Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East

In the decades after its invention in 1839, photography was inextricably linked to the Middle East. Introduced as a crucial tool for Egyptologists and Orientalists who needed to document their archaeological findings, the photograph was easier and faster to produce in intense Middle Eastern light-making the region one of the original sites for the practice of photography. A pioneering study of this intertwined history, *Camera Orientalis* traces the Middle East's influences on photography's evolution, as well as photography's effect on Europe's view of "the Orient." Considering a range of Western and Middle Eastern archival material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ali Behdad offers a rich account of how photography transformed Europe's distinctly Orientalist vision into what seemed objective fact, a transformation that proved central to the project of European colonialism. At the same time, Orientalism was useful for photographers from both regions, as it gave them a set of conventions by which to frame exotic Middle Eastern cultures for Western audiences. Behdad also shows how Middle Eastern audiences embraced photography as a way to foreground status and patriarchal values while also exoticizing other social classes. An important examination of previously overlooked European and Middle Eastern photographers and studios, *Camera Orientalis* demonstrates that, far from being a one-sided European development, Orientalist photography was the product of rich cultural contact between the East and the West.