1948 Photo Album: From Palestine To Israel

Why do we name the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" as we do? The purpose of this class is to use photographs – alongside historical and literary documents--to question the framework of a "national conflict" and study its emergence as a given, unquestioned and axiomatic scheme for any historical narrative of that period. Reading archival material and post-colonial and photography theories, each week we shall study one photograph taken in 1948, reconstructing the photography event as well as its myriad relations among the protagonists involved and its after life as an archived image, to include photographed persons, photographers, editors, journalists, politicians, and more.