Photography S Orientalism

The Middle East played a critical role in the development of photography as a new technology and an art form. Likewise, photography was instrumental in cultivating and maintaining Europe’s distinctively Orientalist vision of the Middle East. As new advances enhanced the versatility of the medium, nineteenth-century photographers were able to mass-produce images to incite and satisfy the demands of the region’s burgeoning tourist industry and the appetites of armchair travelers in Europe. In this way, the evolution of modern photography fueled an interest in visual contact with the rest of the world. Photography’s Orientalism offers the first in-depth cultural study of the works of European and non- European photographers active in the Middle East and India, focusing on the relationship between photographic, literary, and historical representations of this region and beyond. The essays explore the relationship between art and politics by considering the connection between the European presence there and aesthetic representations produced by traveling and resident photographers, thereby contributing to how the history of photography is understood.

From the time of its invention in 1839, photography had a crucial link to the Middle East. When Daguerre s invention was introduced, it was immediately hailed as a boon to Egyptologists and Orientalists wanting to document their archeological findings. The Middle East also beckoned European experimenters in this new medium for a simple technological reason: early photographs were more quickly and easily made in the intense light of the desert than in gloomy Paris or London. In Camera Orientalis, Ali Behdad examines the cultural and political implications of the emergence of photography in the Middle East. He shows that the camera proved useful to Orientalism, but so too was Orientalism useful to photographers, because it gave them a set of conventions by which to frame these exotic cultures in images for Western audiences. Behdad breaks with standard postcolonial approaches by showing that Orientalist photography was the product of contacts between the West and the East. Indeed, local photographers participated enthusiastically in exoticist representations of the region, adapting Orientalism to the taste of the local elite. Orientalist photography, we learn, was not a one-way street but rather the product of ideas and conventions that circulated between the West and the East."

DIVA collection of essays that develop ways of doing postcolonial studies in art history./div

"This volume evolved from "Zoom out: the making and the unmaking of the 'Orient' through photography," held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, May 6-7, 2010"--ECIP data view.

More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic. In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.