Elderly Bethlehemite couple in traditional clothes in front of their house, c. between 1918 and 1935 by Lebanese photographer Khalil Raad
He is known as “Palestine’s first Arab photographer.” His work document political events and daily life in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria over the course of fifty years.
Raad married Annie Muller in 1919, a Swiss national who served as an assistant to Keller, a photographer who Raad studied with in Switzerland on the eve of World War I. He returned to Palestine with Muller to live in Talibiyya, then a village near Jerusalem in which Raad ran for mayorship and was elected.
His photography studio was destroyed during Zionist attacks on the city in 1948, and the family was forced to move, going first to Hebron for a few months and then to Raad’s village of birth, Bhamdoun, Lebanon.