Jerusalem through the lens
Dan Kyram
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The Orientalist artist Jean Louis Germone was fascinated
by photography and used photographs he had taken. The painter
Thomas Seddon brought home photographs taken by his friend James
Graham in the Holy Land. Eugened Delacroix used ethnographic
portraits by his friend the photographer Eugene Durieu, as did
painter Ludwig Deutch, William Holman Hunt and Frederick Church,
who used photographs by Beato, Bonfils, Graham and others.
Comparison of painting and engraving to photographs sold to
visitors to the Holy Land reveals great similarities, especially
after local commercial photographers started selling their works
in the 1860s.
Although the camera in those years 'did not lie', photographers,
like artists, manipulated their pictures. They were aware that the
barren landscapes and dull ruins were unappealing, even with their
associations to biblical text, so they added figures of animals
(camels, donkeys, etc.), artificially posed in strategic spots.
These occasionally helped to explain the subject (as in the case
of Bonfils ''models' at the Western Wall, the entrance to the Holy
Sepulchre, or praying in a mosque, etc.)
Forty years passed from the invention of photography to the
invention of the half-tone printing process. The first photograph
appeared in print on 4 March 1880, in the New York Daily Graphic.
During these four decades, photographs were presented to the public
pasted on to pages in books, as three-dimensional stereographs
views through a stereoscope, or were made in engraving.
The first photographs in the Holy Land were taken by Horace
Vernet and Frederic Goupil-Fesquest. They commenced their
photographic journey in the region in Egypt on 6 November 1839,
barely three months after the invention of photography, and
the announcement of the dagurreotype process. The unique
daguerreotypes, on silver-plated copper plates, were
transformed into engraved plates to be printed as 'engravings
from daguerreotypes' in their book Excursions Daguerriennes,
published in 1841 in Paris. They were followed by the
daguerreotypes Josepht Filibert Girault de Prangey
in 1842 and George Skene Keith in 1844.
Photographer Maxim Du Camp, accompanied on his travels
by the writer Gustave Flaubert, used the salt-paper process,
and the photographs from his visit in 1849 were pasted in a
book published in 1852. the same method was used by August
Salzmann in 1854, attempting to prove with the photographs
the findings of his friend, the archaeloginst Felicien de
Saulcy. The French photographer Louis de Clerc, who photographed
in the Holy Land in 1859, accompanied and archaeological
scientific delegation. All these photographers came with
the aim of verifying archaeological findings by means of photography.
From the end of the 1850s, a growing number of photographers,
using the wetplate-collodion technique, visited the Holy Land.
Among them were the Rev. A. A. Isaacs (1856), G. W. Bridges
(1846), John Cramb (1860), James Robertson and Felice Beato
(1857), Francis Frith (1858), Frank Mason Good (1860s),
Francis Bedfors (accompanying the prince of Wales by command
of Queen Victoria, in 1862) and James McDonald (in 1864 and 1868).
There were some noted commercial photographers who operated
studios in the region and sold photographs of the Holy Land,
such as the Bonfils family (father Felix, his wife Lydie and son Adrian, in
Beirut from 1867), Tancrede Dumas (Beirut), the Zangaki brothers
(Ports Said), and L. Fiorillo (Alexandria). Important resident
photographers in Jerusalem were James Graham (from 1860),
Peter Melviller Berghein (from 1863), Grabed Krikorian (from 1870),
Yeshayahu Raffaelovich (from 1894), and the photographers
of the American Colony (from Kaiser Wilhelm II's visit in
1898 onwards). According to the bibliographer Reinhold Rohrich,
more the 3,000 books about the Holy Land were published
before the year 1878, of which some 2,000 appeared between 1800 and 1878.
Most of these (about 1,600) were published between 1838 and 1878.
Many of these books were illustrated by engravings, lithographs
and chromolithographs, often made after photographsm either
bought from existing stock or especially photographed by
the author or his photographer for the purpose of converting
them into line illustrations.
A few books included pasted photographs (salted paper
or albumen prints), later with pasted carbon prints,
Woodbury types or heliotypes. After the invention of
photomechanical reproduction, photographically illustrated
books included photogravures or halftones.
From the advent of the halftone plate, methods developed
and improved rapidly, and photographs could now be printed with
acceptable clarity, good contrast, and sharpness. As high-quality
photographs appeared, the volume of photographically illustrated
books increased, which the quantity of line illustrated books
decreased. The lens had won decisively over the engraved plate.
This exhibition presents nineteenth-century Jerusalem through
original photographs an engravings and provides an opportunity
to compare the views of the Holy City more than a century ago.
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