By ANNATERESS FABRIS*
Considerations about Ibrahim Nasrallah's recently published book
At first glance, the title One-eyed biography It may sound strange, but it fully responds to the symbiosis that Ibrahim Nasrallah establishes between Karima [Karimeh] Abbud and the camera. Passionate about photography since childhood, Karima believed that the camera was equipped with a brain and that people only needed to be “in front of its eyes and it would remember us”.
The process didn't stop there: then, the photographer “takes the brain to the room, closes the door so we don't discover the secret and, after he takes our photograph from there, returns the brain to the camera”. Even after becoming the first woman to practice photography in Palestine,[1] Abbud does not abandon this imaginative idea; he asks that, after her death, the camera be placed on the tomb so that “she can see all the things I can no longer see”.
Nasrallah's novel, therefore, is the story of Abbud's relationship with “the eye of the camera” and the desire to unite the two eyes into one eye to “capture the dreamed photograph”. At the age of twelve, thanks to photographer Yussef Albawarchi, he observed, for the first time, a landscape of Belém from the camera. Amazed to see the world “inverted”, she asks Albawarchi how she could return it to the “correct position” and has the answer that this “would be her mission as a photographer”.
Second daughter of Said Abbud, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and professor Bárbara Badr, Karima was born in Belém in the 1890s. There are divergences in the bibliography about this date, as well as that of death. Nasrallah states that she was born in 1893, sharing the thesis of Issam Nassar and Mitri Raheb, which establishes the exact date: November 13, 1893. In the unsigned article “Palestinian photographers before 1948: documenting life in a time of change”, it reads that she was born in 1894.
Finally, Ahmad Mrowat and Soraya Misleh de Matos assert that the birth occurred in 1896. The date of death is even more controversial. Nasrallah does not directly mention the date, but the reader infers that the death occurred in 1940, shortly after the photographer attended the Gone with the Wind, shown in December 1939 in Palestine. In a biographical profile of Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question it reads that she died of tuberculosis on April 27, 1940. The year 1940 is also mentioned in Raheb's article.
Mrowat and Mattos, on the contrary, place the date of death in 1955. According to the first, the death of her parents in the 1940s brought radical changes in the photographer's life, who moved to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem. In three letters written to her cousins Shafiqah and Mateel in 1941, Karima talks about her photographic work and the need to organize an album with her images as a publicity tool. The 1948 war leaves a gap in information relating to her, and it is only known that she died in Nazareth in 1955.
Nasrallah places his mother's death and the photo album in another context. Bárbara dies on an undetermined date in the 1930s, shortly after the birth of Karima's son, Samir, whom she regretted not being able to hug because he had tuberculosis. The album, in turn, contained the images she liked best and was used as a kind of laissez passer with the British authorities: “The English soldiers did not see in the photos what she saw. They treated them as if they were an identity card that allowed whoever carried it to pass or not. However, the album was always useful, it worked for one thing or another.”
The tuberculosis that Karima suffers from in the novel had been introduced into the Abbud family by her brother Karim. Considered a “German spy” by the English, for carrying in his pocket a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in the original language, the boy was arrested and subjected to a unique torture: spending the night in the middle of the swamps in the Hule lake area, “with his legs planted in the mud and his body swinging like a bamboo pole”. Released after five weeks, Karim returns home physically and psychologically broken; he spent his nights coughing non-stop and with “pain in every cell”.
Died on August 12, 1921, with his hand covering his mouth – perhaps to stifle his cough or to “prevent his spirit from rising before the sun rose, so he could say goodbye to his family” –, Karim had infected his sister Katarina, who transmitted the disease to her mother. It was the second mourning to take place within the Abbud family. The first to die was little Najib, whose memory Karima cultivates through a stolen and hidden family portrait. It is from this act of memory that she falls in love with photographs, to which she begins to delegate the task of evoking loved ones.
The father soon notices the girl's love for the visual aspects of reality. When some photographer friends came to visit him, Karima would stare at the cameras and even touch them while their owners weren't looking or were immersed in long political conversations. The girl develops a fantasy: “all the photographs were inside the camera. Standing in front of it had a single reason: to make the camera remember the person so that the photographer could, later, reach in and remove the photograph of that person from where it was stored.”
To put this assumption to the test, he looked in the mirror, touched his own reflected image, “then retracted his empty hand, which gave him the certainty that the image on the camera was the real one”.
