The Brownies in Palestina

Photography & Culture Volume 6 Issue 1 March 2013, pp. 41–64

Photography & Culture

Volume 6—Issue 1March 2013pp. 41–64DOI: 10.2752/175145213X13506588677285

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Photocopying permitted by licence only

© Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2013

“The Brownies in Palestina”: Politicizing Geographies in Family Photographs1

Gil Pasternak

AbstractThis article is concerned with the production of domestic familial knowledge in connection to the modern Israeli state’s geographical terrain. Considering the period stretching from the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 to the present day, it focuses on a case study of a family album of pictures portraying Israeli subjects in a landscape that is concurrently perceived as the home of the Palestinian as well as the Jewish-Israeli peoples. By attending to Palestinian and Israeli historical accounts that investigate the Israeli state’s ideological administration of landscape, alongside the theorization of vernacular photography and the methodologies often used to unpack such imagery, I demonstrate how landscape–family photographs may confront the Zionist “Geographical Imagination” and the physical landscape the Zionist project designed and imposed upon the “Israeli” land. Such photographs, I argue, extend and alter existing Zionist representational regimes, challenging formal Israeli historiography. While this article centers on the production of landscape–family photographs within the Israeli state, it intends to offer an insight into the impact both the commercialization and technological simplification of the photographic medium had on the use of photography in cultural politics. I suggest that photography in this context does much more than simply serve the distribution of power by state officials. In the vernacular, I argue, photography must be read as a potentially subversive apparatus capable of undermining formal doctrines and canonical histories.

Keywords: Israeli historiography/ideology, family photographs and state politics, vernacular photography, landscaping, geographical imagination/imaginative geographies.

A group of elderly people stands in front of the iconic defiant lion of Tel Hai (Figure 1). They appear in a black-and-white photograph of half-postcard size, taken sometime in the 1970s while touring the

42 “The Brownies in Palestina” Gil Pasternak


Fig 1 Esther Pasternak, 1970s. Esther Pasternak collection of family photographs, 1946–99. Copyright © Gil Pasternak.

Gil Pasternak “The Brownies in Palestina” 43


northern part of modern Israel. One of them is my late maternal grandmother, Esther Pasternak, shown in the bottom line, fourth from the right. My grandparents were all Eastern European Jewish immigrants who left the Continent for Israel shortly after the 1939–45 war. The vast majority of their private photographic collections show them in arbitrary urban spaces in Germany and in European cafés and apartments; sometimes alone, at other times with family members and friends. When I was a child, Esther and I used to spend some time looking through the collection of family photographs she kept by her bed in a red plastic case. It was through this collection of family photographs that I first became familiar with the faces of late family members and family friends, with foreign countries and distant cities, as well as with other people and sights that were not part of my own immediate environment. The photograph of Esther in Tel Hai is one of a kind in my collection of family photographs showing the generation of my grandparents. It is the only photograph that features one of these four émigrés against an overdetermined Israeli national symbol—the defiant lion of Tel Hai.

The defiant lion is a tombstone monument erected in 1932 to commemorate a group of eight Jewish pioneer settlers who, as the Israeli version of the story goes, fell to Arab village militias in the settlement of Tel Hai in 1920 while defending their homes and community. The lower part of the monument lists their names. Immediately above them, another engraved Hebrew inscription reads “tov lamut be’ad artzenu” (It is good to die for our country). It is often said that these were the last words imparted by Joseph Trumpeldor—commander of the battle, one of its fallen, and an icon of socialist Zionism. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the story of the Tel Hai battle has been perpetuated within the newly emerging Israeli society as a mythic narrative of bravery. Although the pioneers lost the battle, Trumpeldor has become an exemplar

of local heroism, and his words the epitome of Jewish-Israeli patriotism (Zerubavel 1995).

In modern Israel, the defiant lion has become a marker of a contested environment. It denotes a national commemorative site while also being a tourist landmark. On the one hand, the words engraved on the memorial address Hebrew speakers. They speak to those who consider themselves part of a wider national community. They impart a patriotic message to those who would prefer to recognize this part of the country as theirs, and who would ideally annex the historical mythic figure of Trumpeldor to their society. On the other hand, the historical narrative associated with the statue has been used to attract internal and external tourists to this part of the country. As a tourist site it offers vacationers an opportunity to partake in a leisure activity. Eliciting some embellished anecdotes about the battle of Tel Hai—Trumpeldor’s last words, the settlers’ heroism, and the eventual triumph of their political beliefs—the site facilitates the consumption of a simplified storyline which romanticizes the life and death of the socialist Zionist pioneers, and which animates the geographical surroundings.

The now mythologized battle of Tel Hai ended at least fifty years before Esther and her companions would stand by the monument to have their photograph taken. The frame is neatly composed to include all of them, as well as a full view of the memorial, Trumpeldor’s words in the middle, and the emblematic lion at the top. Directing their gaze at the camera, Esther and the others appear to feel comfortable next to the monument. Some of the women hold elegant bags. Some wear sunglasses. The men appear in the top row. Most of the figures smile. Given the competing significances of the defiant lion, this visual information triggers conflicting notions. It may seem to propagate and embrace socialist Zionist ideology: the alliance that the group forms in front of the national symbol generates the impression that



each one of them would encourage human sacrifice in favor of national ends, as if they were to reiterate that “It is good to die for our country.” Conversely, the figures’ smiles signify a rehearsal of vernacular photographic conventions. Their casual appearance by a landmark associates them with the context of tourism. Their blasé performance mitigates the severity of the monument, toning down the defiant lion’s national and ideological symbolic value, and nullifying the figures’ association with sociocultural commemorative rites. In depicting the subjects partaking in a leisure activity, the image also discharges the subjects of the pioneers’ socialist moral sensibilities, which rejected self-indulgence, and instead propagated settlement, defense, and labor as a worthy way of life.

It is true that not everyone would feel comfortable posing next to such a monument for a photograph. Not everyone would affirm that it is good to die for a country. And not everyone would identify “our” with “mine.” This photograph alone cannot attest to its intended meaning or significance. On face value, it communicates the mere encounter between the subjects it depicts and the visited site, and their contingent relatedness in time and space.

