This book captures one of the most critical contributions of the growing field of the visual cultures of the Arab region and Palestine in particular: the idea that found images are in and of themselves telling of the ways in which colonial regimes of visuality, like orientalism, were unknowingly countered in everyday practices of those that lived them. Camera Palaestina demands that we look beyond the gaze and into the lived experiences of those Indigenous image makers that collected material about their political and social lives on their own terms.

This book is a brilliant potential history of Palestine, centered on seven photographic albums collected and curated by Wasif Jawhariyyeh from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. With decolonial commitment and intellectual breadth, the authors turn the photographs into an inalienable entitlement (kawshun) to Palestine, and turn Palestine into an 'uninterrupted albeit traumatic' place, whose existence can neither be eradicated by Zionists actions nor erased by European narratives. This is a must-read book for scholars of Palestine and photography.

Camera Palaestina opens a new chapter in the history of photography in the Middle East. Traditionally dominated by analyses of Orientalist photography taken by Europeans and American, the focus shifts to photographers from the region. This unique book covers Palestine's political, social, and cultural history from an underrepresented perspective during times of critical transformation.

Camera Palaestina offers readers both a rich visual chronicle of Palestinian social and political life in the late Ottoman and British Mandate period and a granular account of the history of photography in Palestine. The story of these archives—with their multiple genres, subjects, and standpoints—highlights the polyvalent terms of Palestinian modernity in the pivotal decades before 1948 while offering the grounds for a new theorization of Palestinian spectatorship as anticolonial practice.

Who knew that one man's photographic collection could reveal such a multifaceted picture of a society? Camera Palaestina shows how these photographs, their arrangement, and Wasif Jawhariyyeh's commentary paint an intriguing picture of Palestinian society before the Nakba, one with more ethical complexity, more religious coexistence (including with Jews), less homogeneity, and above all a society less centered on colonial powers than some may have been led to believe. The three intertwined perspectives on these albums collaborate to trouble notions of 'the' Palestinian subject. This is a profound study of the photographic practices of collecting, arranging, and annotating.