Convinced it is a camera, Karima finally gets the device she dreamed of, but she can't decide what to photograph. Her ambition was “to take a single, miraculous photograph that showed the entire world: its seas, rivers, people, forests, mountains, plains, deserts, birds, deer, horses and crickets… everything that existed in it”. Having a camera meant “touching your dreams, molding them, kneading them and making them, like a potter makes clay, whatever you want”.
The idea of photographing the Church of the Nativity was quickly discarded for two reasons. The building had been recorded by all the foreign photographers who had passed through Belém. The light that fell on the church was not adequate: “It was strong, it formed shadows and hid the beauty of the stones, darkening some corners with a heavy shadow”.
Seeing that his daughter, after six days, had not found the ideal reason, the father begins to wonder if he had done the right thing by giving her a camera: “How can one person give another a dream that, once realized, , does it become a curse, a nightmare, an anguish?” Insomniac, he thinks of a stratagem: he invites the girl to stand on the doorstep, in the hope that she would discover the sky alone, go get the camera and try to photograph what had not been captured by anyone.
Having realized the paternal intention, Karima explains to Said that he could not be her eye because it was up to her to glimpse the photograph she wanted to take: “Otherwise, it will be a black image like the one I would capture if I went crazy now and photographed at night, to then realizing that it was nothing more than an empty photograph, a black page, without the slightest trace of even a star”.
On the seventh day, always searching for the ideal image, the young woman begins to wonder what would happen if she left the camera in the same place between autumn and spring, “without stopping photographing. Photographing every moment: the night, the day, the bareness of the trees, the storms, the tolling of the church bells, the calls to prayer from the mosques, the sound of the birds, of the people passing in front of the door.” After conceiving this “crazy project”, she finally finds the reason, when she notices a ray of sunlight falling on the faces of her family members. “They were them, but different, more beautiful and purer, like the day outside.” Determined to capture “the beauty of that moment, when their faces were unique”, Karima manages to take her first photograph.
Having learned what it meant to “draw with the sun”,[2] the young woman soon realized that the camera was an instrument for understanding the world and that autumn was the best season to begin the photographic art by meeting the sunlight with “the reddish-yellow leaves fallen in the orchards and gardens” or with those that received a greater portion of its rays, by remaining on the branches before falling.
But it's not just beauty that attracts your attention. Karima uses the camera as a political instrument to react to the arrogance of the soldiers of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and the visual tactics of Zionism to demonstrate that Palestine was an empty territory. The first episode has a mainly symbolic meaning. Willing to photograph the Church of the Nativity, she is surprised by the presence of barricades with sandbags and twenty military vehicles parked in the temple courtyard. Undeterred by the order to leave the area, she photographs the scene and smiles when she sees “the soldiers’ heads down and the wheels of their cars up.” After developing the image and looking at it angrily, she fixes it with a pin and is satisfied to see that the soldiers' feet “were up, like there, and their heads were down”.
The political aspect of this photograph gains density some time later through a conversation between the young woman and her father. If the image of the English soldiers could have been made by another photographer, the way in which it was hung was exclusively hers, as it expressed the protest over Karim's arrest and illness. But there was something more to the photo: “You realized, by intuition, that things wouldn't stop with prison, that something big would happen to him. So I can tell you now what you felt but couldn't explain in words: the situation in this country will change because of these soldiers. Whoever dares to close the door that leads to a place of worship, the door that leads to heaven, will do everything to close the doors of the world for this country, for all humanity.”
If this episode does not have its own date in the novel, on the contrary, the advances of Zionism have a precise time frame: May 30, 1936. Informed by Reverend Stevan Gunther that a German-Jewish newspaper had published a set of photographs of houses and mansions in Belém belonging to the pioneering Jews, the young woman is outraged to see that they were the “most beautiful buildings” in the city (Jasser Palace, Ajaar Palace, Armenian Orphanage, Alkarmel Monastery and French Hospital) and several residences, among the which are the Abbud family. In reaction to the information printed in the newspaper – the houses “were empty, waiting for someone to inhabit them” –, he photographs the entire complex and takes special care: he includes a large number of people in the external shots and portrays the residents “in their best light”. internally.
With these photographs, Karima engages in a political battle against Zionist propaganda, which presented Palestine as a “land without people” ready to welcome “landless people”. To the images created by Zionist photographers, which showed the efforts of Jewish immigrants to make Palestine flourish, bringing progress, civilization and modernity, Karima contrasted his shots of religious and historical sites and contemporary cities, considered by Mitri Raheb “documentary evidence that the land was not barren or deserted.”
