Manar Moursi —

My brudder sittin’ on de tree of life, an’ he yearde when Jordan roll;
Roll, Jordan, roll, Roll, Jordan, roll!
O march, de angel, march;
O march, de angel, march; O my
soul arise in Heaven, Lord, for to yearde when Jordan roll.

—African American spiritual, collected in Slave Songs of the United States (1867)¹

In African American spirituals sung under slavery and its afterlife, the Jordan River recurs as a figure of passage: a threshold between bondage and liberation, between this life and the next.² To sing of crossing the river was at once an act of faith and a political claim.

The river invoked in those songs runs today along the eastern edge of the West Bank. Along much of that stretch, Israel restricts Palestinian access to the river through closed military zones and other movement controls.³ The songs and the closures belong to different histories, Black enslavement in the Americas and Palestinian dispossession, and this essay does not treat them as one.⁴ What they share is a question of access: Who may reach the water? For those who sang of the Jordan while held as property, the river lay beyond reach. In Palestine, a river that people once drew water from, worked alongside, and gathered around has been progressively pushed out of reach: surveyed, parceled, enclosed, allocated, engineered, closed off. One distance was crossed in song. The other was built.

Building that distance took most of the twentieth century. In the late Ottoman period, no international boundary divided the river; Palestinian communities drew its waters for irrigation and agriculture, and crossed from one side to the other.⁵ Under the British Mandate (1920–1948), the river became a boundary, and its waters became the object of a hydroelectric concession scheme; in the 1950s and 1960s, upstream works diverted much of the water that fed its lower course; and after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, the river became a militarized frontier.⁶

This essay follows two transformations of the river: into an image for sale, and into a resource to be partitioned, engineered, and extracted. It reads colonial stereographs and aerial views alongside Palestinian family snapshots, examining how photographs helped produce distance from the river and how they preserved relations to it that the colonial archive rarely registered.

Before dams and borders transformed the Jordan, photography had already given people ways to take hold of it from afar. In 1859, the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes championed the stereograph, a pair of nearly identical photographs that, seen through a handheld stereoscope, merge into a single three-dimensional scene.⁷ He imagined a future in which photographs would stand in for the things they showed. People, he wrote, would “hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.”⁸ The photograph was the skin; the place itself, the carcass. A photographed Jordan could circulate independently of the people whose lives were tied to it. Seen apart from those relationships, the river could more readily be imagined as a resource for others to claim.

Photography also became an instrument of survey.⁹ Photographs taken from the river’s banks and later from the air allowed stretches of the Jordan to be recorded, measured, and compared. Under the Mandate, the Survey of Palestine, the British administration’s mapping department, used aerial photographs taken with the Royal Air Force’s help for several purposes, among them revising its maps along the Jordan, where the river’s banks had shifted.¹⁰ Photographs sold to the public brought the river to distant spectators; photographs used in surveys made the river legible to institutions able to alter it.¹¹ Photography did not itself dam the river or draw its border. It helped make the river available to those who would.

A 1913 stereograph distributed by Underwood & Underwood, a major US publisher of commercial stereographs, shows female pilgrims ankle-deep in the mud of the Jordan’s banks. The image was part of a commercial circuit in which Underwood & Underwood licensed and purchased negatives depicting the Holy Land from local studios, including the American Colony in Jerusalem, a prolific photographic enterprise that operated under late Ottoman sovereignty and continued into the British Mandate.¹² Photographers and publishers circulated such stereographs widely in Europe and North America, framing the river as a biblical landscape for devotional consumption. Pilgrimage, profit, and territorial imagination converged in the same frame. An earlier stereograph, made in 1900, depicts Egyptian Coptic pilgrims at the Jordan.¹³ In both images, bodies move through the shallows without constraint.

It was at al-Maghtas that John the Baptist was said to have baptized Christ, and it is this point that draws the pilgrims to the water each year, as it has for centuries.¹⁴ To be baptized is to be immersed: to enter the water wholly and emerge changed. The pilgrims photographed here submit their bodies to the water for their own devotion and salvation; immersion here is rite and rebirth, a passage they choose to enter. 

