Palestine in Transition : Frank Scholten’s Visual Archive of the British Mandate Period

By taking a geographical approach to the collection—like Scholten himself—this book revisits his incomplete project by presenting different regions through contributions 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.

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 to 1923. He documented Palestine, as the British Mandate was formally being established, with a taxonomical and ethnographic eye, relating the modern world he photographed to Biblical passages to explain the complexity of social life in the “Holy Land.”

Palestine in Transition traces the significance of Frank Scholten’s documentation of the transformations occurring during the British Mandate period. By taking a geographical approach to the collection—like Scholten himself—this book revisits his incomplete project by presenting different regions through contributions 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.