Family Photographs: Histories, Politics, MethodologiesRichard Chalfen argues that: “Access to cameras has provided us with a modern expressive form that promotes the communication of information about ourselves to ourselves and future generations” (Chalfen 1987: 4). Yet, the information communicated through landscape–family photographs in particular is often disputable and uncertain. Somewhat inadvertently, the information such photographs communicate may often exceed that intended. Taken away from home, against particular landscapes, they may generate surplus knowledge about the sociocultural and ideological domain within which they are produced. Thereby, their function and

behavior in the broader social context may defy and overthrow, rather than reflect, the meanings their makers or collectors may have anticipated.

The role landscape and family photographs play in occidental societies, and the meanings one might associate with the information they mediate, has been greatly informed by state politics and capitalist ideologies. Preserving (and imagining) cultural, historical, and human landscape was a role officially assigned to the medium of photography when its invention was reported to the people of France by François Arago, in the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 (Sekula 1981). This resulted in photography’s widespread participation in European colonialism; in representing and shaping Otherness in compliance with European imagination, fantasy, and desire. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kodak company further cemented this role, enticing individuals to travel with cameras and participate in the depiction of landscapes. Kodak thus invoked the nuclear family to partake in the production of geographical knowledge within the domestic sphere (Olivier 2007).

To fully grasp the operation of the photographic apparatus in family life, its involvement in politics, in landscaping, and in negotiations of power relations, one has to remember that historically, it was the invention of the one-dollar Brownie camera that enabled the practice of family photography and the production of family photographs in the way that one is familiar with today. First manufactured and sold in 1900, the Brownie, one of the first easy-to-operate cameras for amateurs, brought about the notion of the democratization of photography, and of snapshot photography in particular. It allowed virtually anyone to take photographs regardless of whether or not they possessed any photographic expertise. As Marc Olivier notes, “Before the snapshot, photography was largely a gentlemen’s hobby, a pastime that required technical skill and costly equipment” (2007: 1).



Thanks to the Brownie, women, children, and those who did not enjoy high social and economic status could now express themselves through photography, tell their own story, and reflect their personal worldviews. But, as Olivier explains, the dissemination of the Brownie camera did more than just bring snapshot photography to the masses. Due in large part to an extensive advertisement campaign, it “redefined not only who could take photographs, but for what purpose” (Olivier 2007: 1–2). The Brownie was branded as a democratic means of communication, one liberated from given societal structures and institutions of power. By managing to generate anxiety about undocumented lives, it inspired consumers to give expression to “invisible lives.”2 While the Brownie camera is no longer in use, the desires it generated, and the alleged democratic ideology it promoted, have both been carried into the present day (Olivier 2007).

Some of the leading literature about the relationship between geography and the practice of landscape–family photography is readily available in studies within Cultural and Human Geography (for examples, see Urry 1992; Selwyn 1996; Haldrup and Larsen 2003; Larsen 2005). The majority of this discourse, however, does not consider what forms of familial and geographical knowledge such photographs produce or might generate within the family unit; it does not attend to the roles family photographs play within the familial environment, but rather, solely to the gesture of their production. Although numerous authors have intended to explore what families actually do with the photographs they take, or to study what motivations lead them to capture such photographs in the first place (Csikszentmihaly and Rochberg-Halton 1981; Jacobs 1981; Chalfen 1987, 1998; Bourdieu 1990; Halle 1993; Rose 2003, 2010), it is a difficult, maybe even an impossible task. Once printed, photographs embark on a journey of their own. As objects of exchange, family photographs may be sent to other relatives or interested parties who

may not necessarily use them as their makers intended. Those who were not among the tourists might not be capable of identifying the depicted scenes and locations. As a consequence, such viewers might read new meanings into the images. Finally, as material objects, photographs may exist for much longer than the subjects and sites they show. Thus, the significance of family photographs as signs, coupled with the function they serve, is sure to alter, even when remaining in the hands of new generations of the family they depict; their role and meaning is destined to change, and their legibility to become obscure.

Another commonly overlooked aspect in studies of family photography is the implication of taking pictures within landscapes of conflict by families for whom the terrain simultaneously signifies “home” as well as a politically charged foreign geography. In order to investigate, in particular, images that encompass such conflicting notions, it appears necessary to complicate the currently dominant research methodologies used in studies of family photographs: functionalism, methodological individualism, and feminism.3

The functionalist approach’s maxim presupposes that a union of interests and solidarity is the normal condition prevailing in society. This stance, therefore, tends to consider the practice of family photography as a harmonious evolutionary tradition, and the family photograph as a tuneful and final product. Such studies are necessary as they shed some light on various communicative customs and their visual manifestations in folk culture. However, they also limit the scope of research into family photography. After all, the functionalist approach’s tautology preempts and thereby further cements cohesion as the family photograph’s ultimate political function.

Complementing the functionalist methodology, methodological individualism is equally relevant to the development of a rigorous understanding of family photography. It offers an insight into subjective perceptions



of this practice’s social role through micro-sociological studies investigating the significance individuals assign to the family photograph. Yet the main complexity embedded in this research tradition is one and the same as its promise. It extracts data and information from those who practice and view family photography within the familial sphere. This may lead one to acquire an understanding of the interpretations individual subjects offer once asked to explain their intentions in producing, exchanging, and looking at family photographs. Yet their views and analytical positions could be said to reflect no more than hindsight explanations of such activities, informed by the interviewees’ own subjective set of desires and critical capacities. Therefore, the application of methodological individualism might limit access to other, less obvious sociocultural and political outcomes generated through the various activities associated with family photography. In addition, it might draw one’s attention away from the functions of the family photograph as an object of exchange, as well as from its unforeseen purpose as a phenomenological object.

Some theorizations of family photography—such as those written by Susan Sontag (1979), Julia Hirsch (1981), Phillip Stokes (1992), Marianne Hirsch (1997), and Deborah Chambers (2003)—tend to adhere, albeit not exclusively, to functionalist methodology. However, perhaps due in particular to the relatively personal characteristic of family photography’s apparatus, functionalism and methodological individualism often overlap in more semi-/empirical explorations. This can be exemplified by some of the studies carried out by, for instance, Richard Chalfen (1987), Pierre Bourdieu (1990), Gillian Rose (2003, 2010), and Geoffrey Batchen (2004).

