After Geert van Kesteren caused international fame with his books Why Mister, Why? and Baghdad Calling about the war in Iraq, he migrated to the city of Jaffa in Israel, where his focus shifted from photography to cinematography. In his bookcase there are two hefty photo books about Jaffa begging for attention: Palestine Illustrated (1929) by Frank Scholten. It’s the start of a new project, Jaffa Revisited, that he initiated with Israeli curator Guy Raz and historian Or Aleksandrowicz. During this evening they will tell us more about the story behind this unknown photo collection and why this lost memory of 1920s Palestine is so important to share.
Guy Raz is a photography curator at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, writing the
history of photography in Israel/Palestine (1839-2022). He has curated a selection
of exhibitions in Israel and Israeli photography around the world and is setting up an
unprecedented national Israeli photography archive.
Or Aleksandrowicz is an urban and architectural historian. Aleksandrowicz is a faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He is the head of a newly-established Big Data in Architectural Research (BDAR) lab at the Faculty which is dedicated to collecting, processing, and analyzing physical, spatial, functional, visual, and semantic data related to architecture and planning, including the application of digital tools in historical research.
Maartje van den Heuvel is an art historian and curator of Photography at the Leiden
University Libraries in the Netherlands that manages the Scholten Photographic
Collection for the Netherlands Institute of the Near East (NINO).
Geert van Kesteren produced two of the most relevant photobooks about the United States’ Iraq war, instantly recognised as collector items. His works were exhibited worldwide e.g. the Barbican Art Gallery in London and Visa pour l’Image in Arles, and are in the permanent collection of the Rijksmuseum, and recipient of many awards, such as the ICP’s Infinity Award and a World press photo. He switched to cinematography and now lives and works from Jaffa, a hundred years after Frank Scholten.
Mustafa Kabha is a is a professor of history. His research interests focus on the history of the Palestinian people in the modern era. He examines the political, social, cultural, economic and geographic history of the Palestinians, especially in the State of Israel, including the Arab press, education, Bedouin society, refugees and prisoners.
