Invasion of the Sun-Painters

Early Photos Of Palestine

Reflect Western Interests

By Judith Gabriel

Photography hails back to the Middle Ages, when images reflected inside the Greek camera obscura could be traced by an artist. Egyptian physicist Ibn al-Haytham (the Latin Alhazen) made the first mathematical studies of this "dark chamber" in the 10th century, but it would not be until the early 19th century that such images could be fixed onto a surface.

No sooner had the genie been let out of the box, with the emergence of modern photographic techniques, than the pioneer practitioners of the new medium headed for Palestine, turning it almost overnight into one of the most photographed places on the planet.

Europe, which dominated the 19th century world, was eager to use the new technique to more accurately study the geography it so jealously coveted. British, French and German photographers descended on the Holy Land to document its sacred archaeology and to scope the lay of the land.

Theirs was a "Palestine of stones and relics, mosques, sanctuaries, Crusader remains: a romantic shell, a necropolis, without a single sign of contemporary life," writes Naomi Shepherd in her book, "The Zealous Intruders: From Napoleon to the Dawn of Zionism-The Explorers, Archaeologists, Artists, Tourists, Pilgrims and Visionaries Who Opened Palestine to the West" (Harper & Row, 1987).

Photographers joined the eclectic influx in 1839, eager to try their hand at the new processes introduced in London by William Henry Fox Talbot, whose paper negative process could yield multiple prints; and simultaneously, in France, by Louis Jacques Mandè Daguerre, an inventor whose "daguerreotype" technique would bear his name.

Barely three months later, Frèdèric Goupil-Fesquet arrived in Jerusalem to capture a daguerreotype view of the city, which was reproduced as an engraving in the first book ever to use photographs as illustrations, "Excursions Daguerriennes," published in 1842.

A rare example of his work, as well as that of other 19th century photographers who traveled to Palestine , is included in the book "Revealing the Holy Land -The Photographic Exploration of Palestine," published by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1997) and distributed by the University of California Press.

Most of the early daguerreotypes of Palestine exist now only in engraved reproductions, although 100 plates made in 1842-43 by Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, a student of Islamic architecture, survive. One of those, "The Temple of Jupiter," is the earliest photograph in the Santa Barbara collection, which primarily focuses on 1850-1880.

As a catalogue of the nearly 100 photos which were actually on exhibit at the museum from January through May, the large-scale book contains historical background material, including a comprehensive essay by Kathleen Stewart Howe, curator of prints and photographs at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, where the exhibit will be mounted October through December. Howe specializes in expeditionary photography in the 19th century and is author the of "Excursions Along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt."

The core images in the collection are those taken by Sergeant James McDonald, a "master photographer" who accompanied the British Royal Engineers on their 1864 and 1868 surveys of Jerusalem and the Sinai, and which embody, as Howe notes, "the imperial, cultural, and intellectual assumptions that England made about Palestine in the nineteenth century. They invite us to look beyond the subject matter that is still relevant to us today, and to probe further than their formal aesthetic qualities as images...McDonald's photos, strong, simply composed images, transmit very complex images."

McDonald's expeditionary photos were essentially topographic records made so that the territory could be mapped. Even the lone, posed figures in some of his "spare-time" photos do not truly animate the stark, other-worldly landscapes. In these, and in the work of other European photographers of the period, "natives" appear to be mere props against the backdrop of architecture, terrain and relic.

What made Palestine so important for British photographic documentation was a combination of imperial ambition and the country's Protestant identification with Biblical sites, which fed the drive to authenticate their faith through the same kind of visual documentation. "Indeed, for the pious reader of the Bible," notes Howe, "all of Palestine was a holy landscape." (The Catholic French, she points out, were less obsessed with proving Bible facts on the ground.)

McDonald's photographs in the Sinai "assert the extent of British sense of possession," Howe writes. "Everything-ancient scripts, native peoples, the manifestation of different religious practices, historical sites, and the land itself-is the intellectual property and physical space of English domination."

The collection also includes the results of other methods of early photography-including salted paper prints-by several 19th century British, German and French photographers. Their work tends to feature architectural detail and artifacts, along with several postcard vistas of village structures. There are painterly shots of Jerusalem 's banks of domed rooftops and minarets; the haunting expanse of Bethlehem in 1862; and the Old Town of Gaza and Nazareth in the late 1850s. On the book's cover, a lone turbaned figure perches on a Sinai ridge, playing a flute over an eerie plain. The heat, the golden glare of the region's natural light (a boon for film's early slow-exposure emulsions) are palpable in these "sun-paintings."

There is also a section featuring group shots of Bedouin "tribesmen," Jerusalem lepers, Armenian pilgrims, Bethlehem residents, and four striking poses of local Arab individuals. But essentially, the survey expeditions were not seeking portraits of the land's inhabitants.

In addition, many photographers who first sent home their pictures from the Holy Land would carefully select and "edit" their shots, according to Jerusalem-born historian Nitza Rosovsky, in her essay "Palestine and the Nineteenth Century," also included in the museum publication. "Depictions of dirt, poverty or misery did not sell." Indeed, the early photographers of the Holy Land obscured more than they revealed. Europeans wanted pictures that reflected their pre-conceived ideas about the East.

Until the end of the century, there were no Jewish photographers, Rosovsky observes, due to religious proscriptions banning the creation of "graven images." That taboo, it should be noted, still makes many religious Jews unwilling to have their faces photographed.

Nor did Muslims rush to take up cameras, for similar reasons. An early Arabic term for photographer- mussawir al-shems -means painter of the sun. Significantly, mussawir is an epithet for the Supreme image-maker, whose divine creativity, according to the traditions of Hadith, was not to be challenged by human image-makers, an issue that is still unresolved in Islam.

Generally speaking, European photographers would have had to overcome such reservations to convince most residents, particularly women, to strike a pose before their new-fangled cameras. As a result, many commercial photographers resorted to using paid models, some of whom obviously swapped wardrobes, props and identities from shot to shot, according to Shepherd in her "Zealous Intruders." Among the photographers covering Palestine during the mid-century, there was no sense "of Palestine as a place where people lived, worked, or visibly worshipped."

Small wonder that so many Europeans would believe early Zionist Max Nordau's pre-World War I slogan characterizing Palestine as being "The Land without People..."

With scant reference to Arab sources in the above texts, one might turn to Edward Said's classic "Orientalism" (Random House, 1978), a seminal discussion of Western perceptions of the Middle East over the last several hundred years, or "The Question of Palestine" (Random House, 1979), in which he addresses the 19th century attitudes toward Palestinians held by those who had imperial, archaeological and sacred designs on the land.

For a look at early photographs of Palestinian Arabs in family and communal groupings, and in the natural settings of their daily lives, another memorable volume exists: "Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948" with an introduction and commentary by Walid Khalidi, published in 1984 by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington D.C.

The earliest photos on Palestinians in the volume date back to 1876 and include some by Felix Bonfils and other pioneer photographers. It would be several years before the Palestinians would turn the camera on themselves or pose for group portraits. Khalidi's book is replete with those results-Palestinian life as it was lived in the cities and villages, in the midst of traditional family settings and unfolding historical dramas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This essay appeared in Al Jadid (Vol. 4, no. 23, Spring 1998).
Copyright (c) 1998 by Al Jadid