As part of the Saison Méditerranée, the Centre Photographique Marseille presents the first French exhibition devoted to Photo Kegham, Gaza’s historic photography studio, founded in 1944 by Kegham Djeghalian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide. His grandson unfolds four decades of Gazan social life, running counter to a regime of representation that allows the Palestinian image to circulate only as evidence of catastrophe.
By Basma Mansour
The exhibition allows no breathing room. Prints saturate the walls, hung tightly along a passage one climbs, up to a sign suspended high like a lintel, PHOTO KEGHAM in heavy capitals beneath its Arabic calligraphy. Below it, a large sepia-and-mauve print shows the photographer in old age, in profile in front of his own shop window crowded with portraits in gilded frames. The image is cut off sharply at the edge of the panel, so that the old man’s back touches the room’s actual corner. He stands at the junction between the reproduced shop and the room we are in, and one must pass beneath his name to continue. We then enter through the customers’ door, among grids of identity portraits, class photographs, and groups gathered outdoors.
These images belong to a category that rarely crosses Gaza’s borders. Nothing about them was remarkable at the time they were taken, yet everything has since become so, due to the circumstances under which an image from Gaza reaches us. Palestinian life only gains visibility in the vicinity of death, rubble, bodies, and mourning, and this proximity has become the unspoken condition for the circulation of the image. Mohammed El-Kurd described how this economy of the gaze operates in *Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal* (Haymarket, 2025). Only two figures are acceptable within this framework: the “terrorist,” whom one can neither mourn nor listen to, and the “perfect victim,” too traumatized to fight or express anger, confined to personal tragedy and kept at a distance from any collective demands. Only the latter grants access to a voice, provided one pays the price that El-Kurd calls the “politics of appeal”—the performance of a sanitized “victimhood” before the gates of recognition.
Photographing the Ordinary
The collection on display was assembled far removed from that economy, decades before it became dominant. Founded in 1944 by Kegham Djeghalian Sr. (1915–1981), a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Photo Kegham was Gaza’s first professional photography studio. For nearly forty years, he photographed weddings, families, children, sports teams, celebrations, beaches, official visitors, street scenes, and studio portraits, serving a society made up of multiple communities—Armenians, Greeks, Bedouins, and refugees from 1948. These images were intended first and foremost for the people they depict. Commissioned, hung in living rooms, and tucked into photo albums, they circulated within the very society for which they were intended. When Kegham Djeghalian Jr. discovered three red boxes of negatives in the family apartment in Cairo in 2018, he found much more than just old photographs: fragments of a social infrastructure of the image—a way for a city and its inhabitants to look at themselves, to preserve themselves, and to recognize one another. The ordinary predominates here, and it is this record of everyday life that the boxes have preserved.
Still, it was essential not to betray it by putting it on display. The danger was well known: turning these scenes into happy reminders of a “before” against which the present would appear nothing but catastrophe—a retrospective paradise created by destruction itself. The grandson’s choices can be understood as ways to avoid this trap. He organizes the collection into four sections (“The Studio,” “Gaza Memento,” “Family Album,” “Zoom Call”) rather than following a chronology that would automatically lead up to 2026. Above all, he omits some of the dates and captions and calls the result an “unmade archive”—an open, unfinished archive that refuses to coalesce into a definitive narrative. Yet captions and dates are the very apparatus through which the Palestinian image is typically framed, contextualized for an outside audience, and subjected to the questions that determine its acceptability. By omitting them, he strips the image of its status as evidence in a case file.
This withdrawal has a precedent, set by the institution itself. In 1983, Edward Said was granted permission to hang photographs of Palestinians in the lobby of the Geneva Conference on the Question of Palestine. The UN agreed on one condition: “no captions, no explanations.” Images were permitted, provided they remained silent. The same clause resurfaced forty years later in the exhibition halls of Marseille, but this time it was stated by the exhibitor. Silence has changed hands.
A Living Archive
Still, this silence is not a lack of speech; on the contrary, it opens up a space for expression that the exhibition fills in a different way. A sound installation features the voices of former clients of the studio. Their memories bring to life the dressing room where people changed before their photo sessions, a bride’s artificial flowers, a print of a deceased father that the photographer refused to enlarge because he had a better copy, or even the memory of the man whom the whole town called Abu Bishara. Pinned to tracing paper, the messages the artist has received since the project’s first presentation in 2021 expand the collection: a childhood portrait sent from the diaspora, a wedding portrait recognized by a descendant, and a note from Canada from a man born after the studio closed. The archive is shaped by those it represents, and the authority to describe it lies with them.
Only one section breaks this rule. “Zoom Call” features dated and captioned screenshots from a January 2021 call during which Marwan Al-Tarazi—the custodian in Gaza of what remained of the collection—showed the studio’s most famous prints to the camera. Al-Tarazi was killed along with his wife and granddaughter on October 19, 2023, in the strike on the Greek Orthodox church in Gaza, and the bombings destroyed the portion of the archive that remained on site. These images have become the last traces of the archive, and they alone serve as evidence. Destruction imposes its legacy wherever it strikes.
Photo Kegham of Gaza: An Unmade Archive
May 16 – September 12
Centre Photographique Marseille
This translation was generated using AI. For the original text, please see the French version of this article.