The author also includes in the political aspect the portraits created by her, which revealed the existence of a cultured, prosperous and elegant middle class, far removed from orientalist narratives and biblical representations. Raheb does not hesitate to define this set, which constituted the bulk of his production, “an important national contribution to the documentation of a flourishing middle class”, active in Palestinian life before the Nakba.
The adjective “watamiyya” in the advertisement, published in the nationalist newspaper Alkarmel on March 16, 1924, has a political connotation for Raheb, as it can be translated as “local”, “native” and “national”. It marked the beginning of his professional activity in Haifa and brought a series of information that could be of interest to the public. In addition to presenting herself as “the only national photographer in Palestine”, Karima highlighted her training with one of the “most famous” professionals[3] and its specialization in serving individuals and families “with reasonable prices and high professionalism”. The last information demonstrates its attention to the role of women in Palestinian society: “It caters to ladies who prefer to have their portraits taken at home, daily, except on Sundays”.
With the announcement, the young woman entered a professional field established in 1885 with the opening of Garabed Krikorian's studio[4] in Jerusalem, outside the Jaffa Gate in the Old City. Among his disciples are Khalil Raad, who opened a studio in Jerusalem in the 1890s, becoming the first Arab photographer in Palestine; Issa Sawabni and Daoud Sabonji, who practice their profession in the city of Jaffa. In Belém, the names of Ibrahim Bawarski and Tawfiq Raad can be remembered. In the novel, Nasrallah lists the professionals she admires: Garabedian[5], Raad, Issa Assawabni and Dawud Sabukhi. She was also familiar with the photographs of the brothers Louis and George Sabunji arriving from Beirut, from Safidez, active in Jerusalem, and from Assawabni, from Jaffa.
Karima did not have the same admiration for foreign photographers who had represented Palestine in a unique way, highlighting “the presence of the place and the absence of the human being”. What bothered her most about these representations was “the insistence on killing the beauty of the place by taking away the life that throbbed within it”. The young woman did not take into account that this discomfort with the absence of life was based on some limitations inherent to photography, especially in the 1850s. Although it was considered a document, the “definitive truth”, the photographic image could not represent any type of movement, resulting in a world devoid of even human presence.
This deficiency in photography is appropriated by the imperialist discourse of the second half of the 19th century, which detects in its documentary images an empty world, made up of unoccupied cities and villages, ready to be modified by the “civilizing mission” of European powers. This discourse, which applies to the Middle East as a whole, becomes particularly fierce in the case of Palestine, systematically presented as a place devoid of native inhabitants.
Later, Karima will react emphatically to the resumption of this vision by Zionism, producing images that contrast with those published in the newspaper brought to Palestine by Reverend Stepan Gunther. In the chapter “The return of the ghost”, Nasrallah stages a conversation between Moshe Nordo, the “author” of the photographs released in 1936, and Levi, his true executor. He takes to his superior a local newspaper, in which images by an Arab photographer had been published to prove “that ours are lies and that the houses we photographed have Arab owners and are inhabited by Arabs”.
Fearing the spread of this counter-information, which would, without a doubt, demonstrate the lies of Zionism, Levi transmits the command's orders to Nordo: as the Palestinian images could not appear alongside the Zionist ones, it was urgent to exchange the camera for the rifle and end the life of the photographer. This dialogue does not have a precise chronological framework, but it is possible that it takes place between the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, as the novel ends with an attempted attack on Karima, which does not take place because tuberculosis takes the lead.[6]
It is possible that this scene is a poetic license from Nasrallah, as no news about this was found in the bibliography consulted. One-eyed biography It is not limited, however, to telling the story of a photographer committed to the Palestinian cause. The author dedicates a lot of space to the figure of the portrait artist, whose initial initiative had been the photograph of his own family. Karima manages to win over people who preferred to be photographed at home, but her reach goes beyond this audience.
Even those “who disagreed about personal photos, if they were halal ou haram [7], or those who considered photography an abomination, a work of Satan, were taken by the desire to remain present in the photographs themselves, as they knew that the camera's memory, when it comes to retaining a person's features, was stronger than than their own memory and that of their loved ones. No one else could resist this magic and the need for it. People were then driven by the dream of remaining present no matter what happened, whether they went far away or were overtaken by death. They were captivated by photography's ability to keep their children children, because that was what the heart longed for whenever someone saw their children grow up; or by the ability to stay young, as if time were incapable of taking away their shine”.
