Most of my adult life, I had been searching for my grandfather’s photos, wanting to discover his photographic practice, and striving to find material to work on. But for years all I had were stories, accounts and praises of him, only crumbs of his photographs, most of which were personal family photos we had at home – until 2018, when my father found three small red boxes buried deep in his closet, which he had completely forgotten about, not even remembering exactly how they ended up there.
Before I discuss the boxes, some information about Kegham is necessary. My grandfather was born in 1915 in Anatolia, historicalArmenia. He survived the Armenian Genocide (1915–23) as an infant with the help of his mother. They reached Syria and he grew up across different cities of the Levant. After his mother passed away, he went to the Birds’ Nest Orphanage in Byblos, Lebanon. In the early 1930s, he moved to Jerusalem in British Mandate Palestine and worked a series of jobs, including for a tattoo practice for British battalion soldiers. In Jaffa, he met and married Zevart Nakashian, my grandmother. I believe it is mainly in Jaffa that he learned photography, apprenticing at Studio Al Hamra. My grandparents decided to move and settle in Gaza, where Kegham established Photo Kegham in 1944, the first local photography studio. Photo Kegham gradually evolved into a key institution in Gazan society. As he established his practice there, Kegham mentored and supported many young photographers throughout his life, many of whom worked with him in the studio.
For almost four decades, Kegham steadily inscribed the photo-graphic history and memory of Gaza through its turbulent transition periods under the British mandate, the Egyptian rule and the Israeli occupation of 1956 and of 1967 onwards, and, of course, the forced displacement of Palestinians to Gaza resulting from the Nakba of 1948.Kegham mainly worked across the following photography genres:
- Portraiture and studio photography
- Events and social documentation taking place outside the studio
- Official photography, on site or in the studio
- Political and photo-journalistic documentation
It is important to state that he never worked for any agency or for the press. Yet, he obsessively documented every event in the city.It was his instinctive calling and sense of duty.
Kegham declined to leave Gaza at any point since 1944, even when his children moved to Egypt. In 1981, he passed away in his beloved city.
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Back to the boxes.
I opened them and I found a multitude of negatives, envelopes, photos, documents, postcards, letters and receipts. Basically, layers of figures, incidents, testimonies and histories waiting to be unearthed. My reaction was odd. I started scanning a few negatives, then I put the boxes aside.
I was overwhelmed and intimidated by the mission. I abandoned the boxes for almost two years. Then in 2020, I decided to dive back into the work with the prospect of an exhibition to be held at ‘Cairo Photo Week’ in 2021.
What I am presenting here is not the exhibition or its content per se – what actually took place in 2021 – which remains a work in progress. Also, it is certainly not a direct portrayal of Gaza from the 1940s until the 1970s, the period when Kegham operated there. It is rather about my process in approaching the material I found in the boxes, the ‘making sense’ of it, and the attempt to identify my subject matter in relation to Kegham and Gaza. The focus of my research was originally on Kegham – the person, photographer and his legacy – but through this, it became an ongoing nonlinear reading of Gaza.
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To approach or handle these three boxes containing various unclassified elements, untouched for decades, was not like engaging in archival research, but to me, it was engaging in some sort of archaeology practice or what I call para-archaeology. I see the latter as operating according to the following sub-fields:
- Archaeology of the photographic artefact
- Archaeology of identities and narratives
- Archaeology of historicity
- Archaeology of displacement and trauma
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I fell into a loop of systematic formal archival labour with the unboxing, scanning, indexing, packaging, researching, dating, etc., a process that lasted for a couple of months.
But through this methodical labour, I realised I was losing perspective of the project at hand, and losing my voice as Kegham’s grandson, as an artist who is trying to converse with his grandfather’s legacy and trying to find his position in approaching the project.
But this frustration in the work, led me to a simple realisation: I am not an archivist or a historian, nor should I try to be either. I acknowledged that perhaps the project at that stage was not about producing a comprehensive study or a solid archive of Kegham’s photos. After all, all I had was a tiny decimal of his work, certainly not enough to create an opus of his legacy.
Instead, I realised that my mission here was to attempt to construct meaning and discourse across the structure of differences that are present in the three boxes, and to cultivate a plane through which my subject and my object can be generated and can intersect to produce knowledge and meaning.
