The Al-Ameen archive preserves a precious insight into joyful Palestinian wedding culture between the 1960s-90s

Raya Manaa is a Palestinian photographer based between Istanbul and Palestine. She grew up in a Palestinian village in upper Galilee called Majd Al-Kurum. One of the oldest olive trees in Palestine grows in this village. It is around 4,000-5,000 years old, Raya tells It's Nice That. Thus “Majd Al-Kurum” translates as “Glory of the Grove”. The wistful way Raya recalls the village of her childhood continues as she begins to tell us the story of her father’s photo archive.

Raya’s father, Mahmoud Manaa, opened Photo Studio Al-Ameen in the early 60s, making him the first photographer in Galilee to have his own studio. Mahmoud is a self-taught photographer. He began his practice by documenting the work of the communist party in Beir El-Sabia’ (southern Palestine), continuing to develop his style through street photography. Mahmoud finally settled down as a wedding photographer in the 60s and in the next 30 years he documented “over 2,500 weddings and engagement parties, and hundreds of family portraits,” Raya tells us. Mahmoud “was a good photographer but not a good business owner,” she continues. Many of his clients would dodge paying his fees and never pick up their photographs. While this led to the studio’s eventual bankruptcy in the 90s, it has also contributed to the overall richness of the photo collection which Raya has now begun to archive.

Organising Mahmoud’s visual legacy has been, in many respects, a bewildering experience for Raya. At the time she discovered around 10,000 negatives and prints in the basement of her family home, her father was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s. Lamentably, Mahmoud “recalls nothing regarding the period he used to work as a photographer,” Raya tells us. So compiling the enormous collection of images that are seldom annotated with dates or captions has provided Raya with a particularly arduous task.

Raya hopes to find a professional visual researcher to help her with the archive. But she has already proven herself a very astute archivist. She looks carefully at each image, calculating the “approximate time period according to clothing and through comparing it to other scanned materials.” So, slowly, Raya is constructing a linear narrative through Mahmoud’s richest years of photography. The story that is unfolding is a precious one. The Al-Ameen archive recalls a golden period of wedding ceremonies in Galilee. “During the late 50s and early 60s, the Israeli military rule was lifted, and Palestinians started having the ability of free movement for the first time since Nakba in 1948,” Raya explains. The moment at which the state of Israel was established in 1948 which saw the forced displacement and destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages is remembered as the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” by many Palestinians. Through documenting this period of increased freedom after the Nakba, Mahmoud’s images are a testament to true Palestinian-style celebration – pulling off irrepressibly joyful occasions even when resources are limited. Raya captures the atmosphere: “weddings were not gender-separate and included lots of alcohol, a wedding singer, and a group of musicians are also a must to complete the atmosphere of a Palestinian wedding in Galilee.”

When Raya was sifting through the archive, she noticed that Mahmoud had repeatedly used the word “Montazah” to annotate photographs. Montazah means “garden” and is the name of the only wedding hall in Majd Al-Kurum until the 90s. This bit of history is preserved through the language of weddings in Galilee today – “people still call the main event of the wedding ‘Montazah’ following the place it used to be held in, even though nowadays there are many wedding halls in the area and the Montazah is the least famous among them.”

The surprisingly candid photographs of rituals like the “Hammam el arees”, when the groom’s friends help him shower, along with little fragments of knowledge like the significance behind the word Montazah are some of the things which make the Al-Ameen archive so special. Preserving these moments of hilarity, affection and joy is an important task which Raya has taken up, particularly in parallel with current mainstream media which often misrepresents the vibrant culture as well as the plight of Palestinians.