Preserving Gaza’s photographic history | DW Documentary

Gaza is a war-zone - surrounded by Israel and controlled by Hamas. The works of an Armenian photographer taken in the 1940s and the 1960s show a Gaza that is little known today. “Photo Kegham“ was known all over Gaza. As one of the territory’s first phtographers, the Armenian Kegham Djeghalian opened a photo studio in Gaza City at the end of the 1940s. His images, taken between 1945 and 1970, show a little-known face of Gaza. One image is of Che Guevara, who visited the area in 1959. Another is of a railway station along the line between the Gaza Strip and Egypt which no longer exists today. Marwan Tarazi, whose family took over the business in the 1980s, was able to preserve a part of Djeghalian’s archive, even though Studio Kegham is closed now. Archiving the photos has been anything but simple. Most of the negatives and prints are in boxes and plastic bags in a cupboard. Says Tarazi, “It’s these negatives and prints that are what’s so important to me. They'