JERUSALEM — The life of photographer Kevork Kahvedjian changed one day in 1989, when his wife, Hasmig, decided to clean out the attic of their house in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

There she discovered boxes of negatives of photographs that Kahvedjian’s father, Elia, had taken of Jerusalem in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, before the city’s landscape had been transformed by the 1948 War of Independence.

Kahvedjian’s father, Elia,was born in Turkey in 1910 and orphaned at the age of five. He was brought to live in Palestine in 1920. He began taking his first photographs of his adopted homeland at the age of 14. In 1947, fearing the coming war for Israel’s independence, Elia hid his entire collection and fled the country. The historic photographs remained hidden until some 40 years later, when Kahvedjian and his wife found them.

From the moment the discovery was made, Kahvedjian recognized the rarity of his father’s photographs, and realized that his own life’s work would be to catalogue and exhibit them.

The photographs won critical acclaim after being exhibited in Jerusalem, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere, and in 1998 Kahvedjian published an exquisite collection of them, Jerusalem Through My Father’s Eyes.

During an interview at his studio at 14 Al-Khanqa St. in the Christian quarter of the Old City, 63-year-old Kahvedjian proudly opened the book and pointed to a photograph his father took of the Kotel in 1929. “Look, in the photo you can see that Jewish men and Jewish women are praying together, intermingled. There was no divider separating them like there is now,” he said.

Kahvedjian flipped quickly to another photo showing the area of Damascus Gate. “It shows that after 1948, there was actually a physical barrier dividing west and east Jerusalem,” he said.

“There is a lot of interest in my father’s photos,” he added.

 Photography is a lifelong passion that Kahvedjian says seems to flow in the family genes. Both his sons are also photographers.

The collection of Elia Kahvedjian’s black and white photographs capture the ebb and flow of daily life in Jerusalem, and reflect the eye of an outsider, an Armenian Christian living in the heart of a conflict between Jews and Arabs. The photographs have a sensitivity fostered by the hardships of Elia’s own childhood.

“One hundred and sixty members of my father’s family were murdered in the Armenian genocide. After weeks in the desert, my father was given to a Kurd that was passing by. The Kurd sold him to a blacksmith, who eventually sent him away,” Kahvedjian said.

“He sought refuge in a Syrian convent. When the war was over, [in 1918] the American Near East Relief Foundation began to gather Armenian orphans and distribute them in its orphanages throughout the Middle East.

“My father was sent to an orphanage in Lebanon and then to Nazareth, before arriving at the age of 16 to an orphanage in the Old City. It so happened that one of his teachers in the orphanage in Nazareth was a photographer and started to teach him,” Kahvedjian said.

After learning the trade, Elia bought a studio in 1936 on Jaffa Road (which today is the site of the Dan Pearl Hotel).  He had some business contacts with the British military, and as a result two British intelligence colonels came to his studio in late 1947 to warn him of a pending Arab riot, after the United Nations vote on Nov. 29, 1947, to partition Palestine. The riot destroyed Jerusalem’s new Commercial Center.

The two officers assisted Elia in loading his photographs and equipment onto two trucks and taken to the Armenian convent in the Old City. Two days later, Elia’s studio, together with all of Jerusalem’s Mamilla area, was ransacked.

Elia and his family sought safety in the convent and then fled to Syria for eight months. He returned to Jerusalem to find it divided between Hashemite Jordan and the newly established State of Israel.

Kahvedjian is currently completing a second volume of his father’s photos and has begun cataloguing more than 2,000 negatives his father shot in neighbouring Middle East countries before 1948. His two sons are working on a “then and now” volume, contrasting the changes in Jerusalem that have occurred in the last seven decades.