The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection

The Matson collection is the single largest freely usable photographic record of Palestine before 1948, and it is in Washington. Most of it consists of over 22,000 glass and film photographic negatives and transparencies created by the American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem and its successor firm, the Matson Photo Service; over 1,000 photographic prints and eleven albums are also part of the collection. The Library of Congress states that the majority of the images depict Palestine — present-day Israel and the West Bank — from 1898 to 1946. It reached the Library between 1966 and 1981 through a series of gifts from Eric Matson and his beneficiary.

The reason it matters for Palestinian research is the rights position. The Library’s advisory on the collection is “No known restrictions on publication,” and the digitised negatives and transparencies are served at high resolution directly from the item pages. There is no permissions correspondence, no licence fee and no embargo. For a project that needs photographs of Palestinian towns, agriculture, crafts, markets, religious life, streets and faces in the decades before the Nakba, this is the collection that can actually be used.

It should also be read against its makers. These are photographs taken by an American religious community in Jerusalem and then by a commercial photographic firm, for buyers who were largely pilgrims, tourists, missionaries and the press. The framing follows: biblical illustration is a recurring commercial genre — shepherds posed to illustrate the Twenty-Third Psalm — and the coverage extends well beyond Palestine into Egypt, Transjordan and further afield. Palestinian life appears in this archive as a subject of foreign attention rather than as self-representation, and the captions carry the assumptions of the people who wrote them. That does not diminish the evidentiary value; it changes how a caption should be quoted.

For searching, the collection browse facets are more effective than free text: 664 subject headings, 62 formats and 8 creator names. Cataloguing is at the level of the negative, so a single scene often exists in several near-identical exposures, and the original captions are the Matson firm’s own — useful as period evidence, unreliable as description. Cite the item’s LCCN permalink rather than a search result URL.

Sources

• About this Collection — Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
• Sample item record showing the rights advisory and collection size — Library of Congress