The photographer shared the feelings of her clients, as the episode with the stolen image demonstrates. The action of hiding that collective portrait, considering it “his private property”, had as its substrate the desire to “keep for himself a moment that he would not give up for anything in this world: the moment when he shook hands with his brother Najib ”.
A tireless observer, she begins to “pay attention to the reflections of the colors of the clothes and their impact on the photographs: the color of the dresses, the walls, the sofas, the chairs, the hanging pictures; of curtains and windows; corners, floors and ceilings”. Having learned from painters that close colors “look more harmonious, without conflict”, she asks that the clothes in a group portrait be from the same palette. But he does not follow this lesson blindly, as he realizes that, sometimes, it was necessary “to move a person, with a pretty, rosy face, and position him between two pale, frowning faces, to dispel the sadness of that part. of the portrait, making it a little happier.”
Convinced that the photographs she took “were no longer about a time, but about the people who were there”, she wonders about the fate of the harmony of the image when death takes a loved one: “It continues to be a photograph after its absence ? Does it become the portrait of whoever was with him? Or just his portrait?” She finds an answer to these questions when she comes to the conclusion that photography “is more powerful than the name. […] No matter how beautiful a name is, it may not make you remember all the faces of the person who bears it, but a single photograph is capable of making you see twenty faces, fifty, and who knows, in the future, even thousand faces.
Believing that the portrait “had to reflect the spirit of its owner”, Karima gives a second function to the album that she always carries with her. When someone didn't agree with his point of view about the image that was going to be taken, he showed the album so that the person “could find what looked like them, or the pose for the portrait they wanted”. This illusion, which led the models to not realize that “whoever was in that photo was not similar to them”, resulted in an image that left her disgusted “for having been forced to copy herself, to self-plagiarize”.
An episode highlighted in the novel demonstrates that she did not always bend to the models' vision. Invited to take a family portrait in Jerusalem, she is uncomfortable with the attitude of one of the young people who starts “moving the furniture around, arranging the curtains and even defining the distance between people and the camera”, while not stopping to praise the skill of Turkish photographers. She then decides not to carry out the work, as the result would be bad: “an orphan photograph, without origin”, which would not represent her and on the back of which her stamp would not be stamped.
The discomfort felt when someone “started taking photographs of themselves before she did so” led her to not explain to C. Sawides, the professional chosen to execute her portrait, the characteristics of the desired image, as it would be “an attack on the his mastery, art and extensive experience”. Feeling like a mass of clay in the hands of a “skilled potter”, Karima feels, for the first time, “the different touch of light on her skin”; She adjusts the position of her head, gives a satisfied look and insinuates a confident smile, following the instructions of the master, who represents her holding the camera shutter, “as if she were taking his photograph, and not the other way around”.
As he admires the portrait, he realizes that Sawides had used “four eyes: his and hers.” The master “understood each photograph she took, as there was a distribution of portions that no one knew how to do like him; and there was delicacy, simplicity, kindness and light that no one felt like her.”
Although he recognizes that the poses assumed by clients and the backgrounds used in Abbud's portraits are part of the conventions of the period, Nassar highlights the spontaneity, humility and humanity of the models, who give the impression of being real people, as differentiating elements of his images. inserted in the context of the middle class. The author focuses his vision on some specific portraits, such as that of the father, represented in ecclesiastical robes, holding the Bible in one hand and looking firmly ahead.
Although it is a formal pose, the portrait still has an air of spontaneity, which highlights the model's wisdom and humility. In the portrait of two girls dressed in the latest fashion, Nassar detects two dichotomous attitudes towards the photographic act: one of them seems to be “intimidated by the camera”, while the other shows signs of “being quite comfortable in front of it”. This tension is noticeable in the shorter girl's gaze that avoids the camera and in the taller girl's posture as she faces the lens resolutely.
Nasrallah's novel highlights other aspects of Karima's work as a photographer, including her interest in the Palestinian landscape and her dissatisfaction with hand-colored photographs. The first aspect is summarized in an itinerary that explains the length of the trip undertaken and the desire to get back to work after the break imposed by motherhood: “Karima took off, flew away like someone who wants to gather up all the days she missed and head towards the future. She went to Jerusalem, to the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Nativity, and took photographs. So she headed to the Jordan River, then north to Tabarya, and photographed. She crossed the river with her car and arrived at the city of Yarach, and took photographs. She drove to Lebanon, and photographed it. She went back south, through Akka, Haifa, Yafa to Alkhalil, and photographed. When she returned home, the reverend hugged her and felt the horse's heart that his daughter carried in her chest.”