Conversely, feminist inquiry into domestic imagery often utilizes the notion of conflict as a methodology (Walkerdine 1990; Spence and Holland 1991; Kuhn 1995; Rose 2003). Such studies consider family photographs as indicators of conflicting class and gender positions. Yet,

the majority of feminist discussions of family photographs also appear to agree with the theory of social integration and cohesion, primarily stemming from the functionalist approach. Their underpinning hypothesis suggests that family photographs do not reflect a notion of home or family, but that they help to transform the psychic perception of the house into a home, and the social group into a family unit. In line with the work of others in the broader field (for example, Titus 1976; Hirsch 1981; Chalfen 1987; Bourdieu 1990; Stokes 1992; Halle 1993; Slater 1995; Cronin 1998), feminist studies have mainly resulted in some theoretical suggestions and critical accounts that demonstrate how the family photograph contributes to establishing social integration through the perpetuation of visual representations of gender roles, subject positioning, social manners, conventions, and norms. Perhaps as a consequence of the feminist scholars’ acceptance of the notion of cohesion while studying social conflict, their research into family photographs does not seem to attend to moments of “representational failure.” That is, visual sites or modes of display where representational or contextual rupture occurs, which in fact allows one to reconsider the family photograph as an open channel through which innovative, at times also subversive readings of difference in class, politics, culture, and gender might emerge and reaffirm themselves in distinct terms.

A similar suggestion is voiced by Annette Kuhn, in a section within the concluding chapter of her book Family Secrets (2002: 152–53). Yet, in relying primarily on psychoanalytical theories, and associating family photography with memory work, Kuhn argues that “memory texts”—family photographs included—tend to lead to a state of sociocultural solidarity. “In the psyche,” she argues, “the drive that powers acts of remembering would seem to exert a specific kind of pull: the desire, often only partly conscious, for a lost ‘home’ grounds the work of memory



as a quest for union, reunion, wholeness” (2002: 167). Kuhn later suggests that, indeed, “Public memory may be comprised of a melange of smaller collective memory-stories, always in flux and always potentially in contradiction with one another” (2002: 168). Therefore she also asserts that “Remembering can be the occasion for cultural difference, even for conflict, as well as for solidarity” (Kuhn 2002: 168). Although Kuhn attends to the potential of the family photograph to undermine the notion of cohesion, she does not link the family photograph to the physical but rather to the psychic domestic environment. And because, in her view, the psychic domestic sphere is informed and dominated by “the historical imagination of nationhood” (Kuhn 2002: 169), the family photograph seems doomed to being read as a symbol of psychic submission to social norms, as well as of a feeling of unity.

The experience of the physical environment and that of psychic life may be perceived as interlinked, as well as being two reciprocal conditions of the family photograph. However, I would like to suggest one encounters the family photograph as a post-memory; not purely as something of the past, but also as an informative image and object existing in, and constantly reshaping the present understanding of, the physical conditions it both portrays and materializes, whether these are credible or fabricated.4

Already in 1981, Julia Hirsch, whose work embraces the notion of social cohesion, drew some attention to what she named “the latent hypocrisy of [photography]” (42). In her book Family Photographs, Hirsch delineates the historical emergence of family photography (1981: 15–46). Tracing back its informing representational conventions, she clarifies that family photographs obscure various social and cultural, political and personal frustrations, tensions and existential instability. Accordingly, it appears logical to presume that if the family photograph is often theoretically understood as

an object propagating integration, then on the one hand, it is above all an indicator of prevailing conflicts between social norms, and, on the other, of the angst of exclusion informed by physical rather than exclusively psychic circumstances.

Historically and politically, the condition of conflict has prevailed in Israeli societies and within the geographical terrain of the Israeli state since 1948. Allowing the political conditions that dominate the landscapes represented in the family photographs in question to determine the circumstances under which such images are scrutinized does not suggest family photographs are products consciously made with the intention of resisting political powers. In fact, applying such a critical methodological approach to family photographs rules out the possibility of defining their purpose or function as something embedded and self-contained within the practice of family photography, or in the family image itself. Rather, it makes it possible to observe the family photograph’s multiple functions, contingencies, and potential properties.

Taking particular issue with the production of familial geographical knowledge within the socially and politically contested environment of modern Israel, I will focus on family pictures showing Israeli subjects captured in a landscape that is concurrently perceived as representing the Palestinian as well as the Jewish-Israeli peoples. For this reason, it is simultaneously a space of succor and displacement, refuge and emigration. But, in discussing this contested geographical region and the way it is represented and materialized through family photographs, one must first be equipped with a thorough understanding of the culturally-coded realm of landscape, as well as of the historical formation and re-formation of “Israeli landscape.”

Thinking LandscapesFrom the late 1980s, a new understanding of landscape emerged in the field of cultural geography, treating and discussing landscape as



text.5 The collaborative work of Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1988) is an exemplar of this approach. According to their research, landscape must be understood as a system of authored signs working to narrate the terrain in which they are found. The narratives that landscapes present are predetermined by their principal makers or authors, whether these are individuals or groups. Prior to the late 1980s, the predominant approach toward landscape had been derived by the theories of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley school of geographers. Landscape was thought of as a blank sheet to be overprinted with traces of human activity, a by-product of cultural practices where culture was thought to have agency. The new understanding of the term, however, suggests landscape is a product of intentional activities carried out to determine geographical features and meaning (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987; Kong 1997). Accordingly, landscape needs to be considered as a linguistic experience, writing and communicating meanings in a particular language. A capacity to engage with and read the signs used along the geographical terrain renders landscapes legible, allowing the equipped viewer to absorb the information imparted by the landscape’s designer while depriving the less privileged viewer access to its intended meaning. Those who cannot read the signs used are bound to bestow different meanings upon the very same landscape, to read it in a way that may compete with, or even override its projected significance (Jackson 1989).6

