Nineteenth-century European travelers understood the Middle East through photographic accuracy

Evidence

Among European writers who travelled to the Middle East in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, one very frequently finds the experience of its strangeness expressed in terms of the problem of forming a picture. It was as though to make sense of it meant to stand back and make a drawing or take a photograph of it; which for many of them actually it did. ‘Every year that passes’, an Egyptian wrote, ‘you see thousands of Europeans travelling all over the world, and everything they come across they make a picture of.’ Writers from Europe wanted to make pictures in the same way. They wanted to portray what they saw in words with the same chemically-etched accuracy, and the same optical detachment, as the daguerreotype or the photographic apparatus, that ‘instrument of patience’ as Gérard de Nerval described it, ’… which, destroying illusions, opposes to each figure the mirror of truth’. … The exact correspondence of the image to reality would provide a new, almost mechanical kind of certainty. The publication in 1858 of the first general collection of photographs of the Middle East, Francis Frith’s Egypt and Palestine, Photographed and Described, would be ‘an experiment in Photography … of surpassing value’, it was announced in the Art Journal, ‘for we will know that we see things exactly as they are’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 106

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the idea of the West constructing the Orient as an object of observation — both books examine the photographic/literary gaze as a mode of control.
• QUESTION: Frith’s 1858 collection is cited as promising ‘we will know that we see things exactly as they are’ — worth chasing how early photography of the Orient was received as corrective of travel writing’s unreliability.