Essay by Issam Nassar
This essay will appear on a new web site devoted to WWI in the Middle East
Copyright Issam Nassar
This essay will appear on a new web site devoted to WWI in the Middle East
Copyright Issam Nassar
War
photography as old as photography itself. The first pictures we have date from the
Crimean War (1853-1856), which started less than two decades after the “official”
invention of photography in 1839. Photographic images were also used to
document the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Great War of 1914. And,
even though some of the images that we have from these two last wars were
actually staged, they all remain important historical documents.[1]
They provide us with concrete information regarding the logistics of the war
while suggesting possible motivations and/or intention on the part of the
photographer(s). In what follows, I will examine a number of images of the
Palestinian front during World War I that are currently in the archives of the
Library of Congress.
Given the
importance of photographs as primary source for the study of war history, it
seems surprising that so few historians use them in their research. Photographs
capture a moment that already passed and, yet, remains fixed for us to see, as
it appeared to the camera when the lens shutter clicked. In this sense,
photographs can tell almost as much of what we see in them as of what we do
not. They display important elements to the historians, such as clothing
styles, tools and weapons, and enrich our historical imagination. Perhaps even more
significantly, they capture what we could call the “aura of history.”
As we all
know, the Great War—also called the first “total war”—was fought on many
fronts. Despite the large amount of
territory it covered, it was heavily photographed. However, not all the war
theaters received the same amount of attention. Images of soldiers in their
trenches and charred bodies on the western front, together with pictures of
leaders in full military attires are widely available even nowadays; close to a
century after the cannons fell silent in November of 1918. On the eastern
front, the British and the French also utilized photography, perhaps to a larger
extent than the Ottomans, though the latter did employ it.
The two
photographic albums of John Whiting kept at the Library of Congress present an example
of photographic documentation from the Ottoman side and the British side
thereafter. Dedicated to Whiting and his wife Grace, the albums are fully
devoted to Palestine and Sinai in the period from 1915 to 1917. Whiting himself
was a photographer at the photo department of Jerusalem’s American Colony, and
might be the one who shot most, if not all, the photographs in the albums.[2]
In 1915, following the establishment of the Jerusalem
branch of the Ottoman Red Crescent Society under the leadership of then
dismissed mayor Hussein al-Husseini, Whiting was commissioned by the society to
document its activities.[3] It
was in this capacity that he managed to document soldiers’ lives at the
Palestine and Sinai fronts. The first of the two albums is fully devoted to the
Ottoman war scene and the second covers the war after the British occupied
Jerusalem.[4]
The first album contains 243 photos. A large number of
them are directly related to military activities, as some are of locations near
the battlefields. The pictures of flotillas in the Dead Sea, for instance, showing
the transporting of grains from the eastern shores, document an activity that
was crucial to the troops at the time of the great famine. The British naval blockade,
the attacks of the locusts in 1915 and the war economy were the main reasons
for the famine. In the same way, the few pictures showing the shutting down of foreign
postal services Jerusalem are war photographs. Shutting down the postal
services was the result of the government’s decision to annul the capitulation agreements
that brought those services to the land.
Still, the core of
the collection in the album is devoted to field activities with soldiers,
medical staff and officials occupying center stage.
The album appears to be chronologically organized as well
as carefully planned. Starting with a portrait of Jamal Pasha, the leader of the
Fourth Ottoman Army and moving on to the “celebrations” held in support of the
war effort, the album chronicles activities of the soldiers in trenches
pointing their guns, and shows medical staff posing for the camera. Together,
the pictures in the album, narrate a story in what appear to be an official
narrative presenting the leader, the jubilant population, the marching soldiers
and the medics at the front, as if it was a story of success.[5]
 |
The first photo in the album showing Buyuk (Great)
|
Jamal [Cemal] Pasha, on the shore of the Dead Sea, May 3rd, 1915.
In this short contribution, I am unable to discuss the
entirety of the album; this task will need to wait for a more elaborate essay
that I hope to write in the near future. Nonetheless, there are certain
features to the album in general that I would like to draw attention to. The
first one of them is the large number of staged photographs in the collection. Most
pictures that involve the troops, I believe, were staged. They show soldiers in
what appears to be military engagement, like lining up in trenches on their
stomachs pointing their guns at what seem to be enemy positions. Others show
the soldiers, or officers, standing in individual or group portraits in front
of official buildings or their encampments. While with the latter, staging is rather
obvious in the way soldiers are lined up and the careful choice of the settings,
in the former we can see the staging less clearly. Nonetheless, an examination
of such photographs will also reveal a level of staging. While soldiers are keeping low in the
trenches, possibly in order to suggest that they were trying to avoid enemy
fire, the angle in which the photos were taken suggests that the camera was
placed on a higher level, with its operator standing in full view. If enemy
fire was a concern, then a photographer standing in clear view of the enemy
outside the trenches would have been in grave danger. The soldiers appear
organized in lines, and the fact that they all appear in positions that do not
block other soldiers is another indication that the pictures were taken with
plenty of time to arrange their subjects and during non- combating moments. The
smiley faces or relaxed postures of some of the soldiers also suggest that the
kind of stress associated with combat is actually absent.