This re-theorization of landscape as text began to prompt thinking of landscape as a cultural process rather than as a cultural outcome, let alone as a natural phenomenon. Yet, whereas the perception of landscape as text suggests landscape as an unstable cultural product—a construct open to interpretation rather than a set of neutral natural features—it perceives landscape to be a result of intentional yet naive organic processes rather than of manipulative practices driven by a will for possession and domination.7

Challenging this perspective, in 1988 James Duncan and Nancy Duncan published their “(Re)reading the Landscape,” an article now considered a classic work in the field of cultural geography. Following Marxist methodologies, Duncan and Duncan perceive landscapes as ideological texts organized to embody power and authority and working to this effect in conjunction with other forms of representation. Landscape here is conceived of as a medium that imparts values, capable of cementing suppositions about social function: when landscapes are “read ‘inattentively’ at a practical or non-discursive level, they may be inculcating their readers with a set of notions about how society is organized, and the readers may be largely unaware of this” (Duncan and Duncan 1988: 123).

A close reading of Duncan and Duncan’s theoretical work suggests landscape as a demonstration of political power produced by dominant elites in line with one’s own preferred ideological narratives about social status, structure, and organization. Thus, exposing the fabricating mechanism of landscape evokes alternative readings of the same geographical terrain. Such a disclosure, however, would in fact only reconstruct the landscape and its meaning anew, imbuing the geographical terrain with a power to serve the ideologies of a different authority.

Going beyond the suppositions advanced by Cosgrove and Daniels, and Duncan and Duncan, William J. T. Mitchell offers a phenomenological theorization in which he seeks to consider landscape as an inter-text embodying a multiplicity of authorities and meanings (1994). For him, landscape is a form of “dreamwork” (1994: 10). It is a mental construction, sustained, reproduced, and perpetuated by dominant discourses; a shifting non-static entity, made, shaped, and evolving continuingly and continually. Thus, Mitchell wishes to redefine “landscape” as a verb—to landscape, or landscaping—that would indicate the formation of a terrain by looking at geographical segments either directly or through forms of mediation.



Mitchell’s consideration of landscape is reminiscent of Edward Said’s discussion of orientalism, where Said seeks to make a claim for redefining the latter term as a geography of the imagination (Said 1978). Landscape for Said is a conventional practice involving the introduction of geographical studies and explorations in the form of Western imperialist intellectual traditions that reproduce visionary knowledge. It is therefore also a set of representational conventions that render unfamiliar topographies legible to the occidental eye, whereby the strange comes to resemble something recognizable through the making of the non-European world into a consumable spectacle.

In the context of this article, the geographical terrain of the modern state of Israel constitutes a prime example of the interplay between the semiotic, Marxist and phenomenological approaches to the notion of landscape as discussed above. Geographer Meron Benvenisti’s thorough treatise on the history of the landscape and landscaping of modern Israel demonstrates how particular political interactions with the land have given birth to an array of both authoritative as well as phantasmatic landscapes (2002). According to Benvenisti (2002), at the end of the nineteenth century Zionist pioneers brought with them from the diaspora the desire to reclaim the landscape of their longed-for, lost homeland. Upon their arrival in the region, they faced a different reality. Although popular Zionist historiography often presented the Promised Land as a deserted, unoccupied territory, the land was occupied by non-Jewish people; its landscapes did not live up to the biblical primordial images that appeared in the pioneers’ dreams. Having searched the visible landscape for residues that might echo their collective imagination, they worked to alter its physical features and conceal threatening scenes.8 The second generation of these immigrants, Benvenisti explains (2002), turned to archaeological excavations that gradually exposed the past sites of the ancient homeland, creating

the country’s landscape anew. By the time a third generation was born, they could not possibly experience the landscape intimately. Its alteration had rendered it a collective landscape of a nation, and the location of this nation’s identity.

Yet, as Ghazi Falah (1996) reveals in an article on the cultural landscape of Palestine, some sites of past villages still contain rubble, abandoned olive groves, cactus bushes, and other indications of their previous inhabitants. Some of these stand untouched, others are hidden among thick plantations of forests “planted apparently after the houses were leveled in the early years of the Israeli state” (Falah 1996: 271). Such locations turn this landscape into a site for Israeli amnesia, where some aspects of a non-heroic Jewish-Israeli history are hidden or camouflaged.

Edward Said argues that the conflict over the land of this region, and its perception as a home and a homeland for both Palestinians and Israelis, is the evolutionary consequence of a mix between geography, historical memory, and “an arresting form of invention” (2000: 183). For the same reason, finding a solution for the conflict between the two peoples is highly complex. Even though at present the state of Israel constitutes the sovereign power that dictates rules, dominating the terrain and having the capacity to preserve or remodel its features, a cultural struggle over territory continues. Its constituting elements, according to Said, are “overlapping memories, narratives and physical structures” (2000: 182).

Re/producing Geographical Knowledge in the Domestic SphereA photograph captured in March 1971 during my parents’ honeymoon features Dorit Pasternak, my mother, standing alongside a memorial for Moshe Levinger and Arye Steinlauff (Figure 2). Levinger and Steinlauff were two Israeli road workers who were shot dead by a group of Palestinian militants while paving the road to the Dead Sea in 1951.9 The memorial indicates the Hebrew



date of the workers’ death alongside their names. Above these, a short inscription reads: “galed chalutzim mefalsei ha’derech le’yam ha’melach she’lo zachu le’siyum” (A monument for the pioneers who had started paving the way to the Dead Sea but were not fortunate to complete it). The fragmented historical narrative of the 1951 incident and my mother’s temporal attendance to its commemorative site are united in this image, forming and enacting new conditions for their apprehension. Dorit complements the main vertical memorial stone, paralleling it with the full length of her body. The photographic unification between the figure and the memorial forms a continuation to the tragic narrative commemorated by the stonework. It may appear to proclaim that the two road workers’ death was

not in vain—they had lost their lives, but granted liberty to the future generations of Israelis.

