Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine 1921-23
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine 1921-23
By (Author) Sary Zananiri
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
I.B. Tauris
22nd January 2026
United Kingdom
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Religious aspects of sexuality, gender and relationships
Photographs: collections
Middle Eastern history
Physical Properties
Hardback
256
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Description
This open access book focuses on the previously inaccessible photographic collection of Frank Scholten (14,000 prints, 12,000 negatives, 64 albums and significant collected ephemera) produced during his time in Palestine in 1921-23. The collection documents a queer, upper class, Dutch Catholic converts view of Palestine in the years that the British Mandate was formally established. Escaping prosecution in the Netherlands on charges of homosexuality and indecency in 1920, Scholten fled to Palestine to produce an illustrated Bible. The photographic collection he produced engaged with the modern social life of Palestine rather than the monuments and holy sites more typical to the photographic histories of the region.
The Scholten collection contains important ethnographic documentation of early Mandate society, but also yields insights into the ways in which Palestinian communities mobilised and deployed religious narrative with the rise of nationalism. The queer subtext of the collection also highlights the way masculinity and mens bodies informed both religion and nationalism in Palestine. This books interdisciplinary methodology shows the significant confluence of religious narrative and nationalism and its gendered context during the shift from Ottoman to British rule, through the lens of a unique collection of photographic material.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
Author Bio
Sary Zananiri is a postdoctoral scholar at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He has co-edited two books Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens 1918-48 ( 2021) and European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (2021) and is the author of several other journal articles, book chapters and art criticism.