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In a way, I liberated myself from the weight of conventional archival practice, which I had originally thought was the only way to approach the work. This allowed me to find my position and to attain a certain conceptual clarity with regards to my topic; this project is in fact about disruptions and disrupted histories:
- The disrupted history of Kegham himself through his journey
- The disruption of the Western Armenian context through genocide and displacement
- The disrupted history of Kegham’s own physical archive through its precarious survival or definite loss
- And most certainly, the disrupted history of Gaza, its communities and the continuous ruptures of Palestine
The notion of disrupted histories was a clear and common denominator for all the major signifiers in Kegham’s story. I decided to disrupt the formal reading of this potential archive and I stopped trying to identify every person that appears in the photographs or trying to date every single photograph precisely. This resulted in a conscious decision to experience and present the work undated and uncaptioned – perhaps proposing an unmade archive.
I opted to engage in a raw confrontation with the photographs and I almost imposed it on the viewer. It was important to experience the work through typology rather than chronology, so that historiography becomes secondary, yet is inherently alluded to through the subjects, objects, bodies and spaces shown in the photographic material. The Gazan subject needed to be humanised and depoliticised, if possible.
To enable a space for a raw encounter with the photographs is to allow for an affective reading of the visual memory of Gaza. But it is also to call for a collective participation in an alternative historiography of Gaza, one that aims to demystify the land, the people and the subjective histories that once were.
The typology that I propose falls into four thematic categories that aim to map out a certain discourse in relation to Photo Kegham, his archive and the reading of Gaza:
The First is The Studio, which contextualises and situates Kegham’s studio practice as a significant institution of photography in Gaza, through which Kegham shaped his identity and gained acceptance and assimilation into the Gazan society. It is through the studio that he could establish a certain intimacy with the people and the city.
The second is Gaza Memento, which carries various ensembles of photographs to map out Kegham’s social and political engagement in Gaza while unveiling forgotten realities of Gazan lives and communities; from personalities, weddings, outings, beach life, parties, funerals, schools, refugee camps, landscapes, official visits…
The third is Family Album, a nostalgic indulgence in his (my) family’s story. But it also serves as a mode of reading a facet of Gaza’s sociocultural reality in the mid-twentieth century and the integrated presence of an Armenian community in the city.
The last thematic is Zoom Call. It includes some of Kegham’s most celebrated photographs that were presented to me through a Zoom call between Cairo and Gaza in January 2021.The reason I approached this work as original screenshots of the Zoom call is because these photos were denied to me and to my family for decades. The screenshots of the video recording are the only traces I have of these – another facet of a disrupted archive.
But in the installation in which I included them, the photographs were dated and captioned. Those are photos that were contested, processed, mediated and narrated to me in the Zoom call. A ‘raw encounter’ with them was no longer possible.
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Today, this Zoom call takes on another critical dimension. Marwan al Tarazi, my interlocutor in the call, who preserved an important part of Kegham’s work in Gaza, was tragically killed with his wife and granddaughter during the Israeli bombing of the Greek Orthodox church of Gaza on 19 October 2023.
Despite my multiple attempts to convince him to allow me or allow other parties to professionally digitise his archive and preserve it outside of Gaza, he never truly accepted. The tragedy of his loss that we deeply mourn means the definite loss of the archive of Kegham in Gaza.
Since 2021, I have been receiving many messages on social media from people who were photographed or whose family members were photographed by my grandfather. These messages typically contain mobile photos of the original prints, and are usually followed by greetings, nostalgic accounts or endearing stories involving my grandfather.
What I would like to do at this stage, is to activate these networks of Gazan individuals and communities, in order to produce a collective archive of visual and oral histories. The idea is to create an interactive digital map, which holds the collected material – oral and visual – and which traces the movement and displacement of Gazan communities through Kegham’s photos. Perhaps, this can articulate another strategy to safeguard the existence and the memory of Gaza in the face of genocide.
The study of the subject of Kegham today is a critical endeavour that needs to deal with a palimpsest of problematics, ruptures and subjects:
- That of his practice as a photographer and his role in depicting the Gazan society
- The migration and assimilation of the Armenians after the 1915 genocide onwards
- The occupation of Palestine and the ongoing Palestinian Catastrophe
- Gaza as the ever-changing turbulent and colonised geography that is at risk of complete erasure
- The urgency to find modes of preserving Gaza’s visual heritage, visual histories and memory
* This an edited version of the transcript of the talk by Kegham Djeghalian Jr ‘Portraits of Gaza by Photo Kegham’ given at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 29 January 2024.