Still, the careful planning of the images does not deem
them fake or unworthy of our consideration. To start with, they are pictures on
location and the individuals appearing in them are genuine soldiers who were
stationed at the particular photographed places. Their military status is apparent; the weapons
they hold are the ones they used in combat; and the trenches were dug up in
anticipation of battle.
The same is true of pictures where medical staff are also
posing to the camera, or engaged in treating a patient in a Jerusalem hospital or
at a field hospital. The lack of overlapping bodies coupled with the stiffness
in which they were photographed also suggest staging.
However, other photographs, which show troops in military
formations or marching through Jerusalem or other locations, do not suggest any
form of staging beyond the choice of vantage point and timing.
A number of pictures depict leaders and officers during
their visits to Palestine or to the front. Photographs of the visit of Enver
Pasha to Jerusalem accompanied by Jamal Pasha, or poses by famous doctors (such
as Dr. Tawfiq Kanaan), other officers (such as Jamal II), governor Zaki Bey or
Nashat Bey, are both informative regarding the war efforts as well as
significant for the photographed individuals in their careers.
Despite a few pictures in which wounded soldiers display
their wounds to the camera, the core of the collection in the album illustrates
great organization and readiness for the war. Going back to the issue of the
narrative told by the album, one would find it to be more of a piece of visual
propaganda than an actual coverage of the war and its high cost. The album
itself is organized in a “patriotic” fashion that presents a rather heroic
narrative. Granted, the photographer’s assignment was to document the work of
the Red Crescent Society--perhaps in order to illustrate the significance of
their contribution to war efforts. However, the narration itself appears to be
more beneficial to the army and the officers in charge than it would be for a
relief agency like the Red Crescent.
Was the album produced at the request of Jamal Pasha or
one of his top leaders in Jerusalem? The answer is not easily apparent. That
certainly is a possibility, especially in light of a claim made by a member of
the colony’s photo department that they were indeed the official photographers
of Jamal Pasha.[6]
However, such a claim has not been fully substantiated. Additionally, we have many other photographs
of the army and of Jamal Pasha that were taken by other Jerusalem based
photographer such as Khalil Raad.[7]
In conclusion, I would like to state two significant
points in connection with the photographs themselves, rather than with the
album as narrative. The first relates to the fact that war photographs is
another arena in which image manipulations were employed. What we see in the
pictures was carefully planed ahead of time for our benefit. Nothing that
relates directly to the plight of the soldiers or to actual combat is
presented. Rather, an alternate reality
was created by the photographer(s) aimed at feeding the viewers ideologically
framed perspective. In other words, what we see did not fully reflect the
material conditions that prevailed at the military camps or the battlefield. The
second point that is that the absence of an “authentic” war experience in the
photos does not deem them unimportant. On the contrary, being images of actual soldiers,
leaders and locations, they enable us to see the aura of the time period both
as reflected in the details of the photos and in the photographic ideological
intention behind them. Their aura shows us actual people who would eventually
engage in warfare and their surroundings. At the same time, it projects the
image that, in all likelihood, their leader would have wanted them to offer:
that of a group of heroes about to undertake the grand mission of reclaiming
Egypt.
[1] It is possible that staged
photographs were also used in the Crimean war. However, I am not aware of any
studies that point that out.
[2] Whiting was the son of Americans who moved to
Jerusalem to be part of the original group of founders of the Colony. He was
born in the city in 1882. The American Colony opened up in 1898 its photography
department under the directorship of Elijah Meyer, one of its most notable
members. Meyers had taken up the practice of photography before the department
was founded. The Swede Lars (Lewis) Larson eventually emerged as the lead
person in the department and Whiting, along with others including Eric Matson, was
one of its leading photographers.
[3] For more details see Salim
Tamari and Issam Nassar, al-Quds
al-Othmaniyeh fi al-Muthakrat al-Jawharieh (Ottoman Jerusalem in the
Memoirs of Wasif Jawharieh), (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2003),
200.
[4] For more
information, see the above site as well as: http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/acquisitions-adds.html#whiting
[5] The album can be accessed on
line at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.13709. All
the photographs appearing here are from that album and are copyrighted to the
library of Congress.
[6] This appears in the text
written by Larson. I was unable to see the original sources for myself or find
the correct reference information for it. All I have is a photocopy of a page
from Larson’s papers sent to me by a colleague.
[7] A number of images
available at the library of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut taken
by Raad show similar photographs like the ones described above as well as of
Jamal Pasha appearing in front of the camera. It is possible that Raad was
commissioned by the photo department to produce such pictures on their behalf.
Still, this is merely a possibility to which I have no documentation to
substantiate.
