Karimeh Abbud, also known as the "Lady Photographer", was a Palestinian professional photographer and artist who lived and worked in Lebanon and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.
Background
In 1896, the year she was born, her father As"ad Abbud, was serving as a lay pastor in Shefa-"Amr. Karimeh grew up spending time in all of these towns, while also attending the Schmidt Girls School in Jerusalem. lieutenant was in Bethlehem in 1913 that she first began to take an interest in photography, after receiving a camera from her father as a gift for her 17th birthday.
Education
Karimeh studied Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Career
Her first photos are of family, friends and the landscape in Bethlehem and her first signed picture is dated October 1919. During this time, she took a trip to Baalbek to photograph archaeological sites there. She also took numerous photos of public spaces in Haifa, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Tiberias.
When local Nazareth photographer Fadil Saba moved to Haifa, Karimeh"s studio work was in high demand for weddings and portraits in particular.
The work she produced in this period was stamped in Arabic and English with the words: "Karimeh Abbud - Lady Photographer - كريمة عبود: مصورة شمس". In the mid-1930s, she began offering hand-painted copies of studio photographs.
Karimeh"s mother died in 1940 prompting her to leave Nazareth, first for Jerusalem and then Bethlehem. In the events leading up to and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war little is known of where she lived or what she experienced.
lieutenant is known that her father died in June 1949 in his father"s hometown of Khiam in southern Lebanon.
lieutenant is also known that Karimeh ultimately returned to Nazareth, where she died in 1955 and where copies of her work were first collected. Original copies of her extensive portfolio have been collected together by Ahmed Mrowat, Director of the Nazareth Archives Project. In 2006, Boki Boazz, an Israeli antiquities collector, discovered over 400 original prints of Abbud"s in a home in the Qatamon quarter of Jerusalem that had been abandoned by its owners fleeing the Israeli occupation in 1948.
Mrowat has expanded his collection by purchasing the photos from Boazz, many of which are signed by the artist.