The issue of color photography is addressed in a dialogue between the protagonist and her father. Believing that no one “can see what happens inside people more than the photographer, despite only capturing their appearance”, Karima expresses her discomfort with the failure to tint the images, as “the result is in black and white”. The paternal incentives that point to the acceptance of her colorful images are of no use, as she retorts with an indisputable argument: the problem is that whoever took the photographs knows what is beneath the colors, being aware that they “are infamous”. Struck by tuberculosis, she expresses a wish: “All I want is to live until a time when camera films are colored and cameras are able to capture colors as they are, without manual interference from the photographer.”
It is evident in the narrative woven by Nasrallah that the father is the great supporter of Karima's endeavors while the mother represents the patriarchal unconscious, with her constant concern for the opinions of others. Said Abbud teaches his daughter that it is necessary to say clearly what you want, as demonstrated by the episode of the first camera received as a gift after admitting her interest in photography; he encourages her when she decides to learn to drive so she can carry the camera when she travels; he is moved to tears when he sees the studio's advertisement and emphasizes that the photographer “was born and grew up long before him” because she was able to snatch his freedom; supports her decision not to follow her husband to Lebanon[8]; urges her to resume work after a two-year break to take care of her son, using a kind of poem (“[…] you have the heart of a horse, the eye of an eagle and the touch of a butterfly ”; he is proud of the images created to contrast the Zionist propaganda that give him “a strange feeling, that he was seeing Bethlehem from the sky, and not at the table full of houses and people” and confesses that Karima is part of the force. of his faith “in God who created people, inspiring them to work and […] in human beings who refuse to give up”.
Concentrating on the figure of the photographer, Nasrallah does not give importance to Karima's general background and hopes that the reader will detect for himself the challenging personality of a woman ahead of her time. The author limits himself to saying that the young woman had become a teacher and that she had left teaching after a year to dedicate herself to photography, displeasing her mother. Fluent in three languages – Arabic, German and English – Karima graduated in Arabic Literature from the American University of Beirut in the early 1920s and worked for a period as a teacher at the Syrian Orphanage in Jerusalem.
As Mitri emphasizes, she should not be seen as a simple photographer, but as an entrepreneur, who uses her network of family and religious contacts to open studios in different locations in Palestine. Another aspect highlighted by experts and not sufficiently explored by Nasrallah is the “social revolution” that she introduces into her professional practice when she leaves the studio and its artificial atmosphere and enters the homes of her clients, especially women and children, which captures more of the comfortable in their “natural environments”, in more diverse and not so conventional poses.
It should not be forgotten that Abbud is not limited to recording the life and appearances of the Palestinian middle class, as part of his work is dedicated to capturing popular forms of work in the countryside and in the city, ancestral habits, ceremonies, among others, composing a vast panel of Palestinian life before the Nakba (May 15, 1948), when more than 700.000 people were forced to leave their homes due to the conflicts of 1947-1948 and the Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949), with consequences that continue to this day.
This conflicting context is the basis for the “disappearance” of Abbud’s work over a long period of time. It is up to Issam Nassar to bring back his legacy in a 2005 publication, Different snapshots: first local photographers in Palestine (1850-1948). The following year, Israeli collector Yoki Boazz published an advertisement in an Arabic newspaper, in which he requested information about the photographer, of whom four albums with autographed images had been found in a house located in the Qatamon neighborhood of Jerusalem. After obtaining the photographs in exchange for an old edition of the Torah printed in the Palestinian city of Safad (1860), Ahmad Mrowat locates three more albums with the Abbud family in Nazareth and the set becomes part of the Darat Al Funun collection.
The photographer's legacy is beginning to be publicized and the short film is dedicated to her Restored pictures (2012), by filmmaker Mahasen Nasser-Eldin. The creation of the Karimeh Abbud award by Dar-al-Kalima University, in Bethlehem, crowns the recognition of the contribution of a photographer, who put herself at the service of her people at a time like the 1920s, when Muslim and Christian associations began to contrast the current idea that Palestine was not a nation, but a set of sectarian groups, and to support the unification process.
Published in 2019, Nasrallah's novel is part of this process of recovering the memory of a fundamental figure in the history of Palestinian identity, who knew how to show in his images the existence of a people with habits rooted in an ancient tradition, but simultaneously anchored in modernity, who was proud of his own past, but did not belittle the present. In this way, Abbud called into question a vision created in the XNUMXth century with the “peaceful conquests” of photography and transformed into a weapon of colonialism by France and England and, in the XNUMXth century, into an instrument of conquest by Zionism.
