Performing Self, Performing Other (2020)
Manipulated photographic postcard sourced from Palestinian family archives | Dimensions variable | Edition of 15 + 1 APFrom around the late 19th century a number of studio photographers in Jerusalem, Jaffa and other cities began to offer portraits in what was couched as ‘traditional’ costumes, provided by the studio. The phenomenon has been described as ‘cultural cross dressing’ and analysed primarily as an Orientalist phenomenon targeted at Western tourists and visitors to the region. Working with images drawn from Palestinian family photo albums, this series explores questions of identity and authenticity in portraits of ‘cultural cross dressing’. Commissioning portraits donning ‘traditional’ clothes supplied by studios was a transgressive act for urban Palestinians, not culturally, but in terms of class, unlike their Western counterparts.
The misconstrual of such images today as authentic documents speaks to the lack of understanding of the modern urban middle classes who commissioned such photos. Indeed, a matrix of class and modernity distanced these urban middle class Palestinians from such costumes that – by this period – were seen as the purvey of the rural or the working classes.
What emerges from these images is an urban youth culture with queer, gender-bending subtexts, speaking to solidarities between urban and rural Palestinians as the Zionist movement grew, that have since erased by the contemporary orientalist lens.
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Costume and the Image: Authenticity, Identity and Portrait Photography in Palestine - Book Chapter