When Kegham Djeghalian photographed daily life in Gaza last century, the Palestinian territory was synonymous with Hollywood-inspired brides, fancy dress parties and excursions to smoke a hookah at the beach.
They are images from a time far removed from the rubble and tent cities of the now war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
“It’s a Gaza we no longer know. A joyful Gaza, one full of hope, connected to the world, with trains and an airport,” said his grandson, who has curated a show of his work in France’s southern city of Marseille.
Djeghalian survived the Armenian genocide of 1915 — a term strongly denied by Turkey — then settled in Gaza, opening the city’s first ever photo studio in 1944.
He refused to leave, despite the recurring conflicts hitting the small territory wedged between Egypt and what became Israel in 1948, spending four decades capturing images of the Palestinian society that had adopted him, up until his death in 1981.
Some 300 of his surviving photographs are on show in Marseille until September.
– ‘Diverse society’ –
In one image, children have clambered onto each other to form a human pyramid in the courtyard of a school for Palestinian refugees displaced after the creation of Israel.
In another, women with voluminous hair blowouts pose smiling next to a sewing machine.
In a third, French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir have just stepped off a small propeller plane.
The photograph has no caption, but the pair visited the Gaza Strip in March 1967, when it was occupied by Egypt, shortly before Israel seized the coastal territory in the Six-Day war.
“I grew up with family stories about Kegham, the Gazan photographer who survived the Armenian genocide,” the curator, who inherited the same name as his grandfather and calls himself Kegham Jr, told AFP.
The 41-year-old professor of visual culture, who spent part of his childhood in Egypt, says his father discovered over 1,000 photo negatives “by chance” in 2018 in three red boxes at the back of a cupboard in the family’s Cairo apartment.
They included studio portraits and family photos, images of children on balconies and at the beach, and crowds in the streets.
“We see a diverse society: Armenians, Greeks, Palestinians, Bedouins. But also those displaced in 1948,” said Kegham Jr.
Today two-thirds of Gaza’s population are descendants of Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.
– ‘Unfinished’ –
Kegham Jr said he did not want any captions or context to the pictures in the exhibition titled “Photo Kegham of Gaza: Unboxing”, which is to travel to Bristol in the United Kingdom in October.
The “interrupted and unfinished” archives thus illustrate “a rupture of histories, shattered by war, by genocide, by occupation”, he said.
Kegham Jr was unable to visit Gaza, with the territory under blockade since Hamas seized control in 2007, and then a devastating war ravaging the territory after the Palestinian Islamist militant group attacked Israel in October 2023.
To complete his photo collections, the grandson reached out to a Palestinian called Marwan al-Tarazi who held part of the archives after his brother inherited the studio.
A part of the exhibition dubbed “Zoom call” shows screenshots of their conversation in 2021.
The collaboration was interrupted when, in October 2023, Israeli strikes killed Tarazi, his wife and grandchild, he said.
In front of the images at the Marseille Photography Centre, Houri Varjabedian, a 70-year-old Marseille resident hailing from an Armenian family in Lebanon, said it felt like looking into a family album.
Her maternal grandfather, a dentist in the Ottoman army, had himself been photographed in Gaza, she said.
She said it was heartbreaking to see “those wonderful palm trees, that beach”.
“It’s a bit terrible given the current events,” she added.
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