Issam Nassar is a Palestinian historian of photography and Middle Eastern History at Illinois State University and a research fellow at the Institute of Jerusalem Studies in Jerusalem. Nassar taught at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006; Bradley University in 2003-2006 and al-Quds University in 1998-2003. He is associate editor of Jerusalem Quarterly (Arabic: Hawliyat al-Quds‎) and author of a number of books and articles, among them: Different Snapshots: The History of Early Local Photography in Palestine, European Portrayals of Jerusalem: Religious Fascinations and Colonialist Imaginations, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Gardens of Sand, edited with Clark Worswick and Patricia Almarcegui, TrunerPhoto Middle East, October 2010. I Would Have Smiled: Photographing the Palestinian Refugee Experience, co-edited with Rasha Salti (Jerusalem: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2009)

On photography in Jerusalem and photographs that appear in the film, see:
Photographing Jerusalem: The Image of the City in Nineteenth-Century Photography

This text explores the different ways in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have imagined Jerusalem in the past and considers the meanings of 19th-century photographic representations of the city. It illustrates the way in which the city looked through the lens of a camera in the 1800s and investigates the uses of photographic representation while taking a tour of 19th-century Jerusalem sites in more than 100 photographs.