Marie al-Khazen’s photographs of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

Marie al-Khazen was a Lebanese photographer who lived between 1899 and 1983. Her photographs were mostly taken between the 1920s and 1930s in the North of Lebanon. They were compiled by Mohsen Yammine, a Lebanese collector who later donated the photographs to the Arab Image Foundation. Her work includes a collection of intriguing photographs portraying her family and friends living their everyday life in Zgharta. Al-Khazen seized every opportunity to use her camera to capture stories of her surroundings. She not only documented her travels around tourist sites in Lebanon but also sought creative experimentation with her device by staging scenes, manipulating shadows and superimposing negatives to produce different effects in her prints. Within the borders of her photographs, bedouins and European friends, peasants and landlords, men and women, comfortably share the same space.

Most of Marie al-Khazen's photographs, which are circulated online through the Arab Image Foundation's website, suggest a narrative of independent and determined Lebanese women. These photographs are charged with symbols that can be understood, today, as representative of women's emancipation through their presence as individuals, separate from family restrictions of that time. Images in which women are depicted smoking a cigarette, driving a car, riding horses and accompanying men on their hunting trips counter the usual way in which women were portrayed in 1920s Lebanon. The photographs can be read as a space for al-Khazen to articulate her vision of the New Woman or the Modern Girl as described by Tani Barlow in The Modern Girl Around the World. In this anthology, authors like Barlow point to the ways in which the modern girl "disregards the roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother," in seeking sexual, economic and political emancipation.

Al-Khazen's photographs lead me to pose a series of questions pertaining to the representation of femininity and masculinity through the poses, reasoning, and activities adopted by women and men in the photographs. The questions which frame this study have to do with the ways in which notions of gender, class and race are inscribed within Marie al-Khazen's photographs.