LONDON: A happy family gathers for a picnic. A laughing couple celebrate their wedding with friends. Two children stroll along an idyllic beach, the Mediterranean lapping at their feet and palm trees fringing the sand.
This is Gaza, before the horrors, captured through the lens of photographer Kegham Djeghalian, an Armenian genocide survivor who settled in Palestine in 1944.
Now his grandson, Kegham Djeghalian Jr, a professor of fashion studies, image and design at the German International University in Cairo, has curated a collection of his grandfather’s recently rediscovered black-and-white photographs — poignant echoes of a better time that now seems impossibly distant.
The photographer’s own history is a snapshot of a region almost perpetually in turmoil. Born in 1915 in Anatolia, he and his mother escaped the Armenian genocide and reached Syria. After she died, he was taken in by the Birds’ Nest Orphanage in Byblos, Lebanon.
His grandson took up his story in a talk he gave at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2024.