Jens Jäger (2003) argues that when a depicted landscape is charged with conspicuous national symbols, and perhaps even more so when these take the form of memorials and monuments, its photographic representation is capable of mediating the scene in association with national ideology. According to Deborah Chambers (2003), and in line with Susan Sontag (1979: 8–9), landscape–family photographs work to affiliate members of the family with particular national symbols and locations. They enable the nuclear family to link itself to the broader social realm surrounding it, as well as providing a way to inform society of the participation of the family in social life. In this regard, Dorit’s family

Fig 2 Dorit Pasternak, 1971. Dorit and Ephraim Pasternak’s collection of honeymoon photographs. Copyright © Gil Pasternak.



photograph evokes a sense of affiliation between the geographical terrain and Israeli-Jewish state ideology. In featuring the Hebrew wording inscribed on the memorial, the photograph introduces the depicted geographical region as the property of a particular community. It suggests that the land surrounding the monument, which stretches as far as the eye can see, belongs to Hebrew-speakers, to those people who can comprehend the inscription’s meaning and in one way or another identify themselves with the dead.

Yet, it is also argued that family members and their friends form the main group of family photographs’ viewers (Csikszentmihaly and Rochberg-Halton 1981; Jacobs 1981; Chalfen 1987; Bourdieu 1990; Halle 1993; Rose 2003). This suggests that family photographs’ viewers always already inhabit an informed subject position; that the context of the visual familial narrative presented to them is what stimulates their interest. Any other narratives that may emerge from the photographic image, if at all considered, are secondary. The association between Dorit and the memorial, as depicted in the image in question, emerged during her honeymoon trip. Thus, viewed in the context of the family album, this image connotes the amorous union of two people. However, the honeymoon trip, as a context, also draws attention to the memorial and the visited site, as the latter does not complement an idealistic romantic narrative. The result, it could be argued, impinges upon the sterility of the site and the coherence of its ideological message. It triggers two separate narratives: a romantic story in the foreground; a violent death in the background. Now the landscape created by the image is distinctively different from the one in which it was made.

The participation of social photographic practices in landscaping processes is indirectly explored by Joan Schwartz and James Ryan (2003). Photographic mediation of the geographical, they explain, also operates as

its reconstruction. Considering geographical knowledge to be a blended composition of geographical landscapes mediated through visual and textual images, they identify the 1839 invention of photography as one that brought about a dramatic turn in human engagement with the world. Schwartz and Ryan argue that the alleged realistic properties of the medium have made it a powerful ally of the “Geographical Imagination,” which they describe as the mechanism that visually informs the creation of mental images of distant places and peoples.10 Inasmuch as photographs can directly accumulate geographical knowledge, and form a vehicle for its dissemination, it is now conventionally proclaimed that they are in fact key active participants in the making of geographical knowledge. Hence Schwartz and Ryan advance two core assertions. Firstly, they remind their readers that even nowadays, it remains particularly through photographs that “we see, we remember, we imagine: we ‘picture place’ ” (2003: 1). Secondly, they stress that photographic images of geographies, “from the pages of family albums to the holdings of national archives, continue to influence our notions of space and place, landscape and identity, history and memory” (2003: 5). Mentioning family albums with reference to these two insights suggests that landscape–family photographs participate in the cultural struggle over territory discussed by Said (2000), as they are capable of feeding viewers’ imaginations with selective information about places, presenting it as conclusive.

Thus, as is Esther’s group portrait (Figure 1), Dorit’s honeymoon photograph is conservative, as it is about national commemoration and the possibility of a new beginning. However, it is also potentially subversive. In the years leading to the establishment of the Israeli state, the socialist Zionists—then in power—called upon the Jewish settlers to work the land. Later, some of the state’s leaders claimed to have fulfilled this imperative, to have “made the desert bloom.”11



The environment depicted in the photograph may belong to the Jewish state, and the memorial may be read as a reminder of the Zionist project. Yet, other than the memorial itself, the scene mediated by Dorit’s family photograph denotes this terrain as abandoned. In addition, this image is also subversive in the sense that the familial figure, the materiality of the album, and its context, direct the viewer away from the ideological message of the monument, turning the visited site into a mere signpost—a marker on the itinerary of the honeymoon trip. For these reasons, Dorit’s photograph fails to reproduce and impart the exact meaning commonly associated with this landscape, historically or as experienced in the location itself. Instead, it recodes and recreates this landscape, forming a body of knowledge that differs from dominant Zionist narratives as well as from the cultural significance of the site. This image emancipates the monument of national aura through dissociating the structure from the physical experience of the geographical environment. It replicates the memorial’s fixed position within that environment, and thereby turns it into one of such casual backdrops that thrust the family member to the fore.

Landscaping the Family (Anew)I would like to suggest an understanding of the photographic relationship between sitters and landscapes in comparison with sitters against artificial backgrounds in studio photography. Steve Edwards, for example, explains how in the early days of photography a variety of diverse painted backgrounds enabled studio photographers to create portraits that articulated social divisions of labor, “making sure that each subject received only one identity” (2006: 251). The juxtaposition of subject and background appears to have worked to classify sitters according to social types. Here the background functioned to denote distinctive social environments, establishing a coherent illusionistic space, and simultaneously concealing

the ideological space of the studio. Edwards encourages readers to perceive backdrops as the sitters’ fantasy. That is, as representational spaces with which sitters wish to associate themselves mainly because, in their realities, they do not posses the former’s symbolic value.

If subjects against painted landscapes had to imagine their relationship to the background, when positioned against actual landscapes, family photographs narrate the group as directly involved in, and related to, the landscape surrounding them. This further complicates the reality of the photographic, for if both the subject and the background appear authentic, they are capable of shaping each other’s identity not only historically but also ontologically. Yet, while it could be argued that the two-dimensional painted background draws much of the viewer’s attention precisely due to its visible fabricated qualities, it also serves as an indication of intentionality. It is those already theatrical properties of the background that trigger the spectator’s interest in its symbolic value, and thereby in the possible affinity of the painted background with the sitter. Following the logic of Walter Benjamin’s historicization of photography (Benjamin 1985), it could be suggested that whereas the painted background gains prominence by alienating the sitter from a nonrepresentational space, in family photographs actual landscapes become casual through their photographic replication, allowing the sitter—a person familiar to the viewer—to stand out as the ephemeral element within the photographic image, thus imbuing the background with other significance. This recorded ephemeral encounter of the familiar figure with the inanimate surrounding has the capacity to concurrently familiarize and de-familiarize the viewer with the depicted environment, instilling in the viewer altering visions of conflicting political and social realities.

