Family Photo Salon: Thinking with Family Photographs

Exclusively for Palestinian/Gazan Participants only.

Emerging from the Photo Kegham of Gaza project by Kegham Djeghalian Jr, the Family Photo Salons are intimate gatherings that begin with a simple gesture: sitting together around our family photographs and the stories they carry.

Bringing together a small group of Palestinian and Gazan participants, each salon aims to create a situated intimate space for conversation, where personal memories can become forms of shared and situated knowledge. We think together through photographs as images, but also as objects that have travelled, survived, been inherited, displaced, forgotten or held close.

Participants are invited to bring one or several family photographs - physical or digital - or simply to join the conversation. Photographs are shared, never collected.

Through these encounters, we reflect on family, memory, belonging and unbelonging, displacement, loss and survival, allowing fragmented memories and unfinished stories to remain open, while asking how our most intimate photographs might help us weave alternative personal and collective histories.

Due to limited space, If you are not able to make it please let us know so we can allow someone else to have the spot. events@palestinehouse.org

Biography:

Kegham Djeghalian Jr is a Palestinian-Armenian visual artist and creative director based between Cairo and Paris, whose practice unfolds across image-making, visual culture, archival practices and fashion. He is Professor of Fashion Practices and Visual Culture at the German International University in Cairo (GIU), where he serves as Artistic Director and Co-Head of the Fashion Design Department. He has taught at Paris College of Art and the Institut Français de la Mode since 2016. Educated at the American University in Cairo, Goldsmiths College, University of the Arts London and the Institut Français de la Mode, his transdisciplinary practice moves between artistic production, research and pedagogy.

His work, research and interventions have been presented internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Photographers’ Gallery in London and the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. For more than a decade, a central enquiry within his practice has developed through Photo Kegham of Gaza, an ongoing engagement with the precarious photographic legacy of his grandfather, Kegham Djeghalian Sr (1915–1981), founder of Photo Kegham, Gaza’s first professional photographic studio. Through the activation and re-reading of these surviving photographic fragments, Djeghalian explores notions of the unmade archive, affective historiography, and the ways images can produce, unsettle and reclaim histories.

This event is connected to Photo Kegham by Kegham Djeghalian Jr., an exhibition organised by Bristol Photo Festival and supported by the British Council.
The opening week of Bristol Photo Festival, themed Time Machine, runs from 14–18 October 2026. Exhibitions will remain open until 15 November 2026.
www.bristolphotofestival.org