Capturing Land in Palestine: The Indigenous Manzar in the Palestinian Photography Archive

Abstract This article examines how archival photographs of Palestine captured by orientalist and Indigenous photographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can act as tools of resistance against Zionist obfuscation and erasure of Palestinian existence by offering a view (manzar) that functions as an Indigenous claim for Palestinian belonging to the land. It explores how archives, approached as anti-colonial spaces, ensure access to these views (manazer) and make it possible to retrieve the Indigenous spectators and subjects from the landscapes depicted in early photographs from the region, thereby challenging Zionist attempts to obfuscate and erase Indigenous Palestinian existence from the land. Both the Indigenous and orientalist photographic views of Palestine afford the opportunity to develop the “civil contract of photography”—the mutually assured social contracts generated by the photographer, subject, and viewer—across time, despite ongoing settler-colonial occupation and genocide.