Khalil Raad

Biography

Khalil Raad (1854–1957) was a pioneering photographer widely regarded as the first Arab photographer of Palestine. He was born in the mountain village of Bhamdoun in present-day Lebanon; after his father, a Maronite convert to Protestantism, was killed during the sectarian violence of 1860, his mother brought him and his sister Sarah to Jerusalem, where they settled with relatives. Raad was educated at the Bishop Gobat (Protestant) School and came of age in the cosmopolitan, multi-confessional Jerusalem of the late Ottoman period. He learned his craft under Garabed Krikorian, an Armenian-Palestinian photographer trained in the workshop established by the Armenian Patriarch Issay Garabedian. After working independently for several years, Raad opened his own studio around 1890–1895 on Jaffa Road, then the commercial heart of Jerusalem, directly opposite his former teacher's establishment. The two became the city's leading rival studios, a rivalry later softened by the intermarriage of their families. On the eve of the First World War, Raad traveled to Switzerland to refine his technique under the photographer Keller; he returned with Annie Muller, whom he married in 1919, and settled in the Talbiyya quarter near Jerusalem. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Raad built one of the richest visual records of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. His surviving archive includes well over a thousand glass-plate negatives, numerous postcards, and rare film footage documenting Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. His subjects ranged across landscapes and cityscapes, studio portraits, scenes of rural and urban daily life, agriculture and trades, religious commemorations, archaeological and biblical sites, and major political events. He worked both as a commercial portraitist serving Jerusalem's communities and as a documentarian whose images circulated internationally as postcards and illustrations. The Nakba of 1948 shattered Raad's world. As fighting engulfed Jerusalem, the Jaffa Gate area became no-man's-land between Arab Legion and Israeli forces, leaving his studio inaccessible and ultimately destroyed. The bulk of his life's work survived only through the daring of a young Italian friend who crossed the lines at night, repeatedly, to rescue the negatives and films from the studio. Displaced from both home and livelihood, Raad and his family fled first to Hebron and then to his native Bhamdoun. At the war's end he returned to Jerusalem, where the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Bishop Ilya Karam, invited him to live within the Patriarchate's complex in the Old City. He resided there from late 1948 until his death in 1957. The core of his collection eventually reached the archive of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, and his images have since anchored major exhibitions, including the Palestinian Museum's "Khalil Raad: Photographs 1891–1948."

Why This Person Matters

He created the most extensive Arab visual record of late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, preserving a homeland that the Nakba would erase from the map but not from memory.

Historical Context

Raad worked at the hinge of Palestinian history, from the multi-confessional Jerusalem of the late Ottoman Empire through the British Mandate to the catastrophe of 1948. His lens captured a society in transition—its peasants, notables, pilgrims, markets, and political upheavals—just as that society was being dismantled. His own life mirrors the Palestinian experience: a craft built over half a century, a studio and home lost in the Nakba, displacement to Hebron and Lebanon, and an archive saved only through extraordinary chance. The survival of his negatives, smuggled out of a studio in no-man's-land, became a literal act of preserving a nation's image against erasure.

Legacy & Influence

Raad's archive is a foundational primary source for the study of pre-1948 Palestine, drawn upon by historians, curators, and a Palestinian public reconstructing a vanished landscape. Held principally at the Institute for Palestine Studies, his images have anchored landmark exhibitions such as the Palestinian Museum's "Not Just Memory" and "Khalil Raad: Photographs 1891–1948," and circulate widely in books, documentaries, and online archives like Jerusalem Story. As a founding figure of indigenous Arab photography in Palestine—alongside his teacher Krikorian—he established a local visual tradition that countered the orientalist gaze of European photographers, and his work remains central to Palestinian collective memory and the politics of the image.

References & Sources

1. Khalil Raad — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalil_Raad
2. Khalil Raad — Jerusalem Story — https://www.jerusalemstory.com/en/bio/khalil-raad
3. Not Just Memory: Khalil Raad and the Contemporary Gaze — The Palestinian Museum — https://palmuseum.org/en/exhibitions-and-events/exhibitions/not-just-memory