Tales of the Orient

Over 200 photographs from the 19th century of the Near and Middle East seen through the eyes of Western photographers.
With the discovery of photography in 1839, archaeological documentation and travel illustration were among the main fields of application of this new technique. The work of the "second generation" offered a rich interweave of photographers of western origin who traveled East: local operators with cosmopolitan backgrounds and itinerant photographers transmitting iconographies from Armenia to Greece, and from Turkey to Egypt.
The years between 1850 and 1890 thus marked a watershed in the elaboration and dissemination of photographic images, branching out into increasingly diversified publication formats-from books with attached photographs, personal memory albums to stereography, the postcard and the plate for the magic lantern.
This book brings together many never-seen-before 19th century photographs of the Orient from the Communication Archive and Research Center of the University of Parma, the largest photographic collection in Italy. The volume constitutes an exceptionally representative cross-section of the photographic work done in the Near and Middle East from the 1860s to 1910 by photographers of great stature. Though these photographers provided an extended imagery, whose actions played a significant role in determining how the countries depicted were represented, they tend to remain anonymous illustrators, perhaps even lacking a biography or a reliable chronology of works.
These fascinating photographs, beautifully reproduced in duotone plates, touch on all the genres practiced in 19th century photography: from panoramas to atelier portraits, from theme shots to urban vistas and to the transcription of the relics of antiquity, and will delight travelers, photography collectors, and scholars in the region.