[Photography - Palestine - Lebanon - Egypt]. [Album with 128 photographs of Palestine and Lebanon].

€ 2,500.00

Beautiful album with 128 photographs of Egypt and Palestine (present-day Israel and the West Bank) during the British Mandate. It was likely compiled by a British soldier who was stationed in the Middle East during the 1940s. Some of the photographs are numbered in the negative and may have been made by important photographers active in the area at the time, like G. Eric Matson and his wife Edith, the founders of the Matson Photo Service.

The images show Cairo and various locations in Palestine, including Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Tiberias, Sea of Galilee, Nathanya, Tel Aviv, the Jordan river, Haifa, Beirut and the Dead Sea. Other than important locations, like churches and gates, the photographs also show many locals, including, for example, street barbers in Cairo, shepherds and farmers in Palestine, and beautifully dressed women in Haifa. In the back of the work, a few dried leaves from local plants have been mounted, namely orange, lemon, fig, eucalyptus, grapevine and mulberry. The eucalyptus leaf still retains some of its scent.

The edges and corners of the boards are somewhat scuffed, with some loss of material at the head and foot of the spine, and around the edges of the embedded aluminium plate. The photographs mounted on the inside of the front board are slightly stained, the fig leaf mounted on one of the final pages is damaged and the cyprus leaf is missing. Otherwise in good condition.