‘Bedouin Boy With Camel’: An Analysis of Archival Photographs of Bedouin Children in Palestine

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes photographs found in historical archives of Bedouin children in Palestine from over a hundred years ago. The Bedouin children were photographed in their natural environment by foreign European photographers touring the Holy Land. Young children were photographed held by their mothers, at work, on a path, or near the tent. The research unravels the context in which the pictures were constructed, documented, and archived. The study explores how colonialist photography in the region generated tropes of presentation of Bedouin children and examines its effects on forms of representation of their childhood of the time. The Bedouin women’s inferior status in society and its impact on the documentation of women and children are also examined. The study highlights notions of other children dressing up as ‘Hebrew Bedouins’ for studio portraiture as part of an orientalist cliché.

KEYWORDS:

• Bedouin
• photography
• children
• childhood
• culture
• colonialism
• postcolonialism
• Palestine

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We explored archives of public and private collections. The public archives we consulted include the 1893 photographic albums of the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, the Israeli Government Picture collection, the archives of the University of Haifa, Piki wiki, the California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside, the PEF online archive and Flickr photographs, the Magnum archive, and the American Colony Archive and The Matson collection in the U.S. Library of Congress. The private collections we used are The Ken Jacobsen Orientalist photography collection, and the private archive of Dr. Yehuda Ben Assa. We also consulted the personal collection of John D. Whiting of the American Colony in Jerusalem, who photographed people, locations, and events in the Middle East from 1890–1954. Whiting created Diaries in Photos (1934–1939). Additionally, we surveyed books and academic publications.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edna Barromi-Perlman

Edna Barromi-Perlman is a research fellow of the Institute for Research of the Kibbutz and the cooperative idea in the University of Haifa, and an Honorary Research Associate of The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, at Brandeis University. USA. Her research focuses on archival photographs in Palestine and Israel, personal historical albums and analysis of gender and photography in Judaism. Her work appears in academic journals such as Social Semiotics, Journal of Israeli History, Journal of Visual Literacy, Journal of Landscape Research, Journal of Media and Religion, Photography and Culture, Journal of Landscape Ecology, International Journal of Qualitative Methods. She received her PhD at the University of Sussex, and her MFA in Goldsmiths College in the UK. Her book Photographs of Childhood and Parenting on Kibbutz: Collective Memories and Private Memorials was published in 2020. Edna is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual Literacy in Kibbutz College of Education in Israel.

Ruth Kark

Ruth Kark, Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written and edited 27 books and 200 articles on the history and historical geography of Palestine/Israel. Her research interests include among other topics, land and settlement activity, policy and law, Western civilizations and the Holy Land (consuls, churches, missionaries, modern technology), women and gender, museology and ethnographic museums, as well as the Bedouin in the Middle East.