Sand Gardens
TURNER
ART
CLARK WORSWICK
Pages: 144
Year of publication: 2010
Measurements: 28.8 x 24.5 x 1.5
Hard cover
Between 1859 and 1905, a diverse group of photographers active in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, and the Maghreb recreated their landscapes, populations, and ancient monuments, leaving behind an unprecedented visual documentation of the Middle East. Sand Gardens is an editorial project that rescues 100 original photographs, most of them unpublished masterpieces, taken between 1859 and 1905. The archive illustrates the themes and specialties of expatriate photographers from the second half of the 19th century: studio portraits, royal commissions, landscape painting, inventories of significant monuments and buildings, and Orientalist scenes imbued with classical European imagination. However, the project also explores the confrontation between these pioneers and the foreign, and between the Western imagination and the visual reality of the Middle East. This encounter ultimately led to the emergence of a local photography style, gradually distancing itself from Western stereotypes. Authors such as James Robertson, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, G. Lekegian, Antoine Beato, Felix Bonfils, Otto Shoefft, Emile Béchard or Sulayman Al-Hakim de Damascus, the only documented Arab photographer of the 19th century, are represented in the book, which includes writings on the photographic panorama of this period in the Middle East as well as a critical analysis of Orientalism and photography as a means of transmitting a reality free of prejudice.
TURNER
ART
CLARK WORSWICK
Pages: 144
Year of publication: 2010
Measurements: 28.8 x 24.5 x 1.5
Hard cover
Between 1859 and 1905, a diverse group of photographers active in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, and the Maghreb recreated their landscapes, populations, and ancient monuments, leaving behind an unprecedented visual documentation of the Middle East. Sand Gardens is an editorial project that rescues 100 original photographs, most of them unpublished masterpieces, taken between 1859 and 1905. The archive illustrates the themes and specialties of expatriate photographers from the second half of the 19th century: studio portraits, royal commissions, landscape painting, inventories of significant monuments and buildings, and Orientalist scenes imbued with classical European imagination. However, the project also explores the confrontation between these pioneers and the foreign, and between the Western imagination and the visual reality of the Middle East. This encounter ultimately led to the emergence of a local photography style, gradually distancing itself from Western stereotypes. Authors such as James Robertson, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, G. Lekegian, Antoine Beato, Felix Bonfils, Otto Shoefft, Emile Béchard or Sulayman Al-Hakim de Damascus, the only documented Arab photographer of the 19th century, are represented in the book, which includes writings on the photographic panorama of this period in the Middle East as well as a critical analysis of Orientalism and photography as a means of transmitting a reality free of prejudice.
TURNER
ART
CLARK WORSWICK
Pages: 144
Year of publication: 2010
Measurements: 28.8 x 24.5 x 1.5
Hard cover
Between 1859 and 1905, a diverse group of photographers active in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, and the Maghreb recreated their landscapes, populations, and ancient monuments, leaving behind an unprecedented visual documentation of the Middle East. Sand Gardens is an editorial project that rescues 100 original photographs, most of them unpublished masterpieces, taken between 1859 and 1905. The archive illustrates the themes and specialties of expatriate photographers from the second half of the 19th century: studio portraits, royal commissions, landscape painting, inventories of significant monuments and buildings, and Orientalist scenes imbued with classical European imagination. However, the project also explores the confrontation between these pioneers and the foreign, and between the Western imagination and the visual reality of the Middle East. This encounter ultimately led to the emergence of a local photography style, gradually distancing itself from Western stereotypes. Authors such as James Robertson, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, G. Lekegian, Antoine Beato, Felix Bonfils, Otto Shoefft, Emile Béchard or Sulayman Al-Hakim de Damascus, the only documented Arab photographer of the 19th century, are represented in the book, which includes writings on the photographic panorama of this period in the Middle East as well as a critical analysis of Orientalism and photography as a means of transmitting a reality free of prejudice.