Many early American Colony images were stereographs. Held to the eyes, the paired photographs plunge the viewer into an illusion of depth, offering the sensation of standing within the scene, at the river’s edge or even in the water, without leaving one’s parlor. Yet the sensation of presence depends on separation; the two images must remain slightly apart. The pilgrims stand in the Jordan; the Western observer is immersed in the image of them.

Sold door to door by publishers like Underwood & Underwood, the stereograph packaged the Jordan as a devotional commodity: simulated presence at a site, purchasable by people who would never travel to it. In this circulation, it offered the river as a scene to be held in the hand and inspected from afar. It gave portable form to what Timothy Mitchell calls the “world-as-exhibition”: places set out as pictures for an observer who stands outside them, so looking can pass for knowing and the people in the scene become part of the display.¹⁵ Its depth was real to the eye, but it brought its viewers no closer to truly knowing the people pictured.

The American Colony itself began as a religious experiment. In 1881, Anna and Horatio Spafford, Chicago evangelicals shattered by personal tragedy, led a small band of “Overcomers” to Jerusalem, convinced that the Holy City would be the stage for the Second Coming.¹⁶ In 1896, the Colony was transformed by the arrival of Swedish converts, some from the farming village of Nås in Dalarna, others from a Swedish immigrant congregation in Chicago that Anna Spafford had persuaded to join her. They made the Colony predominantly Swedish American.¹⁷ Among the children they brought with them was G. Eric Matson, later one of the Colony’s leading photographers.

Necessity soon pushed the group from devotion into commerce: they opened a hostel, a store near the Jaffa Gate, and, in 1898, a photography service. Stereographs of holy sites and tableaux of Bible scenes were sold to the swelling tide of Western pilgrims, which meant that the darkroom quickly paid the bills.¹⁸ An early breakthrough came that same year, when Colony photographers documented Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Palestine and marketed the images in Europe.¹⁹ In the photograph of his arrival at Haifa, the emperor himself can hardly be seen. The camera looks past the jetty and a diagonal line of flags set in the water toward the ships anchored offshore: imperial authority arrives by steamship at a landing place prepared for ceremony. Open water and sky fill most of the frame, and the picture could pass for a seascape, the kind of distant view painters had long sold to European buyers.²⁰ Unlike a painting, though, it was formed by light from the scene registering on a photographic plate.²¹ The same picture could be sold as a Holy Land view and kept as a record of an imperial visit. That double use would serve the Colony well: in time, its camera would also record the work of the administrators and engineers who remade the Jordan River.

Over the following decades, the American Colony Photo Department’s clients multiplied. Its photographers shot for the Turkish Red Crescent during the First World War and, in 1917, recorded General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem and the beginning of British rule.²² Under the Mandate, the studio turned increasingly from devotional scenes to aerial surveys, engineering commissions, and documentation for Zionist development funds eager to publicize “modern progress.”²³ After the American Colony split in 1934, Matson and his wife, Edith Yantiss Matson, took over the Photo Department. In 1940, they renamed it the Matson Photo Service.²⁴ What began as a millenarian record of pilgrimage became, in effect, a commercial photographic agency serving administrators, newspapers, militaries, and development enterprises. Those clients were reshaping the land by other means. Under the British Mandate, colonial authorities surveyed the river valley, determining which claims counted, how land could be valued and taxed, and where boundaries fell.²⁵ The camera joined that work; it did not initiate it.

Some of the American Colony’s images of the Jordan make sense only when read together. In what is now the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress, five consecutive negatives, numbered 13016 through 13020, dated by the catalog to between 1925 and 1946, sit filed under one generic title: “Jordan River.” Laid out in order, almost as a contact sheet, they document not a moment but an operation, a work party at a single bend of the river, recorded first at a distance and then progressively closer.²⁶ Like a field report, the frames proceed from site, to intervention, to movement through the river, to the organization of labor, and finally to the behavior of the water itself.

The first frame stands back to show the whole site. Men work in and beside a cut channel. Sandbags, timber, and disturbed earth line the near edge, a rectangular wooden structure projects from the bank, and a tongue of freshly dug soil pushes into the water. On the far bank, a tent and two automobiles mark the presence of a field party. The scene reads less like ordinary life along the river and more like a temporary worksite: equipment, transport, shelter, and labor have been brought to one place to do one job. The photographer leaves a great deal of empty water in the frame. The subject is not just men, but men working on a river.

