James Graham

James Graham (1806–1869) was a Scottish photographer who took some of the earliest images of the Holy Land, where he was sent as lay secretary for the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.

Graham, a former director of a Glasgow bank, having learnt the basics of photography, arrived in Jerusalem in December 1853 and stayed there for two-and-a-half years, taking lodgings in a tower on the Mount of Olives. While there he was visited by artists including Thomas Seddon and William Holman Hunt, both of whom seem to have used his photographs as reference material for their paintings.

When he exhibited photographs, he would often write an appropriate quotation from the Bible on the mount.

He was the author of a pamphlet called Jerusalem; its Missions, Schools, Converts etc. under Bishop Gobat published in London in 1858.