Such a disruption appears in three early childhood photographs featuring my brother Seffi and myself along with military hardware scattered



throughout the Israeli landscape, now serving as monuments to commemorate historical battles and the Israeli fallen.12 In one photograph we allegedly celebrate the glorious victories of Israel in both the 1956 campaign in Sinai and the Six Day War of June 1967 (Figure 3). When seen together with the emblematic Syrian tank of Kibbutz Degania, we apparently mock the defeat of the Syrian armored corps in the 1948 battle over the Golan Heights and the bridges of the Jordan River (Figure 4). Finally, when returning the gaze of the camera from the left wing of a fighter plane, “evidently” we are paying tribute to the pioneering pilots of the Israeli air force (Figure 5).

Incorporating these memorials into the family album, the three photographs solidify their status as cultural memories. Yet they fail to narrate a coherent link between the children and the memorials. In all three photographs the sitters attend to the camera, but they do not strike a pose. Assuming a legible pose would have implied their consciousness of the photographic apparatus as a whole, and of the impression their performance might make on others. Instead, they are deprived of subjective agency, objectified by the camera, appearing unaware of the military

hardware’s significance. The scale of the hardware and its hard, metallic appearance emphasize the children’s fragility, their delicate bodily state; they are dwarfed by the military hardware, literally as well as ideologically. It is due to this inconsistency that in fact the photographs fail to convince of the children’s identification with Israeli state ideology as represented by the memorials. Instead, they perform a discrepancy between the sitters and the landscape, interrupting the political appreciation of cultural memory as an organic raw product, and instead making the involvement of ideology in its fabrication more noticeable. Through the children’s engagement with the hardware and the photographic record of this meeting, the pictures operate to describe the children’s inadvertent imbibing of ideology. The images seem to speculate on who the children will become, not what they are at the photographic moment. At best, the photographs record and narrate the process of the children’s familiarization with the ideologically constructed Israeli political sphere.

The three photographs subvert the fantasy of Israeli landscape as something neutral and coherent. While intending to commemorate

Fig 3 Seffi and Gil Pasternak, 1980s. The Pasternaks’ family album, 1971–89. Copyright © Gil Pasternak.



Israeli heroism and victorious historical moments, the memorials violate the perceived fragility and innocence of the children. Subjective reality and state ideology in the shape of formal imagination fail to merge here; the involvement of the family in landscaping as captured by these three pictures does not allow a smooth imposition

of state ideology. Instead, they are reminders that ordinary people, their involvement with objects, and the practice of everyday life all have bearing on the organization of landscape, elaborating and complicating the “Geographical Imagination.” Put differently, producing family photographs in a landscape does not just





subject them to the scenery depicted in the background, but rather has the capacity to empower the photographed subjects.

The intrinsic lack of formality and authoritative agency in family photographs maintains their subversive potential in the political context. One accidental episode captured on film and placed in my family album performs the most significant subversion of official Israeli history precisely because of the family photographs’ capacity to transform inimitable scenes into casual ones. The image I refer to was created during a school trip in the early 1980s and presents me with some of my classmates and a parent, against a view of the Old City of Jerusalem (Figure 6). This expansive view is captured from a tourist observation point located at the top of the Mount of Olives. The sitters appear comfortable, at ease within the environment and with the photographic gaze pointed at them. The background, however, is loaded with political meanings, as dominion over the Old City of Jerusalem and its sacred places has been a matter of public, regional, and international dispute since the state of Israel captured the city from Jordan in the war of 1967 (Bregman 2003; Pappé 2006: 183–219).

This photograph complicates the relationship between the sitters and the geography it features. The four figures in the center of the photograph appear to acknowledge the photographic moment, and address the camera as part of the conditioned ritual of the practice of family photography. Attending to the camera and waiting to be photographed commonly results in a photographic category of portraiture that Thierry de Duve names as “time exposure” (1978). If snapshots are images depicting a moment from the past captured and separated from the flux of time, de Duve suggests time exposures are images created when the subject of the photograph ceases to act in space autonomously, designating some time to acting in front of the camera instead. Thus in time exposures the past tense of the view would not refer any more to a particular tense, person, or subject, as these were not present when the photograph was taken (1978: 116).

In accordance with de Duve’s theory, the four sitters depicted in Figure 6 appear to subjugate themselves to the photographic gaze of the camera as if time itself were brought to a momentary standstill. The mechanical operation

Fig 6 Untitled, 1980s. The Pasternaks’ family album, 1971–89. Copyright © Gil Pasternak.



of the camera, however, recorded more details than the vista of Old Jerusalem and this group of people. While the camera recorded lives that have no location other than the surface of the photograph, an imaginary discontinuous life, it also stole an independent life that was never offered to it. The same photograph presents a snapshot within a time exposure portrait of others. For the first time, a photograph found in my own collection of family photographs provides a clear depiction of a member of the Palestinian population identified as such by the white and red keffiyeh he is wearing on his head (Figure 7).13

Riding on a white donkey, passing by behind the group portrait, this figure comes to represent and physically embody the unconscious, as it were, of the constructed Israeli landscape. Palestinian life in the region is alluded to as not being anachronistic or something of the historical, but rather as something of the geographical mundane. The photograph landscapes the performing figures as associated with the Old City of Jerusalem—the Israeli national symbol of state sovereignty. But it also links them to those the Israeli state has intended to exclude from its national landscape. Although it could be regarded as inconsistent with the Israeli state’s ideology, this photographic slippage does not suggest an incoherent scene. Rather, it supplements official Israeli history: it expands the field of Israeli “Geographical Imagination”; it makes visible the presence of others in the region and, in turn, results in landscaping the family anew.

