Reading Marie al-Khazen's Photographs: Gender, Photography, Mandate Lebanon

Description

The Lebanese photographer Marie al-Khazen seized every opportunity to use her camera during the years that she was active between 1920 and 1940. She not only documented her travels around tourist sites in Lebanon but also sought creative experimentation with her camera by staging scenes, manipulating shadows, and superimposing negatives to produce different effects in her prints. Within her photographs, bedouins and European friends, peasants and landlords, men and women comfortably share the same space. Her photographs include an intriguing collection portraying her family and friends living their everyday lives in 1920s and '30s Zgharta, a village in the north of Lebanon. Yasmine Nachabe Taan explores these photographs, emphasizing the ways in which notions of gender and class are inscribed within them and revealing how they are charged with symbols of women's emancipation to today's viewers, through women's presence as individuals, separate from family restrictions of that time. Images in which women are depicted smoking cigarettes, driving cars, riding horses, and accompanying men on hunting trips counteract the common ways in which women were portrayed in contemporary Lebanon.

Yasmine Nachabe Taan is Associate Professor in Visual Culture and Graphic and Fashion Design History at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.

Through her work Reading Marie al-Khazen's Photographs, [the author] fulfils a duty of remembrance, restoring to these women the merit they have been stripped of through the story of a figure that is both different from and common to all women. * Agenda Culture (Bloomsbury Translation) * Comparative and nuanced, attuned to gender and visual culture debates, Nachabe Taan's analysis of Lebanese photographer Marie al-Khazen's rare archive is a must-read for anyone interested in gender studies, histories of photography and middle eastern modernity. * Mary Roberts, The University of Sydney, Australia and author of Istanbul Exchanges * The first book-length critical engagement of indigenously produced women's photography in the Arab world, Nachabe Taan's rigorous and self-reflective study successfully makes the photographic oeuvre of one elite Lebanese woman amateur photographer relevant to the larger interplay between gender and class dynamics in Mandate Lebanon ... A refreshing addition to the growing body of scholarship on indigenous photography of the Arab world. * Stephen Sheehi, William & Mary University, USA * In a novel reading of Marie al-Khazen's oeuvre, Yasmine Nachabe Taan shows how this independent Lebanese woman used her camera creatively to exert control over images, including her self-image, and complicate gender roles. Nachabe Taan's discovery and recovery of a body of forgotten photographs makes a major contribution to gender and visual studies and to critical discussions by scholars of the Middle East about archives, evidence, and intimate histories." * Beth Baron, City University of New York, USA *