Birth: NULL/NULL/1910 Death:NULL/NULL/1979
Born in 1910 in Jerusalem; worked at the American Colony photographic department in Jerusalem as an apprentice to the Swedish photographer Eric Matson, with whom he collaborated until his career in Palestine ended in 1946; was employed by the British Mandate government as a Public Information Officer; documented through his work as photographer Palestinian life and history under different periods; took a photograph in the 1930s of a group of Palestinian women demonstrating near the Old City against the British troops who were trying to stop them, which caused the British Parliament to order an investigation into the affair; other famous photos document the Deir Yassin massacre, the funeral of Abdul Qader Al-Husseini in April 1948, and the fall of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter in May 1948; joined an archaeological expedition, as an underwater photographer, in search of the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Dead Sea and documented the famous Jericho conference which, in 1950, granted King Abdullah I of Jordan the right to rule over the West Bank; later took photos of Pope Paul VI’s visit to the Holy Land in 1964, of the house demolitions in the Old City after Israel had conquered the city in 1967, and of the damage caused by an arsonist at Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969; lost some of his collections in the course of the 1967 War, when they were stolen from his studio in Jerusalem; had his photos published locally and abroad in newspapers and journals such as The National Geographic Magazine, the Readers Digest, the London News and the Associated Press; his son Raffi Safieh published his biography in 1999 under the title Hanna Safieh: A Man and his Camera, Photographs of Palestine 1927-1967; died in 1979.
