The UNRWA Photo and Film Archive

UNRWA has photographed Palestine refugees since it began operating, which means the agency accidentally became the largest single visual archive of Palestinian refugee life in existence. The holdings, as the agency states them, are more than 430,000 negatives, 10,000 prints, 85,000 slides, 75 films and 730 videocassettes. In 2009 UNESCO inscribed the archive on the Memory of the World register in recognition of its historical value.

What the archive contains, in the agency’s own summary, is the visual record of a dispossession told through its administration: Palestinians leaving their homes in 1948; the establishment of the camps through the 1950s; the second flight of 1967; the hostilities in Lebanon; the unrest from the second half of the 1980s into the early twenty-first century. Because the photographers were UNRWA’s own, much of the material is framed around agency work — schools, clinics, ration distribution — but it also carries portraits of public figures and coverage of political events, and it is often the only photographic record of a camp or a generation.

The archive nearly did not survive. Filippo Grandi, then Commissioner-General, described the collection at the opening of the “Long Journey” exhibition in Jerusalem in November 2013 as “literally decaying,” and said digitisation was the only option for preservation; the programme was funded by the Welfare Association, Bank of Palestine, PADICO, Wataniya and PalTel, together with the governments of France and Denmark. His successor Pierre Krähenbühl, speaking in Gaza City in June 2014, framed the custody question in terms that are worth keeping in mind when citing the collection: “These influential historical images are the property of all Palestinians as part of their heritage, which includes not only their suffering and loss, but also their achievements,” adding that UNRWA “as the custodian of this archive, takes full responsibility for its protection and conservation, and for making it available to all those who are interested.”

For researchers, access is the weak point rather than the content. A selection is presented online through the agency’s own galleries and exhibition pages, but the digitised collection is not exposed as a single open, item-level, downloadable catalogue in the way that a national photographic archive would be; substantive research requests go through UNRWA directly. Anyone working on the visual history of the camps should budget time for correspondence, and should be aware that the agency’s own institutional position — its funding, its mandate and the physical security of its installations — bears directly on the archive’s future. An archive that was already decaying in 2013 is not a safe deposit.

Sources

• UNRWA photo and film archive for Palestine refugees — UNRWA