The Photography Room
Palestine. The Holy Land in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Photography
The Twelfth Instalment of the Photography Room
16 April – 3 August 2025
Curator of the Instalment: Anna Masłowska
The Holy Land fascinated photographers from the earliest days of their art. The first photographic images of Jerusalem were taken in December 1839, just several months after the invention of the daguerreotype had been announced in Paris. In the next decades, the development of the photographic technique combined with progress in transportation led to a continuous growth in the number of photographers who travelled to the Middle East from Europe and America. Palestine attracted visitors both as the setting of the events described in the Bible and due to its perceived Oriental exoticism, its local culture and unusual landscapes. Photographers captured the main destinations traditionally visited by pilgrims and travellers, such as Bethlehem, Bethany, the Jordan Valley, the Judaean Desert, the Dead Sea coast, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee.
The unmissable destination was Jerusalem - the Holy City of three religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Almost all artists photographed its panorama from the Mount of Olives, with the signature outline of city walls and the towering dome on the Temple Mount. Such views of Jerusalem from the mid-1850s can be seen in shots by Mendel John Diness, the first – and, for a long time, the only – local photographer of Jewish origin. Photographs by the Brit James Robertson and his collaborator Felice Beato come from the same period. Although their work reproduced popular themes, it achieved immense commercial success due to its high technical and aesthetic value.
Monochromatic sepia photographs from the second half of the 1800s reflected the austere, sun-burnt landscape of the Holy Land brilliantly. However, they could not express the colour of its cultural, religious and ethnic diversity. The vibrant, exotic Orient that the Western viewer knew from literature and art did not translate into monochrome photographic images. As a response to this shortcoming, new photography-based techniques were introduced, including the photochrom process, which entered the market in 1888, allowing artists to produce prints that imitated colour photography. Still, the coloured genre scenes and portraits of inhabitants which were featured in photochroms were staged in studios to fabricate an attractive but largely fictional image of local life. A more authentic effect, albeit poorer technically and compositionally, was achieved in amateur photographs, like the ones taken by Count Konstanty Broel-Plater during his expedition to the Holy Land in spring 1908.
The growth of amateur photography at the turn of the century coincided with the emergence of modern pilgrimage tourism, which in turn brought about the rise of the souvenir industry. One of its most popular products were printed postcards with photographs portraying the inhabitants of Palestine and the region’s major sites and landmarks.
Original photographic prints, photochroms and postcards served as treasured visual memories for pilgrims and travellers. For those who could not visit in person, these images constituted a precious record and a way to vicariously admire the Holy Land
[Anna Masłowska]