated Raad's access to the Egyptian-Palestinian front.

Raad also produced postcards for tourists. Modern scholars, such as Annelies Moors, have critiqued his presentation of Palestinian Arabs in this body of work, noting that he "often used biblical connotations that conscribed their lives as static," thus conforming to the Orientalism characterizing Western postcard portrayals of the Other.

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