It All Began with Karimeh Abbud
Karimeh Abbud began photographing Palestine as a teenager.
Born in 1896, she received her first camera from her father in 1913. She photographed family, friends, landscapes, and places around Bethlehem, developing the pictures herself.
By the early 1920s, photography had become her profession.
Her photographs carried a stamp in
Arabic and English: Karimeh Abbud — Lady Photographer. In a 1924 newspaper advertisement, she offered photographic sessions to women and families. She worked in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Haifa, Jerusalem, and other Palestinian towns, photographing weddings, children, families, streets, churches, and landscapes.
At a time when photography in Palestine was dominated largely by men and foreign photographers, Abbud was a Palestinian woman running her own photographic business.
This was everyday Palestine
Much of the photography produced in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was made for foreign audiences.
European photographers often looked for the biblical Holy Land: shepherds, ancient streets, religious sites, traditional clothing, and scenes that could be sold as souvenirs.
Abbud photographed religious sites too, but her archive also shows Palestinian life from inside.
Families sit together in gardens. Children pose for portraits. Women appear in homes and studios. Cars move through streets. Schools, weddings, neighborhoods, churches, and family outings become part of the record.
One of the photographs in this week's post shows Nazareth around 1925: shops, cars, buildings, and people moving through the city.
Today, images of Palestine are overwhelmingly associated with conflict, displacement, checkpoints, destroyed buildings, refugee camps, and war.
Abbud’s photographs preserve something else: ordinary Palestinian life before those images came to dominate how the world saw the country.
Being a woman gave Abbud access many male photographers did not have.
She could photograph women and girls inside homes and family spaces. Families could hire her to photograph daughters, wives, children, weddings, and private gatherings.
The photograph of women carrying water belongs to that part of her archive.
Women walk together, carrying out a daily task side by side.
Mount Tabor, a century ago
Abbud also photographed churches, landscapes, and sacred sites for visitors.
She produced postcards, including hand-colored images published under the title Souvenir de Palestine, and sold them in Nazareth.
The hand-tinted photograph of the Church of the Transfiguration at Mount Tabor comes from this commercial work. The present church had been completed only a few years earlier.
Her postcards meant that visitors could leave Palestine carrying photographs of the Holy Land made by a Palestinian woman.
A Palestinian record
Abbud worked during the final years of Ottoman rule and throughout much of the British Mandate period.
She died in 1940, eight years before the Nakba.
Her archive preserves Palestinian towns, families, streets, homes, and social life before the mass displacement of 1948 and the destruction or depopulation of hundreds of Palestinian communities.
The importance of that archive is also in who made it.
Abbud was not visiting Palestine.
She lived there.
A century later
Palestinian women are still photographing and reporting on the places where they live.
Since October 2023, Palestinian journalists in Gaza have worked through bombardment, repeated displacement, hunger, destroyed communications, and the deaths of colleagues and family members.
Foreign journalists have largely been prevented from entering Gaza independently, leaving Palestinian journalists on the ground to produce much of the visual record.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has described this as the deadliest period for journalists since it began keeping records.
Palestinian women journalists and photographers have been among those martyred while documenting it.
Photojournalist Mariam Abu Dagga was martyred at Nasser Hospital in August 2025.
Photographer Fatma Hassona documented Gaza throughout the war before she too was martyred.
Others continue to work.
Among them is Doaa Mohammad Al-Baz, a Palestinian photographer and journalist from Gaza. Her photographs document destruction and displacement, but also families, children, and everyday life.
In 2026, her work was included in FotoEvidence’s Journalism Is Not a Crime, a collective archive of 73 Palestinian journalists and photojournalists documenting Gaza.
It all began with Karimeh Abbud
Karimeh Abbud photographed weddings, streets, churches, families, and towns.
Today’s Palestinian women journalists photograph war, displacement, death, destruction, and the daily lives continuing inside them.
They are separated by a century and by radically different circumstances.
What connects them is simple:
Palestinians documenting Palestine themselves.
When we want to know what Nazareth looked like a century ago, we can look at Karimeh Abbud’s photographs.
When future generations look back at Gaza during these years, many of the images they see will have been made by Palestinian journalists who lived through what they photographed.
Comments