For a people who lost not only their territory, but also the narrative regarding their ways of life, Abbud's photographs represent an important contribution to the documentation of a specific and crucial moment in Palestinian life: the period of the British Mandate that ended with the Nakba. The uncertainties surrounding Abbud's biography show that new research is needed into the trajectory of a determining figure in the documentation of a lively and varied national life, regardless of the occupant of the moment.
* Annateresa Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Visual Arts at ECA-USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reality and fiction in Latin American photography (UFRGS Publisher).
Reference
NASRALLAH, Ibrahim. One-eyed biography. Translation: Safa Jubran. Rio de Janeiro, Tabla, 2024, 164 pages. [https://amzn.to/3LSshWA]
REFERENCES
ASMAR, Maswan. “The 'Lady Photographer' of Palestine” (3 Jan. 2018). Available in: .
“Karimeh Abbud.” In: International Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question. Available in: ..
MATOS, Soraya Misleh de. A history of Palestinian women: from salons to the beginnings of resistance literature. Doctoral thesis. São Paulo: Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, 2022.
MROWAT, Ahmad. “Karimeh Abbud: early woman photographer (1896-1955)”. Jerusalem Quarterly, n. 31, Summer 2007, p. 72. Available at: . Accessed on: 77884 Jul. 9.
NASRALLAH, Ibrahim. One-eyed biography; trans. Safa Jubran. Rio de Janeiro: Tabla, 2024.
NASSAR, Issam. “Early local photography in Palestine: the legacy of Karimeh Abbud”. Jerusalem Quarterly, n. 46, summer 2011. Available at: .
NASSAR, Issam. “Karimeh Abbud: first female photographer of Palestine”. In: VERDE, Tom (org.). Women behind the lens: the Middle East's first female photographers (Mar.-Apr. 2019). Available in:https://www.aramcoworld.com/female-photographers>.
“Palestinian photographers before 1948: documenting life in a time of change” (sd). Available in: .
RAHEB, Mitri. “Karimeh Abbud: entrepreneurialism and early training”.Jerusalem Quarterly, n. 88, winter 2021. Available at: .
SOLOMON-GODEAU, Abigail. “A photographer in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann and his time”. In: _______. Photography at the dock: essays on photographic history, institutions and practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Notes
[1] According to Issam Nassar, there is no evidence of women working as photographers before 1948 in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, with the exception of Abbud. It is known that Najla Raad hand-colored the portraits taken by her husband Johannes Krikorian and that Margo Abdou ran her brother David's studio when he traveled. Neither of them, however, owned a photography studio like Karima Abbud.
[2] As a child, she took the expression literally: she believed that photographers “held the sun and drew with it on paper”. Then she realizes that the star was very far away and no one could hold him.
[3] Nassar wonders who could have been the girl's master: Khalil Raad, Garabed Krikorian or Sawides? Or, perhaps, she had studied at the American Colony of Jerusalem? Or with al-Sawabini in Jaffa? Or, with someone whose name you don't know in Haifa?
[4] Krikorian had been a student of Yessai Garabedian, patriarch of the Armenian Church in Jerusalem, who founded a photography studio in St. James's Cathedral around 1860.
[5] The author combines in the photographer Issay Garabedian the figures of Yessai Garabedian, who was unable to practice photography due to his religious position, and Garabed Krikorian, who opened a studio in Jerusalem and was Raad's teacher.
[6] In a footnote, Nasrallah reports that Abbud's images were released three years after they were taken, when journalist Najib Nassar “was introduced to them and learned their story.”
[7] The terms indicate what is considered legitimate and illegitimate under Islamic Law (Sharia).
[8] In the novel, Karima meets Lebanese Yussef Fares in August 1930. The young woman, who had “a calm personality, trained to stand behind the camera with the firmness of a soldier and the delicacy and cunning of an artist” , is not interested, at first, in the “frivolous” man. She nevertheless marries him, but refuses to follow him to Lebanon, as she does not want to abandon her successful career. Even though she is pregnant, she cannot reach her husband in Lebanon and only sees him again shortly before her son Samir turns one. A new refusal to move to her husband's homeland puts an end to the union. Mitri Raheb and Soraya Misleh de Matos report the information that the couple lived for two years in Brazil, where Samir was born. The quick return is seen by Raheb as an index of the photographer's attachment to Palestine and its people.
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