An Innocent Politics? Landscape–Family Photographs in Israel and BeyondInvestigating family photographs in the context of this article has entailed observing travelers engaged in exploratory acts. It has been concerned with temporary expressions of relations between subjects, and between subjects and the realm of geography. Here geography was thought of as a political site in

which relations between subjects and places overcome, or at least may appear to refuse to go along with, the confines of authority (Rogoff 2000: 21). Thus, I suggested one read family photographs that articulate relations between subjects, places, sites, and spaces as cultural products of critical activities that loosen and rebuild, study and alter photographic and geographical spaces. Consequently, I described landscape–family photographs as sites that bring to light the intersections between subjects and the perceived dominant orders of geographical and photographic knowledge, meaning and significance; as sites which contest perceived static ideas about actual and represented places, and replace these with unstable structures of physical and psychic subjectivities. In this regard, I portrayed the photographs in question as platforms on which geography and photographic conventions are produced at the margins, constantly negotiating,

Fig 7 Untitled (detail), 1980s. The Pasternaks’ family album, 1971–89. Copyright © Gil Pasternak.



challenging, and revising political ideologies, scopic constructions, and realities of belonging.

In considering the reciprocity between family photographs and geography, I acknowledged and intended to reconcile the semiotic, Marxist and phenomenological approaches to the concept of landscape.14 I wished to demonstrate this trans-methodological approach by recourse to my own collection of family photographs which, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, represents common familial photographic practices in the modern Israeli state (Pasternak 2009, 2010, 2011). My own collection of family photographs was used to attend to visual patterns identified during my research into a great number of family photo albums collected and compiled by Jewish-Israeli families. In choosing to focus on one family, I intended to demonstrate a notion of continuing representational practice and processes across three generations of Jewish Israelis. Furthermore, I hope that my choice allowed a clearer insight to be gained into the impact that a subjectively produced, accumulated, and constructed knowledge has on political, historical, and cultural education within the individual family unit. This is the key to an understanding of family photography not as a mere social practice, but rather as a social platform, imbued with the potential for political subversion.

Photography’s historicization as a credible means has broadly resulted in a perception of photographs as unconscious eyewitnesses, detached from the realities they depict (Tagg 1988; Rosler 1989; Solomon-Godeau 1991). Although these rather narrated qualities of objectivity and credibility have been contested both theoretically and empirically from the nineteenth century to the present day (Batchen 1999), and despite the increase in new photo-processing and editing software made readily available in the past two decades, the innocent perception of photographs as reflections of the realities they show still appears to prevail in popular culture (Winston 1998). This

understanding of the photographic image further empowers and prolongs the medium’s manipulative propensities; it obscures the mediation and subjectivity inevitably embedded in the mode of photographic production, and indeed in any visual and verbal act intended to disseminate information. It is perhaps primarily due to this sustainable sociocultural value, coupled with dominant political and economic interests, that photography conquered the highest end of the representational spectrum in the context of state politics (cf. Benjamin 1985). Furthermore, it was this very credible currency so closely associated with the photographic image that qualified photography, from the moment of its discovery, as the most effective medium to shape and reshape viewers’ geographical knowledge in both an informative and simultaneously deceptive manner (Schwartz and Ryan 2003).

However, much more needs to be said about the social, political, and cultural meaning of the nuclear family’s capacity to produce and present images of itself. Various authors have already pointed out that the existence of any nuclear family is conditioned by the nation-state.15 The nuclear family and the nation-state operate in relation to one another through complex negotiations of possession and ownership, rights, privileges, and obligations. These are dictated by reciprocal and conflicting anticipations, hopes, and expectations. As such, the institution of the family must not be perceived as an indication of unconditional and unreserved subordination to state ideology or sovereignty, nor that family photographs may serve only the nation-state’s ideological stance. If one acknowledges the status of the nuclear family as a medium rather than as a natural biological organism, one sees that the activities carried out by each family member are essentially political; the products they make within either the public or the domestic environment are thus inevitably politically loaded. It is perhaps true that family photography, itself a social norm, most often contributes to both the



perpetuation and the solidification of common cultural ideas and positions broadly considered acceptable within given social formations. Yet, according to the literature on family photography reviewed here, it currently still serves a mode of production repeatedly used innocently by the nuclear family as a recording mechanism of biographical highlights. As such, it might be said to ingrain social norms, while escaping the formal modes of ideological production, bypassing prescribed academic and popular educational environments, as well as the politics they represent. Thereby, family photography cannot be said to be a practice simply serving familial internal or external integration, nor the distribution of power by state officials alone.

In line with the development of various research methodologies, both landscapes and family photographs are sometimes considered as organic products of sociocultural integration, other times as normative media, guarded and utilized by dominant sociopolitical institutions to inculcate political ideologies to less powerful social formations. In this article, I primarily advanced another research approach that allows a synthesization of these perspectives, while considering family photographs and landscapes as unstable and unfixed platforms, whose meanings are created and recreated through subjective perception and corporeal interaction. This not only enabled me to show how members of the family are capable of reshaping the meanings of their own images while simultaneously embracing and subverting the significance of state symbolism. Rather, it also made it possible to reveal the commanding potential of the family photograph to re-landscape the human, political, and ideological terrains surrounding the family, imbuing them with alternative, at times resilient, significance. The implications of this reciprocity between the family photograph and landscape are made manifest in the context of the “Geographical Imagination.” Included in this mechanism through its participation in social

and physical practices of production and display, contextualization, viewing and “storytelling,” the landscape–family photograph maintains the potential to elaborate as well as challenge other competing representational regimes used to depict the geopolitical. This is despite, or perhaps because of, the family photograph’s apparently innocent cultural perception.

Analyzing family photographs solely within the context of social integration and cohesion enhances the transparency of the ideological apparatus of family photography, downplaying family photographs’ subversive discourses. Inasmuch as the nation-state and the institution of the family have been widely considered from a critical perspective, a well-informed investigation into the political operation of family photographs appears equally necessary in a project that has already identified in this form of representation at least some aspects of political insubordination. In particular, the practicing of family photography in the open terrain increases the potential of the family photograph to ascend, and even transform its formalist understanding as a mere socializing biographical record. When considering these kinds of family photographs as rambling, exploratory reminders of both the psychic and physical domestic spheres, and of the various environments that condition their existence and maintenance—the nuclear family, the nation, the land, and the state—they appear to be capable of undermining formal doctrines and methods of indoctrination. Even when not entering the public political realm, family photographs inscribe the complex psychic and physical relationship between the subjects they depict and the environments they occupy. Thinking of them as discursive sites assists in developing a diverse analytical methodology, highlighting facets of discrepancies with canonical national, ideological, and sociological tropes, topoi, and historiographies.16 For this reason, the political innocence academic research often associates with family photographs is politically



suspect. Every family photograph interferes with the authoritative representational order, inherently manifesting an innocent politics.

