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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Travel Photography, Amateur Photography, and Locality
Chapter 3: Were there Female Photographers in the Region?
Chapter 4: Producing an Alternative Space: Destabilizing Fixed Images of Womanhood
Chapter 5: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Mandate
Chapter 6: Modernity as Expressed in the Photographs
Chapter 7: “Successful Failures,” or Marie al-Khazen’s Photographic Experiments
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Yasmine Nachabe Taan is Associate Professor in Visual Culture and Graphic and Fashion Design History at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.
Summary
The Lebanese photographer Marie al-Khazen seized every opportunity to use her camera during the years that she was active between 1920 and 1940. She not only documented her travels around tourist sites in Lebanon but also sought creative experimentation with her camera by staging scenes, manipulating shadows, and superimposing negatives to produce different effects in her prints. Within her photographs, bedouins and European friends, peasants and landlords, men and women comfortably share the same space. Her photographs include an intriguing collection portraying her family and friends living their everyday lives in 1920s and ‘30s Zgharta, a village in the north of Lebanon.
Yasmine Nachabe Taan explores these photographs, emphasizing the ways in which notions of gender and class are inscribed within them and revealing how they are charged with symbols of women’s emancipation to today's viewers, through women’s presence as individuals, separate from family restrictions of that time. Images in which women are depicted smoking cigarettes, driving cars, riding horses, and accompanying men on hunting trips counteract the common ways in which women were portrayed in contemporary Lebanon.
Foreword
An exploration of the Lebanese photographer Marie al-Khazen's work, revealing interactions between her practice and gender, class, travel, dress and everyday life in 1920s and 1930s Lebanon.
Additional text
In a novel reading of Marie al-Khazen’s oeuvre, Yasmine Nachabe Taan shows how this independent Lebanese woman used her camera creatively to exert control over images, including her self-image, and complicate gender roles. Nachabe Taan’s discovery and recovery of a body of forgotten photographs makes a major contribution to gender and visual studies and to critical discussions by scholars of the Middle East about archives, evidence, and intimate histories.”