The next frames move closer and sort the operation into its parts. In one, laborers bend to the channel’s edge, digging and shifting the earth, sandbags accumulating at the left. In another, two men cross a faster stretch of water in a small boat. And in the closest frame, the camera moves in on the same work party: men in the river itself, one swinging a pickax at the bed, another plunging a long pole vertically into the water, probing the bed beneath him, others building up a mound of excavated earth. They have hitched their galabias up over wet legs; they are barefoot, bent, mud-streaked, caught mid-motion, the swung pickax and the flung earth blurring across the exposure.

On the right of this frame, raised on the dry bank above the men, stands a figure who does none of these things. He wears the field uniform of expertise: a pale suit unblemished by the mud that cakes the men below him, a sun helmet, spectacles, his shoes clean in counterpoint to the workers’ bare and muddied feet. He holds no tool. He faces the camera, hands on hips, weight cocked back, posed. Because he alone is still, the camera renders him sharply while the laboring bodies dissolve into their own motion. The catalog does not name him, and I would not assume from his dress alone that he was European rather than a local overseer or engineer in colonial garb, just as I would not assume where the men in the water were from. What the frame stages is not a nationality but a hierarchy, and it builds that hierarchy from posture and position rather than from any label: labor below, in the water, wet and bent and watched; authority above, on the bank, dry and clean and posed.

It is also a hierarchy of looking. He stands where the camera stands on the bank above the work. The laborers are overseen twice over, by the man above them and by the camera that shares his place, and they look back at neither. The blur obscures their faces, and the catalog names none of them. In the baptismal images, entering the water was the rite; here, standing in it is the job. What the immersion transforms is not the men but the river. The men in the water do the work; what the river should become is decided on the bank.

The sequence ends by removing people altogether. The camera turns to the water itself, fast and broken over a shallow drop in the riverbed. The men may have been reinforcing the bank, constructing a temporary barrier to hold or divert the current, or carrying out some other form of channel work. The catalog does not identify the purpose of the intervention, nor does it name the photographer: it attributes the negatives either to the American Colony Photo Department or to its successor, the Matson Photo Service.

What survives are the negatives, their numbers, and their passage into the collection. The negatives establish that a photographer documented the operation and did so systematically; whether the photographs served the work or merely accompanied it, the record does not say. The camera sees the intervention closely enough to catch a pickax blurring mid-swing, yet it cannot tell us what the intervention was for. It makes the labor visible while leaving both its purpose unstated and its laborers unnamed.

Whatever the work was, it took place in the decades when the river’s course had become a problem for the Mandate government. In 1922, Britain made the Jordan River the administrative boundary between Palestine and Transjordan, tying a political line to a river that did not hold still.²⁷ In February 1927, a sudden shift in the river’s course moved the Jordan River some five hundred meters in the Beisan subdistrict, leaving roughly eight hundred dunams, or about eighty hectares, of land that had previously lain west of the river on the eastern side of its new channel. British officials then had to determine whether the boundary remained in the abandoned riverbed or moved with the water. They chose the latter.²⁸ Before officials could allocate or engineer the river, they had to locate it, and it kept moving.

I cannot say what the work in the five negatives was for, or whether it had anything to do with the boundary. But they belong to the same moment, when the riverbed itself was becoming an object of increasingly exact attention.

If the boundary made the river a line to fix, the decade that followed made it a source of power. In the early 1930s, the American Colony’s photographers documented, both from the air and on the ground, the works the hydroelectric entrepreneur Pinhas Rutenberg built at Jisr Majami’a (Naharayim). His Palestine Electric Corporation held a concession, agreed with the British government in 1921 and formalized in 1926 for seventy years, to use the waters of the Jordan and the Yarmuk to generate and distribute electricity.²⁹ The plant began operating there in 1932. An aerial photograph from October 1931 lays out the Palestine Electric Corporation’s works as a system of parts: the tail-race canal, power station, workshops, and the engineered course of the water between them.³⁰ From above, the river could be read through the terms set by the corporation and the Mandate government: as a concession, an investment, a project already half built. On the ground, the work had already reshaped the land. A photograph of the tail-race canal from about 1932 shows the power station in the background and, in front of it, a channel that engineers had cut through the terrain and lined with concrete and stone to hold the water.³¹ 

At the inauguration of the Jisr Majami’a plant, the river recedes still further from the frame. British High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope and Rutenberg stand in tailored suits beside motorcars as they formally open the facility, while the water itself is barely visible. Across these images, the terms of visibility shift: earlier photographs registered the river through bodies immersed in it; the aerial view renders it as a system; the tail-race photograph grounds that in concrete and stone; and the inauguration returns human figures to the frame as officials who preside over a river transformed into infrastructure.

