A Sketch of Manners

Alfred Roch, Jaffa’s biggest landowner and member of the Palestinian National League, was a politician with a bohemian panache. In 1942, at the height of WWII, he threw what turned out to be the last masquerade ball in Palestine. Inspired by an archival photograph taken the event, A Sketch of Manners recreates and reimagines an unconventional bon vivant aspect of Palestine’s lost pre-1948 past. A multilayered work that reflects on the history of photography, notions of modernity within the region, and the role of artifice and farce in society.