Abstract
Despite what we say when we walk into a shop, we are never just looking. All viewing is a theory-laden and history-laden activity.1 Our eyes are trained and layered with a history of images, of ideas, of ideology. Both seeing and being seen are framed by this social and intellectual placement: ‘how you look’, in English, can be transitive or intransitive. How you look can mean the activity of staring, glancing, squinting, stereotyping; or it can mean how you appear to others, ‘how do I look?’, your role as an image for others to see, how you present yourself, in terms of dress and deportment, class and nationality. Seeing oneself being seen is an integral part of the regime of the visual, an integral part of how seeing becomes a performance, a performance through which identity is enacted. The tourist abroad constitutes a particularly charged moment in this drama of the gaze: the tourist is caught between the self-consciousness of self-presentation —how one dresses, stands, stands out, culturally, nationally —and the self-conscious viewing of the other.
A longer discussion of the material of this chapter is included in my book The Buried Life of Things: How Objects Made History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); the re-use of some of this material is with permission of Cambridge University Press.
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Notes and references
See especially Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984)
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: Emergence of the New City (Jerusalem: St Martin’s Press, 1986)
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh and Moshe Davis, Jerusalem in the Minds of the Western World 1800–1948 (London: Praeger, 1997)
Engin Çizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire 1839–1919 (Istanbul: Hishat Kitabevi, 1987)
Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land, 1839–1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985)
Kathleen Howe, Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1997)
Burke O. Long, Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models and Fantasy Travels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003)
Issam Nassar, Photographing Jerusalem: The Image of the City in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1997)
Eyal Onne, Photographic Heritage of the Holy Land, 1839–1914 (Manchester: Institute of Advanced Studies, Manchester Polytechnic, 1980)
Shimon Gibson, Jerusalem in Original Photographs 1850–1920 (London: Stacey International, 2003)
Ely Schiller, The First Photographs of Jerusalem: The Old City (Jerusalem: Ariel, 1978).
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980)
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Onne, Photographic Heritage; Nir, The Bible; Howe, Holy Land
J. James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) are particularly relevant to this article, as is the general work of
Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (eds), Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) (with further bibliography).
This is not the place for a full doxography of so extensively debated an issue. Suffice to say that Said’s work on orientalist scholarship has been profoundly criticised by Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006)
Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the boundaries of East and West, important developments have been made by
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990)–with the comments of
Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On gender from several angles including most relevantly here, see
Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: Rutgers University Press, 2004)
Nancy Micklewright, A Victorian Traveller in the Middle East: The Photography and Travel Writing of Annie, Lady Brassey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). In general, most recently, see
Ian Richard Netton (ed.), Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land and Voyage (London: Routledge, 2013), which unaccountably does not cite Marchand. The battle over photographic images as a dynamic of East–West relations is notably absent from most general books on oriental-ism, for example
A.L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002)
John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). The initial work on Ottoman photography has been undertaken mainly by Turkish and Arab scholars, especially Çizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire;
Bahattin Öztuncay, James Robertson: Pioneer of Photography in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 1992);
Bahattin Öztuncay, Vassiliaki Kargopoulo: Photographer to his Majesty the Sultan (Istanbul: BOS, 2000);
Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios, and Artists from Nineteenth-Century Istanbul (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2003)
Engin Özendes, Abdullah Frères: Ottoman Court Photographers, trans. P.M. Isin (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Culture, 1998)
Engin Özendes, From Sébah & Joaillier to Foto Sébah: Orientalism and Photography, trans P.M. Isin (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1999)
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
Ayshe Erdogdu, ‘Picturing Alterity: Representational Strategies in Victorian Type Photography of Ottoman Men’, Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, ed. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 107–25.
On the railways see Gregor Schöllgen, Imperialismus und Gleichgewicht: Deutschland, England und die orientalische Frage (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984), pp. 38–49
Jonathan S. McMurray, Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001)
Walter Pinhas Pick, ‘Meissner Pasha and the Construction of Railways in Palestine and Neighbouring Countries’, Ottoman Palestine 1800–1914, ed. Gad G. Gilbar (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), pp. 179–218.
Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2010) is lively but unreliable. On the pipelines, the forthcoming work of Rachel Havrelock is eagerly awaited. See already
Rachel Havrelock, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) for the geopolitics of boundaries in the region.
Reinhold Röhricht, Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae: chronologisches Verzeichnis der von 333 bis 1878 verfassten Literatur über das Heilige Land (Jerusalem: Universitas Booksellers of Jerusalem, 1963).
Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), pp. 408, 407.
Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (London: Methuen, 1900 [1844]), p. 116.
Stephen Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (London: Thomas Nelson, 1913), p. 123.
Neil Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land (New York: Random House, 1982)
Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land; Haim Goren, ‘“Sacred but not surveyed”: Nineteenth-century Surveys of Palestine’, Imago Mundi, 54 (2002), 87–110
Rachel Hallotte, Bible, Map and Spade: The American Palestine Exploration Society, Frederick Jones Bliss and the Forgotten Story of Early American Biblical Archaeology (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006).
François-Réné Chateaubriand, Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary During the Years 1806 and 1807, trans. Frederic Shoberl (New York: Van Winkle and Wiley, 1814), p. 391
Josiah Conder, The Modern Traveller (London: James Duncan, 1830), p. 74.
