The geographical term is ill defined, roughly covering the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt in the west and extending to Iran in the east through the Arabian Peninsula; in the 19th century, Europeans also distinguished it by the dominant religion, Islam. Early photography in the region was motivated initially by fascination with the monuments of antiquity, especially Egyptian but including the ruins of Asia Minor; by the pious reconnaissance of Palestine (the Holy Land); and by Western interest in an exotic East subsumed under the rubric of Orientalism.
Early explorations
Egypt was one of the earliest destinations for photographers, and was to become one of 19th-century photography's most frequently represented subjects. François Arago, secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, specifically linked the use of Daguerre's new process to the necessity of recording the hieroglyphic texts on Egypt's ancient monuments, an investigation begun by the scholars who accompanied Napoleon's army of the Nile in 1798. By October-November 1839 the first of many photographers were in front of the Sphinx. Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet (1817- ) had accompanied the painter Horace Vernet to Egypt to make photographic studies to complement the artist's sketches. Pierre Joly de Lotbinière, a Swiss who had been in Paris during the ‘daguerreotypomania’ of the autumn, was also there with daguerreotype equipment. Their photographs were reproduced as engravings and aquatints in Noël-Paymal Lerebours's Excursions daguerriennes (1840-4) and Hector Horeau's Panorama d'Égypte et de Nubie (1841), respectively. Both went on from Egypt to photograph in Palestine and Syria.
They were the first in a procession of photographers, initially using the two early processes, the daguerreotype and calotype, and later the wet-plate negative process. The motive for many of the early photographic surveys of the region was scholarly interest in the history of architecture as a record of the trajectory of civilizations. The first extensive survey (c.250 plates) was completed by an antiquarian and historian of Islamic architecture, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-92). In 1842-3 he travelled through Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Greece daguerreotyping architecture, sculptural details, landscapes, and, occasionally, people in the region. The plates, in many cases the earliest known photographs of sites, were made for personal, scholarly reference and were neither displayed nor reproduced. Pierre Trémaux (1818- ) worked on a similar project documenting the architectural history of Asia Minor and Africa, which was published in three parts over the course of several years (1847-62). Trémaux employed daguerreotypes, his own sketches, and, later, calotypes as the basis for the lithographic illustrations. Later fascicles of Voyage au Soudan oriental et dans l'Afrique septentrionale exécutés en 1847 à 1854 were issued with mounted salted-paper prints which faded and required replacement by lithographic reproductions.
The writer and romantic traveller Maxime Du Camp accomplished an extensive series of 220 paper-negative prints on his journey up the Nile and across the Sinai in 1849-51; 125 were published in the first photographically illustrated travel book, Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (1852). In rapid succession, other photographers followed suit. Félix Teynard published 160 calotypes from his 1851-2 journey up the Nile as Égypte et Nubie (1854), which he described as a photographic atlas to complement the great Napoleonic project, Description de l'Égypte. Louis de Clercq (1836-1901) produced a six-volume survey of the architectural heritage of Syria and Palestine, Voyage en Orient 1859-60, for which he photographed ancient monuments, Islamic architecture, and Crusader castles.
Photography was an early adjunct to the archaeological projects that marked the exploration of the ancient lands of the Middle East by Western scholars, although it was rarely used as a systematic record of the phases of excavation until the end of the 19th century. (Perhaps the earliest photographs of an excavation were made in 1843 in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq.) The French consular officer Paul-Émile Botta (1805-70) had daguerreotypes (now lost) made of the excavation of what he identified as the Palace of Nineveh, but was actually the Palace of Sarhgan at Khorsabad. John Beasley Greene, a francophone American associated with the French Egyptologist vicomte de Rougé, travelled and photographed in Egypt in 1853, 1854, and 1856. On his second visit, he excavated the second court at Medinet Habu which he systematically documented with calotypes. In 1854 Auguste Salzmann photographed archaeological sites in and around Jerusalem. His photographs of architectural details were intended as evidence to support his patron Louis-Felicien de Saulcy's contested dating of the monuments. This early period also saw the work of other amateur calotypists—Ernest Benecke, John Shaw Smith (1811-73), and Colonel Claudius Wheelhouse—whose photographs were not intended as adjuncts to their scholarly studies or for publication.