Equally striking in the American Colony and Matson images of the Jordan is what they seldom show. The American Colony photographed the river as a sacred site and then, more and more, as a worksite: laborers in the channel, the machinery of “modern progress.” The river as an ordinary place in the lives of the people who lived along it rarely enters the frame: farmers drawing on it to water their fields, families washing and gathering at its edge, neighbors crossing along its banks, children swimming in it for no reason but pleasure. This absence does not mean that such life had disappeared. At this stage, what is missing is the image, not the life. The studio photographed Palestinian daily life, but usually as picturesque or ethnographic images, arranged for an outside viewer. The archive does not give us the kind of image a family makes of itself: one whose significance lies not in explaining its subjects to an outside viewer but in remembering who was there. Those images survive elsewhere, in photographs Palestinian families made and kept.³²

Among them are photographs of a 1955 outing the Ashrawi family made to the Jordan, now held in the Palestinian Museum’s digital collections.³³ In one, adults and children sit loosely arranged on a pebbled bank before the open water, woven baskets and cloth bags set down on the stones beside them. They are not posed before a famous site; they have settled in for a while by the bank, sat down and placed their belongings there. The river here is neither sacred geography nor hydraulic object. It is a place where a family spends the day.

The difference between this archive and the colonial one is not that one contains people and the other does not. The American Colony photographed many Palestinians. But this institutional archive makes people legible according to the purposes of the institution: as pilgrims, as types, as labor, as the population of a district. This family album preserves people according to the relationships internal to the family itself. The institutional record shows exactly what a work party did to one bend of the river, even when it cannot say why, while letting the men who did the work go unnamed. This album does the reverse: it records who the people are—Naifah, Salwa, Sama’an—and the children gathered around them, while what they were doing was nothing more remarkable than spending a day by the water. The album records an ordinary outing. Read now, it also preserves a claim of presence: we were here.

Twelve years later, the same river appears in a photograph of a very different kind. Taken in June 1967, during the war, it shows a woman fleeing al-Khalil (Hebron), which Israeli forces had occupied, wading across the Jordan toward the Jordanian-held east bank, with two others helping her through the current.³⁴ She was one of some 200,000 people who crossed the river from west to east that summer.³⁵ The original publication and the photographer are unknown. Unlike in the Ashrawi photograph, no one has gathered for the camera here, and nothing has been set down on the bank. She enters the same water the pilgrims once entered for rebirth, not as a rite, nor as labor, but as an escape. During the war, the river where a family had once spent a day at ease became, for those driven from their homes, a line to flee across. Behind her, home is already becoming occupied ground; ahead lies uncertainty.

Upstream, Israel and Jordan had already transformed the river’s flow. Before the 1950s, Lake Tiberias released an average of 605 million cubic meters a year into the lower Jordan. By the mid-1960s, Israel’s National Water Carrier was pumping water out of the lake, while Jordan’s East Ghor Canal was drawing water from the Yarmuk, the Jordan River’s largest tributary. Israel had also rerouted saline springs into the river below the lake, so what reached the lower river was a trickle, and a salty one.³⁶ By around 2000, inflow to the Dead Sea had fallen to about a fifth of the river’s historical volume.³⁷ The 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty formalized bilateral allocations and arrangements over Jordan and Yarmuk waters; Palestinians were not a party to the treaty.³⁸

For Palestinians in the valley, the consequences are still felt today. After 1967, they lost the pumps and wells they had used along the river, and a military order required Israeli permits for any new water installation, which the authorities rarely granted. Israeli wells in the valley now supply its settlements and their farms, while many nearby Palestinian communities must buy water that is trucked in at several times the price.³⁹

As the river’s flow diminished, Israel also restricted access to stretches of its western bank. From the late 1960s into the early 1970s, it laid minefields along the river frontier with Jordan; from the 1970s onward, it designated extensive areas of the valley as closed military areas and firing zones.⁴⁰ At Qasr al-Yahud, the baptism site on the western bank facing al-Maghtas across the water, the minefields sealed off the surrounding churches, monasteries, and adjacent land for more than fifty years. The contrast with the 1900 stereograph is stark. There, the Coptic pilgrims enter the Jordan without visible constraint; at Qasr al-Yahud, later pilgrims reached the river only along a cleared corridor through mined ground.⁴¹ The question was no longer only how much water remained, but who could reach the river at all.

