In 1999, the year of his controversial memoir, Edward Said wrote a preface to a new edition of After the Last Sky, his extended commentary on Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinian lives first published in 1986. In this preface Said described the project as “something like a source book for the Palestinian condition, and an attempt to render that condition not from the viewpoint of policy-makers but that of memoirists and unregimented historians.” This paper sets out to discuss what the implications of these claims might be and what strategies of narrative and descriptive treatment follow from them for Said’s own text. For this purpose, the paper will investigate both the visual rhetoric of Mohr’s photographs and the verbal rhetoric of writing which, in the tradition of ekphrasis, translates them to another medium. All this should serve to analyse, and critically evaluate, the verbal-visual construction of a photographic Palestine that this collection offers as well as the policy of memory and history enacted here—in the unacknowledged effort to “try freedom.”