In 1856 Francis Frith embarked on the first of three photographic expeditions to the Middle East and the beginning of what would be a remarkably prolific career as the publisher of travel images. He used the recently introduced wet-plate process, which yielded crisply detailed images and permitted near-perfect copy negatives necessary for the large-scale production of prints, in multiple formats: 20.3 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in), 38.1 × 48.3 cm (15 × 19 in) mammoth plates, and stereos. In addition to standard topographical views, he photographed staged scenes in which European travellers strolled through ancient sites and native types provided local colour. Frith combined an understanding of what his viewers wanted from travel photographs—a scene they could engage with imaginatively rather than an accurate but dull record of place—and a commercial genius for production, distribution, and marketing. His first book, Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described by Francis Frith, issued in an edition of 2, 000 in 1858, began a series of publications in multiple editions that established F. Frith & Co. of Reigate in the mass production of travel views and books. In 1860, Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, with 100 stereo views, appeared; the same year, audiences in Manchester and Liverpool were thrilled by projected glass lantern slides of his views of Egypt and the Holy Land. On his final trip to Egypt in 1859-60, he made the first photographs of Ethiopia and the ancient kingdom of Meroë. He published two editions of the Bible illustrated with photographs from Egypt and Palestine. The four-volume Mackenzie series (1862) contained 148 albumen prints derived from all three of his expeditions. After 1860 he devoted himself to the publication company, photographing only occasionally in Britain, and hiring ‘operators’ to furnish his publishing business with foreign views.
After 1860 photography in Egypt was dominated by professional commercial photographers who produced technically competent, standardized views. A number of studios catered to tourists who flooded into Egypt with the new package tours begun by Thomas Cook in 1869, the same year that distinguished Europeans such as Adolphe Braun travelled to Egypt to cover the opening of the Suez Canal. Guidebooks directed visitors to studios where they could obtain views for inclusion in personal photographic albums. The studios of Sébah, Antonio Beato (c. 1825-1903), the Zangaki brothers (fl. 1870s-), Légékian (fl. 1860-1890s), W. Hammerschmidt (fl. 1860- ), Otto Schoefft (fl. 1870s-1890s), Henri Béchard (fl. 1869-late 1880s), and a branch of the Beirut studio of Bonfils et Cie offered extensive catalogues—views of archaeological sites, antiquities in the Cairo Museum, atmospheric views of the Nile, costume studies of ethnographic types, and genre scenes frequently staged in the studio or an adjacent courtyard. Photographers established branches within the sites themselves, as for example Antonio Beato's studio in the ruins at Luxor, collapsing the distinction between the experience of a place and the acquisition of its photographic representation.
Absent from the vast majority of photographic depictions of 19th-century Egypt was any reference to a modernizing society with contemporary inhabitants. The country of the photograph was a procession of ancient sites which had been cleared and resembled exhibitions at an international exposition, quaint street scenes, and quasi-ethnographic studies of exotic types. These widely disseminated images came to define Egypt.
The Holy Land
Photographic attention to the ancient sites and landscapes of Palestine, more commonly referred to by contemporaries as the Holy Land, was motivated as much by religious sentiment as it was by secular, historical investigation. The Revd Alexander Keith cited the accepted veracity of the photograph as evidence for the literal truth of the Bible, and based the illustrations for Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion (1844) on daguerreotypes made by his son George Skene Keith. Similarly, the English clergyman George Bridges (fl. 1840s-1850s) published a series of calotypes made in Jerusalem in 1850 as ‘illustrating the Bible’. Members of the missionary community in Jerusalem also deployed the new technique to document the reality of holy sites. James Graham (active 1853-7) began photographing in 1853 and was the most prolific of these early photographers. He in turn trained the convert Mendel John Diness (d. 1900), a Russian Jew who ran a successful portrait studio, as well as supplying standard views of the city, until he emigrated to the USA in 1860. In 1862 the prince of Wales, accompanied by an entourage which included Arthur Stanley, dean of Westminster and one of the foremost biblical scholars of the day, travelled through Egypt and the Holy Land. Francis Bedford was commissioned to photograph the tour and published the results in four volumes as Egypt, Sinai and Jerusalem (1863). By the late 1860s there were a number of commercial studios offering views of sites sacred to the increasing number of Christian tourists.
But the most extensive photographic survey of Jerusalem was completed by a detachment of British Royal Engineers and the photographer Colour Sergeant James McDonald (1822-85) in 1864-5. The survey was financed privately and charged with mapping the city and its water supply, evaluating the antiquity of monuments, and photographing. The resultant images and the archaeological discoveries furnished the impetus for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF; f. 1865) to finance and conduct surveys, which included photography, in the region. McDonald and the Royal Engineers with a group of civilian scholars returned in 1868 to survey the Sinai Peninsula and identify Mount Sinai and the route taken by Moses and the Israelites from Egypt, as well as to map and record the region they traversed. The photographs accompanying the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (1864) and the Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai (1869) were widely disseminated and provided a model for the integration of military and scholarly expeditions in the region. Political and religious motives continued to merge in the extensive mapping and recording of biblical lands under joint projects of the British military and the PEF, including a survey with photographs of the Wilderness of Zin accomplished by T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) in 1913.
