Scanogram 1# / Samira’s Wedding / 1949
The Christian Palestinian community is a minority within a minority, one foot in the East and the other in the West. Its sons and daughters represent a tiny number of the population of Israel.
Dor Guez presents a scanogram from the dedicated archive he founded in 2009—the CPA (Christian Palestinian Archive). The archive, focused on a community scattered across the Middle East, originated in a suitcase the artist found under his grandparents’ bed. It currently contains thousands of photographs and documents from the first half of the 20th century.
The photographs in the archive supply an alternative approach to identity, history, memory, and loss between the Jordan River and the sea. Guez employs archival methodology, regimenting information. But unlike the ideological system enforced in (all) archives, this particular archive does not address the preservation of physical materials. After scanning, original photographs are returned to their owners. The preservation, retrieval, and distribution system established by Guez has no territory. It is no national archive and never will be. It is a sub-sovereign archive, one subtle and elusive enough to undermine standard historical narratives instated by institutional archives while compelling enough to validate and define a community.
Guez employs images that emerge like memories. The scanograms are comprised of dozens of scans using three different scanners and unified into a single image. While each scanner automatically corrects flaws in the scans, the combination of them all enables immortalizing each in a processed digital image that preserves its historical character.
In this scanogram, we encounter Samira on her wedding day in the “Lod Ghetto”, a year after banishment from Jaffa. She stands at the center, starkly and singly dressed in white against those in the background. Her face is veiled, but even so her direct gaze at the camera is clear. She is encircled by bridesmaids and family dressed in their finest. Everyone is aware of the moment: this was the first wedding to be held following the conquest of Jaffa and dispelling of last Christian community members in 1948 to the Lod Ghetto.
The wedding photographs of Yaakov and Samira lay in a suitcase under their bed for decades, wrapped in a plastic bag. Family memories become testimonials.