Palestine in Transition: Frank Scholten’s Visual Archive of the British Mandate Period - Karène Sanchez Summerer

Frank Scholten set out to produce an illustrated Bible, instead returning with captivating documentation of the modernist transformations and intimate views of Palestine from 1921-1923. He documented Palestine as the British Mandate was formally being established, with a taxonomical and ethnographic eye, relating to the modern world he photographed through Biblical passage to explain the complexity of social life of the ‘Holy Land’.

Palestine in Transition. Frank Scholten’s Visual Archive of the British Mandate retraces the importance of Frank Scholten’s documentation of the transformations of the British Mandate period. By taking a geographical approach to the collection – like Scholten himself – this book effectively revisits his incomplete project by presenting different regions through discrete chapters by scholars specialized in each field, a century after his visit and the dramatic social, cultural and political upheavals that the ‘Holy Land’ has undergone since then.