Gardens of Sand: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, and the Levant

Gardens of Sand: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, and the Levant

AUC Press

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Issam Nassar

Between 1859 and 1905, a number of photographers working in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, and northern Africa captured their landscapes, towns, and monuments, bequeathing an unprecedented visual documentation of the Middle East. Gardens of Sand brings together 100 original photographs, masterpieces mostly hitherto unpublished, taken between 1859 and 1905.
The archive illustrates the themes of the expatriate photographers of the second half of the nineteenth centuryÑstudy portraits, royal commissions, landscapes, inventories of significant monuments and buildings, orientalist scenes, steeped in classical European imaginationÑbut also explores the confrontation between western imagination and the visual reality of the Middle East, a meeting that gave rise to a local photography, gradually moving further away from western stereotypes, and includes a critical analysis of orientalism and of photography as a means of conveying a reality of prejudices.