AcknowledgementsResearch for this article was supported by generous grants from the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme, the University College London Graduate School, and the Kenneth Lindsay Grant of the Anglo-Israel Association. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for Photography & Culture as well as my very good critical friend Dr. Catriona McAra (University of Huddersfield). I am especially grateful to Professor Tamar Garb (University College London), Professor Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths’ College), and Dr. Steve Edwards (The Open University) for reading previous versions of this article, and for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes1 The title of this article takes its cue from Palmer

Cox’s book, The Brownies in the Philippines (1904), which was the first of the Brownies’ books to include a Brownie photographer character whose role was to record the adventures of the Brownie band through their explorations of foreign countries. “Palestina” is the Hebraized name of the area stretching between the Jordan River and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean known in English as Palestine. I am using “Palestina” because this name maintains the Israeli-Palestinian conflicting ideological sentiments toward the land, while at its core it is descriptive and apolitical.

2 Nancy Martha West points out that the Kodak campaign for the Brownie camera launched the new product as a toy, allowing children to playfully explore and validate their own world and views (2000: 74–108). While in operating the Brownie camera children partook in the growing practices of both amateur and family photography, they also engaged in reshaping the role of the camera, and the perception of photography, within both the domestic and the social spheres. The renowned Cottingley Fairies photographic series produced

in 1917–20 is perhaps one of the most telling examples of child-photographers’ disruption to the order of adult knowledge on a socio-national scale.

3 Other qualitative methodologies—such as semiology, iconography, Marxism, phenomenology, and discourse analysis—are often used in parallel with those I discuss here. I choose to focus on the ones that lead and underpin the main approaches used in current research into family photographs. See also Rose (2001).

4 “Postmemory” is a term used by Marianne Hirsch to describe the family photograph as one “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (1997: 22). In her view it is “a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997: 22).

5 The politics of landscape was already recognized by poststructuralist and Marxist art historians in the social history of art in the 1980s and 1990s. See, for example, Solkin (1982) and Hemingway (1992).

6 In this work Jackson clarifies that the so-called new cultural geography apprehends meanings associated with a landscape to be interpretations rather than givens, and therefore one landscape may hold multiple significations. Hilary Winchester could be said to elaborate upon this by claiming that: “Each person or group views, uses and constructs the same landscape in different ways: these are neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’ but they are part of the many layers of meaning within landscape” (1992: 140).

7 This somewhat basic position can be exemplified by recourse to Peirce Lewis’s “Axioms for Reading the Landscape” (1979).

8 See also Gurevitch and Aran (1994).

9 Levinger and Steinlauff were killed in a politically motivated attack in the afternoon of August 21, 1951 on the road between Ein-Chotzob and Sodom. See “shnei yehudim nehergu ba’derech le’sdom” (Two Jews Were Killed on the Way to Sodom), Ha’aretz, August 23, 1951 (Hebrew): 4; “shnei yehudim nirtzechu ba’derech le’sdom” (Two Jews Were Murdered on the Way to Sodom), Davar, August 23, 1951 (Hebrew): 1; “ha’meratzhim hitalelu



be’shnei ha’korbanot ba’derech le sdom” (The Murderers Abused the Victims’ Corpses on the Way to Sodom), Davar, August 24, 1951 (Hebrew): 1; “va’adat shnaim yatzah le’sdom” (Two Officials Set Out to Sodom), Ha’aretz, August 24, 1951 (Hebrew): 1; “pirtei ha’retzach be’sdom” (The Murder in Sodom—Details), Davar, August 26, 1951 (Hebrew): 4.

10 Schwartz and Ryan draw upon David Harvey’s use of the term “Geographical Imagination.” According to Harvey (1990), “Geographical Imagination” is a way of thinking that charges spaces, places, and landscapes with meanings of social and cultural life, fashioning them on the basis of encounters with spatial forms created by others. Schwartz and Ryan, however, redefine this term as “the mechanism by which people come to know the world and situate themselves in space and time. It consists, in essence, of a chain of practices and processes by which geographical information is gathered, geographical facts are ordered and imaginative geographies are constructed” (2003: 6).

11 For example, Levi Eshkol (Israeli Prime Minister 1963–69), Jerusalem Post, February 17, 1969.

12 For discussions of memorials and patterns of commemoration in Israel see Azaryahu (1995); Almog (1991).

13 Keffiyeh is the Arabic word used to refer to the traditional headdress usually worn by Arab men.

14 See, for instance, Ingold (2000); Thrift and Dewsbury (2000); Dewsbury, Harrison, Rose, and Wylie (2002); Winchester, Kong, and Dunn (2003); Lorimer (2005).

15 See, for example, Engels (1972); The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (1972); Bourdieu (1977, 1986); Deleuze and Guattari (1983); Withers and Throne (1993); Chambers (2001).

16 Although ultimately focusing on snapshot photography rather than on family photographs, Catherine Zuromskis’s text on photographic power within public and private spheres also elaborates on and complicates analytical discourses regarding the role photography plays in the dissemination and solidification of grand ideologies, arguing that: “The revelatory nature of the medium is equally capable of aiding and undermining such ideologies” (2009: 61).

Dr. Gil Pasternak is Senior Lecturer in Photography and Photography Course Leader at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, the University of Huddersfield. He writes widely on the participation of professional, vernacular, and fine art photography in the solidification and subversion of state and society relations. In 2011, Pasternak copublished the book Visual Conflicts: On the Formation of Political Memory in the History of Art and Visual Cultures (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

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The Brownies in Palestina

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