The archive

About the Umayyad Visual Archive

The Umayyad family/tribe, in addition to their political roles, were a visionary collective like Britain’s Pre-Rafaelites, sharing a passion for creativity, connection with the past, and artisanal production of the highest calibre.

Saïd Nuseibeh began puttering about Umayyad sites and monuments at age 21 (1977). His fascination bloomed over the next half-century as he became an exhibiting artist and professional architectural photographer. Saïd has built a 50-year ‘Archive of photographs’ related to Palestinian, Arab and Islamic worlds. His crowning work-to-date has been a documentation of Umayyad Aesthetic Legacy in the Levant (present-day Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon), sponsored by a 2005 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award.

This website is a project to publish said work with culturally-sensitive rich textual metadata, breadcrumbs for the curious into the historic environment of the photographic subjects and the photographer’s epic journey.

“Creatively, I seek unmediated engagement with this heritage and I not so innocently continue to share my camera’s fruits in the face of oppression. Sadly, the work to me is becoming less about celebration and more toward salvage for future generations. This UVA – Umayyad Visual Archive is a direct descendent of Owen Jones’ Grammer of Ornament and Alois Riegl’s Stilfragen exhibiting discrete and group morphemes of early Islamic visual culture which may —in the editorial world (insha’Allah) and popular imagination— become more interesting representations of Middle Eastern cultures than war, poverty, fear and suffering.”