NEGATIVES COME TO LIFE
A treasure trove of old photographs gives a rare glimpse into the little-documented history of Gaza, before the sophisticated seaside city and the broader Gaza Strip turned into a cramped prison for more than two million people.
By Catherine Mazy
Kegham Djeghalian captured the important moments of life—the weddings, funerals, parties, dignitary visits—for four decades. He opened the first photography studio in Gaza City in 1944, and his love for his adopted city comes through not just in his professional work but also in the photos he took for himself—of family, friends and his metropolis.
Djeghalian died in 1981. When his grandson, also named Kegham Djeghalian, opened three red boxes of his grandfather’s negatives in 2018, he also opened a rare window into life in Gaza in the mid-20th century. After three years of work, he turned those photos into an exhibition as part of Cairo Photo Week in March.
“This is a city that has been under-documented,” Djeghalian says. “It’s not Jerusalem. It’s not Bethlehem. These cities had plenty of photographers. Gaza did not have many. Even in those tiny little boxes, I cannot begin to tell you what’s in there. Documents proving the ravaging of Gaza in just six months in 1956.” That was when Israel invaded Egypt, to which Gaza belonged, during the Suez Crisis. Gaza was already home to many Palestinian refugees from Al Nakba, or The Catastrophe, who fled violence or were expelled when the British Mandate for Palestine became Israel in 1948—the Jews in their turn having fled anti-Semitism and genocide in Europe. During their brief occupation in 1956, Israelis expelled a number of Palestinian families—some for the second time—from homes in Gaza. The territory’s refugee population swelled again after the 1967 war. Displacement upon displacement.
The elder Djeghalian was no stranger to displacement himself. When he was a toddler, he fled the Armenian genocide of 1915. Most of his family was killed; he escaped with his mother and a maternal uncle to Syria. But his mother died shortly after the move, and he was placed in an orphanage in Lebanon. In his late teens he moved to Palestine, to Jerusalem and Jaffa, where he met Zevart Nakashian. They married in 1944 and moved to Gaza, where he opened Studio Kegham.
“I personally believe he was trained as a photographer in Jaffa,” his grandson says. “To open a photography studio was a big investment—not just for a camera, but you need film, a darkroom. There’s no school for photography per se. You would need an apprenticeship.”
The photos include portraits and weddings, but also picnics and dinners, people at the beach, people drinking—all classes of society. Women wore chic dresses. A picture of a costume party shows a group of men in women’s clothes from different countries—the height of hilarity in the 1950s and 1960s.
“What struck me most is how unsettling it is psychologically looking at these images and connecting them to the mental image of Gaza today,” Djeghalian says. In assembling the exhibition, he sought photographs taken by his grandfather, “he was taking portraits of all the key families of Gaza, and those photos exist in their homes.” Many members of the Palestinian diaspora responded, but the response in Gaza itself was muted. “A lot of the ladies would not share the photos because they were not veiled at the time,” he says. “The mentality has completely changed,” worn down by bombardments, lack of food, water, electricity, jobs, health care, and more, all while not being allowed to leave. Gaza has been under a blockade by Israel and ruled by Hamas since 2007. “They are making living conditions so difficult that you lose your civility, your humanity. You think a few decades cannot change the DNA of a city and yet it did.”
“A lot of the ladies would not share the photos because they were not veiled at the time. The mentality has completely changed.”
The elder Djeghalian also took photos of important events, although he wasn’t a journalist, “there are no photos in newspapers that we know of.” He documented the Israeli invasion and visits to Gaza by Che Guevara and by Hassan Al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The grandson met a person from Gaza living in London who knew the photographer and who related a “mind-boggling” story. “My grandfather was such an activist that after 1967”—the time of the Six-Day War—“in addition to documenting Israeli activity he activated a network of Armenian photographers to collect negatives from Palestine. The man in London was the 16-year-old who transported the negatives to Egypt. I never knew how much my grandfather was involved in this resistance,” Djeghalian says, despite being neither Palestinian nor Muslim—the grandfather was a Christian Armenian.
“I’m fascinated by this man. He’s such an emblem to me at least. Two of the most atrocious acts in the 20th century, he’s in the crossroads of these two catastrophes. It’s kind of sad or ironic that he left one genocide to stumble into another.”
The younger Djeghalian never met his grandfather—he was born three years after the photographer died—and he was never allowed to visit Gaza despite many efforts. He grew up in Cairo, where his father had moved to study dentistry and where he eventually stayed as the noose around Gaza was drawn tighter. Another displacement. The last for the grandfather—he refused to ever leave his beloved Gaza.
“The walls of my dad’s dental clinic are a collage of photos, of everyone in the family. Some are my grandfather’s photos,” Djeghalian says. “Up until 2018, I hadn’t seen his formal work as a photographer.”
Djeghalian’s favourite photo by his grandfather shows two children walking along Gaza’s beach. They are perhaps five or six years old—his aunt and his father. In the foreground, one sees the photographer’s shadow, like a guardian angel.
That year was when his father presented the three red boxes of negatives and other papers that he had uncovered in a closet. “I try to stage how they left Gaza in my head. Probably after my grandfather passed away, my father or aunts grouped some negatives here and there into the three boxes and took them to Cairo. It seems like they were not organised. They cover so many topics.”
Djeghalian was well suited to turn the find into an exhibition illuminating Gaza’s history. A visual artist, art director and image maker, he is a professor at l’Institut Français de la Mode, or the French Fashion Institute, and is on the faculty of the photography department at the Paris College of Art.
He took the three boxes back to his home in Paris and started scanning them at the university. “It’s such labour. It’s insane the time it takes,” he says.
At the same time, Djeghalian tapped the photographer’s subjects to create a portrait of the man behind the camera. “I did Zoom calls and phone calls with people who knew Kegham and were photographed by him. They would tell me about a photo session or things they knew about him. It gave the exhibition another human level. It was a bit more than going back to family history and nostalgia. It’s heavier. He becomes a motif of Gaza. You read Gaza through reading this foreigner, Kegham.”
On the grandfather’s death, the photography studio and its vast archive of photos and negatives passed to his assistant, and upon the assistant’s death it passed to the assistant’s brother, who is not a photographer. Much of the archive has been lost—discarded or damaged.
Even properly stored, negatives degrade with age. “One of the things that is burdening me is that the rest of his work that may have survived is still in Gaza,” Djeghalian says. “It’s my quest to retrieve those negatives. It’s not about having them. It’s to digitise them. Already they’re fragile, and they’re in a city where things are not normal. You never know if they’ll be bombarded or if there will be a fire.”
The Palestinian Museum’s digital archive centre has offered to digitise the archive and send it back to the assistant’s brother. Others have suggested Djeghalian fundraise and recruit an institution in Europe to buy the archive.
In the meantime, Djeghalian is working to take the exhibition to other cities. And press surrounding the Cairo show has unearthed even more of the grandfather’s photography clients, sharing their photos.
Djeghalian’s favourite photo by his grandfather shows two children walking along Gaza’s beach. They are perhaps five or six years old—his aunt and his father. The aunt has her arm around her brother’s shoulder. In the foreground, one sees the photographer’s—their father’s—shadow, like a guardian angel following the children. “Formally speaking, it’s an excellent composition,” he says. “There’s something very personal about it. It’s almost outlandish. That image made me cry so many times, for reasons I cannot articulate. That’s what photos are for.”
The photos include portraits and weddings, but also picnics and dinners, people at the beach, people drinking—all classes of society.
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF KEGHAM DJEGHALIAN
