In the Arab Middle East, one of the first professional photographers to achieve distinction, perhaps the first, was a Palestinian lady, Karimeh Abbud, born in 1893 and deceased in 1955. Her pictures of open spaces and archeological sites in Haifa, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Tiberias and Baalbek were to bring her fame. Her first photos were of her family and friends and of sites around her home in Bethlehem but in 1919 she was extending her work and taking money. This was originally done with a camera that her father had given her for her seventeenth birthday. Her interest in the Baalbek temples and ruins was largely the result of her going to study Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut. In due course she had a professional studio at home and worked on portraits of women and children and views of weddings and various celebrations.

Her reputation was firmly established when in the nineteen-thirties she moved to Nazareth, where her grandfather had been senior pharmacist at the English Hospital and her father had been pastor. A local photographer had got the people of Nazareth into the habit of having their photographs taken and when he moved to Haifa Karimeh had a ready field for her work. This can be instantly recognized as the photos she produced were stamped in Arabic and English with the words Karimeh Abbud – Lady Photographer.

Karimeh moved to Jerusalem and then back to Bethlehem when in 1940 her mother passed away. It appears that she moved around during the events surrounding the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 In June 1949 her father died in Khiam in South Lebanon, his birthplace.
A letter to her cousins dated in the year 1941 expresses her desire to produce a printed album of her work. Karimeh finally moved back to Nazareth, where in 1955 she ended her days. Ahmed Marwat, Director of the Nazareth Archives Project, collected copies of her portfolios. Over four hundred of the original prints of Karimeh’s work were left in a house in Qatamon in Jerusalem that had been left empty by the owners fleeing the Israelis in 1948 In the year 2006 these were discovered by the Israeli collector of antiquities Boki Boazz and were saved for posterity.

William Matar