Jerusalem through the lens
Dan Kyram
Photography was born in 1839, and from that moment complex
relationships developed between this new technology - which
quickly developed into an art - and the traditional graphic
arts, painting and engraving. This close relationship
produced a series of interesting mutual influences.
Until 1839, artists and engravers visually described
the world, its views, objects, people and their creation.
The camera, which during its first decades had not yet learned
to lie, revolutionized visual reporting by introducing an
unprecedented accuracy.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, immediately
following Napoleon's retreat from the area, the Near East
opened up to western visitors. These included artists who
could now accurately describe what they saw without being
suspected as spies by the Ottoman rulers (as were adventurous
visitors before this time). During the first forty years of
the nineteenth century, before the invention of photography,
drawings and paintings made for the European market dealt
with archeological, ethnographic and topographic subjects.
The Romantic era provided European artists with inspiration
for describing the awesome, the sublime and the picturesque
in bible lands. In reality these historic sites were small
and dilapidated cities, set in dull landscapes occupied by
sparse, backward population.
The stories of the Bible, together with the opening
of the Holy Land to visitors, researchers, writers and artists,
increased the public's appetite for corresponding visual
description. Thus, when the artists David Roberts arrived
in the area in 1839, his drawings and narrative fired the
imagination and presented a model of accurate visual description
laced with some enthusiastic imagination.
Similar were the paintings of Luigi Mayer
(in the service of his patron, British Ambassador
in Constantinople, Sir Rober Ainslie), J.M.W Turner,
(who never visited the region but translated the accurate
drawings of 1819 by the architect Sir Charles Barry into beautiful
paintings and engravings), and William Henry Bartlett.
The arrival of photography freed the artists from having
to produce relatively accurate drawings. They were now able to
engage their imagination and manipulate space, light and atmosphere
to create special effects in their pictures, without totally
destroying the illusion of reality. Thus, the artists moved
from visual reporting to visual expression.
In its first years the camera imitated painting, and
the earliest photographers sought to record views and landscapes
which they had previously seen as engravings in books by Mayer,
Turner, Roberts, Bratlett and others. Later the process was reversed,
and it was the artists who used photography to help them with
their works
page 2 |
