Photo Agenda

Last spring, while at DePauw, I took a course called "Politics of the Past." It was about how people use objects, symbols, and images to make claims to the past to further a political agenda. The professor, who is now at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is an archaeologist, so a lot of our studies related to how archaeology is used to make claims to the past. As we can all imagine, and have seen clearly from our readings, this has been and still is done extensively in Jerusalem.  In one of our classes we discussed National Geographic's use of photography and captions to further it's political and social agendas. Indigenous peoples were especially exploited in order to make a clear distinction between the American/Western, civilized world and the primitive/wild world of others. This came to mind as soon as I began reading Issam Nassar's essay. Nassar makes an interesting claim when he says, "Nineteenth-century photographs of Palestine were not only about representing the country’s landscape; they also revealed something very significant about the way in which Europeans thought of themselves and of the world around them at that particular time in history." These photographers wanted to send a message to their people at home - a message emphasizing and glorifying the realities of this biblical world while belittling and trivializing the Palestinian people. The message apparently instigated major European powers to become "protectors of the different Christian communities in Palestine, a role that further enabled them to expand their presence in the city." This is an important concept to understand, because it makes it easier to imagine how the Zionists could rationalize their entrance into the city and how the British permitted it to happen.