Commercial views
Not only in Egypt and the Holy Land but throughout the region, commercial photographers compiled stocks of images of sites of interest and constructed views of the exotic life of the East, available both to armchair travellers—through publishers and agents in Europe and the USA—and to the increasing number of tourists. Initially, the professionals produced images primarily for sale in Europe. However, as European travel increased, first in the areas closest to the Mediterranean sea routes to Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, and later in Mesopotamia and Arabia, a number of commercial studios appeared in major cities. Initially their proprietors came from outside the region, primarily Europe, although Indian and Turkish operators were represented. But soon local entrepreneurs established businesses. The studios acquired negatives of principal tourist sites, either by purchase from local operators or through their own photographic expeditions, which they offered for sale throughout the region. Contemporary guidebooks advised travellers on the best sources for view photographs and listed the addresses of studios and their agents. In many cases, views from Sébah, Abdullah Frères, Bonfils, Zangaki, Légékian, Beato, and others are interchangeable, and there is compelling evidence that studios transferred negatives or made copy prints from other studios' stock images.
The introduction of dry-plate negatives for medium-size hand cameras, and then, in 1888, the Kodak roll-film camera, transformed the market, as it created the opportunity for hundreds of thousands of vernacular travel photographs. Demand for large, professionally executed view photographs diminished. An increasing number of tourists, as well as commercial and official visitors to the Middle East, used the new technology to make their own photographs, which were preserved in family albums and archives. It also heralded a change in photographic publishing, as travellers relied on their own snapshot photographs to illustrate travel accounts, and publishers responded to the growing number of ‘Kodakers’ by producing manuals offering instruction in taking high-quality travel photographs. On the other hand, the turn of the century saw the reinstatement of the photographic tour as a medium for popular instruction. In 1905 Underwood & Underwood marketed a set of 100 stereographs, Egypt through the Stereoscope, as a complete tour of Egypt and its antiquities conducted by the Chicago University Egyptologist James Breasted. Sets of stereoscopic views accompanied by an authoritative text became an accepted pedagogic tool. The standardized views presented in this and similar projects served as a counterpoint to the personal, contingent, and unmediated possibilities inherent in the snapshots made by Kodak-wielding tourists.
The Arabian Peninsula
Photography arrived late in the region, perhaps because of the difficulty of travel and prohibitions against Western visitors to the holiest sites of Islam. As elsewhere in the Middle East, photographic expeditions were driven by the twin goals of geographical knowledge and military intelligence. Beyond the views taken by travellers on their way to India as they passed through Jeddah and Aden, the vast expanse of Arabia was first photographed by Sadic Bey (Mohammed Sadic; 1832-1902), beginning in 1861 and continuing during the course of multiple surveys and assignments in the region through 1895. He made the first photographs in Mecca and Medina, the two holiest shrines of Islam, and documented the haj and the annual journey to bring the mahmal, the embroidered covering for the Kaaba, from Cairo. By the late 1870s there were at least two Indian photographers with studios in Mecca. Only after 1885 was the haj documented photographically by Europeans, Christian Snouk Hurgronje (1857-1936) in 1885 and Jules Gervais-Courtellemount (1863-1931) in 1896. The northern provinces were photographed in 1908 by two British officers, General Stephen Butler and Captain Aylmer, on a joint mission for the Royal Geographical Society and the War Office. In 1911, after travels through Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, Gertrude Bell travelled south from Baghdad into Arabia to photograph and report on the central provinces, again on assignment from the War Office. In the 1940s, finally, another Briton, Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), travelling by camel with his Leica in a goatskin bag, photographed Arabia's ‘Empty Quarter’ and its inhabitants.
Eric Matson: Bethlehem from the South, c.1934-9
— Kathleen Howe
Bibliography
- Vaczek, L., and Buckland, G., Travellers in Ancient Lands: A Portrait of the Middle East 1839-1919 (1981).
- Nir, Y., The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land, 1839-1899 (1985).
- Graham-Brown, S., Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950 (1988).
- Perez, N. N., Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East 1839-1885 (1988).
- Janis, E. P., Louis de Clercq: voyage en Orient (1989).
- Carney, G., Wahrman, D., and Rosovsky, N., Capturing the Holy Land: M. J. Diness and the Beginnings of Photography in Jerusalem (1993).
- Howe, K., Excursions along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt (1993).
- Howe, K., Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine (1997).
- El-Hage, B., Saudi Arabia: Caught in Time, 1861-1939 (1997).
- Gregory, D., “‘Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839-1914’”, in J. Ryan and J. Schwartz (eds.), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (2003).
- Nickel, D. R., Frances Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad (2004)
