Photographic theorists have pointed out that the history of photography in Palestine is strongly entwined with colonialism with photographers selectively highlighting the ancient biblical past at the expense of modern Palestinian life. Auguste Salzmann was one such photographer who – influenced by theories of amateur archaeologist Louis Félicien Caignart de Saulcy – attempted to prove through photography that the physical remains of Jerusalem dated from the period of Solomon (c. 970-931 BCE), rather than the Roman period (1st century CE). Salzmann helped fund his scholarly research through the sale of lavish photo books for the armchair tourists of the West, creating an ideological confluence of photography, archaeology and religious tourism.

The Palestinian modernity that enabled such biblified photos – from the formalisation of academic disciplines to the advent of photo-reproductive technologies to the communication and transport infrastructure that facilitated tourism – was paradoxically undermined by the global projection of ancient biblical land that eclipsed the imaging of modern Palestine.

Biblical narrative had its own antecedents in Palestinian visual culture. Nicola Saig, arguably the first Palestinian modernist painter, first trained as iconographer. The late Kamal Boullata and, more recently, Nisa Ari have both looked in detail at the ways in which photographic practices impacted Saig’s paintings, who often worked with imagery from photographs, particularly the American Colony Photo Department.

Many of these Palestinian iconographers, hailing from Orthodox backgrounds, had deep links with Russia and Russian populations living in late Ottoman Palestine. Memoirs discuss Russian pilgrims as being a lucrative market for Arab Orthodox cultural producers until the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917.