Yet neither the 1967 war nor the minefields ended Palestinian life along the river’s waters at once. In the years that followed, Palestinians still came to the valley’s springs and riverbanks, even as the conditions for reaching them narrowed. A photograph preserved in the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive shows Musa Sanad with his students in 1971 at ‘Ein al-Fashkha, a spring on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, a few kilometers south of where the Jordan ends: twelve boys stand waist-deep in the springs, laughing.⁴² Set beside the Matson negatives, the photograph breaks with how other images in this essay show people in water: as pilgrims, laborers, or objects of observation. The same waist-deep posture that the American Colony camera had rendered as labor appears here as pleasure and belonging. The photograph records one day of that access, bodies caught mid-play.

The springs are not part of the Jordan River, but they discharge into the same terminal sea whose level has fallen sharply as upstream diversions reduced inflow.⁴³ The photograph belongs here not as evidence of access to the Jordan, which it does not show, but as evidence of what the institutional archive hardly recorded: an ordinary, continuing relation to water in a landscape already under enclosure. Two years before this photograph was taken, Israel had confiscated 97 dunams of land from the village of al-’Ubeidiya at ‘Ein al-Fashkha.⁴⁴ The site is now a nature reserve, one of several designations, alongside firing zones and settlement areas, that restrict Palestinian land use across the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea region. In 2017, B’Tselem estimated that Israel barred Palestinians from entering or using roughly 85 percent of that area.⁴⁵ What the photograph holds, then, is not an afternoon outside that history but one taken inside it: boys in the water at a site Israel was already enclosing around them.

Across the photographs and songs discussed here, the Jordan appears in three relations: a river imagined from afar by people who could not reach it; a river rendered as sacred spectacle, territory, worksite, concession, and hydraulic system, even when the people in the frame stood in its water; and a river lived close at hand, by the Ashrawi family who sat beside it and the refugee who crossed it in flight. Surveyors, engineers, administrators, and military authorities turned ways of living with the river into forms of control, transforming closeness into distance. Photography served that process in two ways. It let buyers in European and American parlors own the river as an image, apart from the people who lived along it. Detached from those lives, the river became easier to picture as something others could claim. Photography also made the river legible to the institutions that fixed it as a boundary, channeled its power, diverted its flow, and closed its banks. The American Colony’s pictures moved between parlor and office. In the archive that now holds them, the distance persists: the work party appears under “Jordan River,” with none of the men named.

Family snapshots, now kept in a Palestinian archive, preserve what enclosure would take away: a day on a pebbled bank, boys laughing as they wade waist-deep in the spring. They show that the closeness existed, and whose it was. Yet they hold only a fragment of it. To lose a river is to lose more than water. It is to lose the fields it watered, the crossings it allowed, the gatherings it held, the relatives on the other bank. The river still runs, diminished, and no photograph or song can restore the conditions of that life.

Today, at Qasr al-Yahud, an Israeli-run site in the occupied West Bank, pilgrims again step down into the Jordan from stone terraces built for them, the ritual of the stereographs restaged inside a managed enclosure. Nearby, Palestinian farmers are barred from drawing water from the river.

The river of which enslaved African Americans sang as a symbol of deliverance is the river Palestinians are now kept from. The histories of Black enslavement and Palestinian dispossession remain distinct, but set near each other, they show colonial power working through property: human beings bought, sold, and worked for profit; land and water surveyed, seized, and granted as concessions.⁴⁶ The question, then, is not only what the Jordan has been made to mean, but who may still touch its waters.


This essay grew out of a lecture-performance incorporating poems from the author’s artist publication Blue-Black Liver (2025), presented at Agit, Berlin, and Tintera, Cairo, as part of the public program accompanying her 2025 exhibition Blue Black at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.