It is cited, for example, in J. Newton Brown, The Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, (Brattleboro, VT: Joseph Steen, 1844), p. 682 (a much used encyclopaedia)
J.T. Bannister, A Survey of the Holy Land, its Geography, History and Destiny (Bath: Binns and Goodwin, 1844), pp. 274–5
Christopher Kelly, Kelly’s New System of Universal Geography (London: T. Kelly, 1819), p. 19
C.B. Walk, A Visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Places Adjacent (London: J. Haddon, 1828), p. 19
C.B. Walk, Christian Penny Magazine, 22 (3 November 1832), p. 170
C.B. Walk, The Portfolio 3 (1824), p. 38
William Carpenter, Scripture Natural History (London: Whiteman and Cramp, 1828), p. 363–and a string of other encyclopaedias and miscellanies.
George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land: Especially in Relation to the History of Israel and of the early Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894), p. 99. For Smith’s life see
Lillian Adam Smith, George Adam Smith: A Personal Memoir and Family Chronicle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1944)
Iain D. Campbell, Fixing the Indemnity: The Life and Work of Sir George Adam Smith (1856–1942) (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2004), especially pp. 77–104; and for his intellectual place, the rather unsatisfactory discussions of
Robin A. Butlin, ‘George Adam Smith and the Historical Geography of the Holy Land: Contents, Contexts and Connections’, Journal of Historical Geography, 14.4 (1988), 381–404;
Edwin James Aiken, Scriptural Geography: Portraying the Holy Land (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), pp. 132–85. As the preface to the 25th edition (1931) makes clear, General Allenby used Smith as a field guide, and Smith responded by adding an appendix on Allenby’s campaigns: see also
Brian Gardner, Allenby (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 114.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 4.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sermons preached before his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, during his tour in the East, in the spring of 1862, with notices of some of the localities visited (London: Porter & Coates, 1863), p. 31.
On Bonfils, see Carney Gavin (ed.), ‘Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II’s Photographic Album’, Journal of Turkish Studies, 12 (1988); M. Woodward, ‘Between Orientalist Cliché and Images of Modernization: Photographic Practice in the Late Ottoman Empire’, History of Photography 27 (2003), 363–74 with the background of Çizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire;
Gilbert Beaugé and Engin Çizgen, Images d’Empire: aux origins de la photographie en Turquie, trans. Y. Bener (Istanbul: Taksin, 1993).
Vivienne Silver-Brody, Documentors of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel 1890–1933 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1998)
Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 195–224
Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
In general see John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 2000). Compare the failures of the American attempts at mapping: see Hallotte, Bible, Map and Spade, and
Rachel Hallote, Felicity Cobbing and Jeffrey B. Spurr, The Photographs of the American Palestine Exploration Society (Boston: American School of Oriental Research, 2012).
See S. Spencer Francis Bedford, Landscape Photography and Nineteenth-century British Culture: The Artist as Entrepreneur (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 87.
See Jacob M. Landau, Abdul-Hamid’s Palestine (Jerusalem and London: Deutsch, 1979).
Typical is Ken Jacobson, Odalisques and Arabesques: Orientalist Photography (London: Quaritch, 2007), p. 20: ‘the image of the Orient in the 19th century was defined almost exclusively by foreigners and resident Christian photographers … Though in theory it would indeed be illuminating to see if the East might have been portrayed differently through the eyes of the Muslim majority, this is not possible’. The list of books that do not discuss Muslim photographers or the Abdul Hamid collection, even when relevant to an argument, would be long. But for detailed discussions of the collection and Muslim photography see Landau, Abdul-Hamid’s Palestine written before the discovery of the London albums; Çizgen, Photography; Beaugé and Çizgen, Images d’Empire, especially p. 191 ff.; Gavin, ‘Imperial Self-Portrait’;
William Allen, ‘The Abdul Hamid II Collection’, History of Photography, 8 (1984), 119–45;
William Allen ‘Analysis of Abdul-Hamid’s Albums’, Journal of Turkish Studies, 12 (1988), 33–7;
Michelle L. Woodward, ‘Between Orientalist Cliché and Images of Modernization: Photographic Practice in the Late Ottoman Empire’, History of Photography, 27 (2003), 363–74
Wendy Shaw, ‘Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century: An “Innocent” Modernism?’, History of Photography, 33 (2009), 80–93.
Carmen Pérez Gonzalez, Local Portraiture: Through the Lens of the 19th-Century Iranian Photographers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012);
Issam Nassar, ‘Early Local Photography in Jerusalem: From the Imaginary to the Social Landscape’, History of Photography, 27 (2003), 320–32. Susan Slyomovics, ‘Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes and Photographing Algeria’, Orientalism Revisited, ed. Netton, pp. 128–150, building on Alloula, The Colonial Harem, is a good example of the insightful analysis of colonial photography without adequate treatment of Ottoman photographers.
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Goldhill, S. (2016). Photography and the Real: The Biblical Gaze and the Professional Album in the Holy Land. In: Henes, M., Murray, B.H. (eds) Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543394_5
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