Paper
delivered in conjunction with the National Gallery of Australia's
exhibition: Revealing the Holy Land
A
paper to examine the nineteenth century photographers
and the photographs of the Holy Land. In order to examine these,
it is important to first study the contemporary social and
political context that made the Near East the focus for nineteenth
century
Europeans of all social classes, but especially for the newly emerging
middle class of England.
 |
Sergeant
James McDonald, Archway on the Ascent to Jebel Músá at
Which Pilgrims Were Formerly Confessed, 1868-1869. |
Until
the beginning of the nineteenth century, travel to foreign lands
had been confined largely to the aristocracy,
the church, the
military and a small merchant class. However the social and economic
ferment that accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Europe
and England rapidly changed that situation. Several factors appear
to have combined to produce an explosion of public interest in
the Near
East in both France and England from about the middle of the
eighteenth
century.
Both
France and England had strong military interests in Egypt, not
least because of its strategic location with respect
to the
eastern
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Those interests sharpened
with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. England allied
itself with the Ottoman Empire against the French, providing
naval forces
to bombard Napoleon’s operations at the final land battle,
the siege of Acre in 1799, and then defeating the French naval
forces at Aboukir Bay.
English
fascination with the Near East was, however, far deeper than just
a response to a passing
military problem. From the
reign of
Henry VIII, strengthened by the puritan interlude of Cromwell,
the English had had a strong link with what was then referred
to as Palestine,
a link founded in religion but extending far beyond that
boundary. Thomas Huxley, who gave the language the term “agnostic” speaks
of the relationship of English history and the Bible in the
following terms “consider the great historical fact
that this book has been woven into the life of all that is
best
and noblest in British
history, that it has become the national epic of Britain”.
The Archbishop of York, William Thompson referring to Palestine
in 1865, said “This country of Palestine belong to
you and me, it is essentially ours. It is the land towards
which
we may look
with as a true a patriotism as we do this dear old England
which we love so much”.
By
the early part of the nineteenth century there was a growing belief
in the Millennium and
the imminent Second Coming of
Christ, a precondition
of which was the return of the Jews to their homeland and
their conversion to Christianity. This saw the rapid rise
of a great
diversity of
missionary societies in both Britain and the United States.
In the early 1830's, the London Society for the Promotion
of Christianity
amongst the Jews sent the Rev Nicolayson to Jerusalem.
Lutheran Prussia
and the Anglican church combined to appoint the first Protestant
bishop to Jerusalem, Solomon Alexander, a converted Jew.
Competition among European nations to sponsor and protect
their chosen
religions in Palestine soon had a dramatic impact not only
on the inhabitants
of the region, especially Jerusalem, but on the actual
infrastructure of the city itself. France supported the Catholics,
Russia
the Orthodox, Britain/Prussia the Protestant faiths, while
the Rothschild
family
and the great English philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiori
sought to ameliorate the position of the Jews building
hospitals and
schools.
Artists,
theologians, historians, pilgrims and travellers journeyed to the
East in rapidly increasing numbers.
By
the early 1840's,
travellers such as W.H. Bartlett and A.H. Stanley, the
Dean of Westminster,
had published popular accounts of their travels to Sinai,
Palestine and Jerusalem, illustrated with steel engravings.
Similarly,
Alexander Kingslake’s Eöthen, published in
1844, an account of his overland journey from Greece
to Egypt
undertaken nine years earlier,
and Thackery’s Notes of a Journey from Cornhill
to Grand Cairo, published in 1845 under the pseudonym
of Titmarsh,
were among the
most popular books of their day. The most complete visual
record of the region at this time was the six volume
collection of coloured
lithographs from drawings made in the 1830's by the Scottish
painter David Roberts. Published originally between 1842
and 1849, these
were so popular that they were re-issued in 1855-56 under
the title The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia
from Drawings made on the spot by David Roberts.
While
these publications served to whet the appetites of
archaeologists and Biblical scholars alike, there
were
no accurate scientific
accounts of the region. Burton and Speke were not to
set out on their epic
journey to discover the source of the Nile until 1858,
two years after Frith made his first journey. France
appointed a Director
of the Antiquities Service in Egypt in 1850 but in
the rest
of the region
no systematic work was undertaken until the 1860's.
Popular
knowledge of the pre-Christian history of the whole region was
tied, at least in England, to the
accounts presented
in the
Bible while the reconciliation of the accounts of
the Mosaic tradition
with the actual geography of Egypt, Sinai and Palestine
was one of the most pressing and difficult problems
of sacred
geography. Which
of the several likely mountains in Sinai was in fact
the mountain referred to in the narrative of the
Giving of
the Law?
The
first serious, planned expedition to photograph the historic places
and monuments of the region was
undertaken
by the
Englishman, Francis Frith. Frith was born in Chesterfield
in 1822 to a
Quaker family. After leaving school at 16 Frith
was subsequently apprenticed
to a Sheffield cutler but at 21 he suffered a serious
mental and physical breakdown. During his lengthy
convalescence, Frith experienced
a religious conversion, his faith becoming the
central focus of his life from this point. By his early 30's
he
had made
a small fortune
in the importing business and retired to follow
his interest in photography. In 1853 he became one of
the founders
of the Liverpool Photographic
Society, one of the main centres for photography
in England at this time.
According
to at least one historical source, Frith was one of the most technically
advanced
photographers
in
the country
by
the time
of his first voyage to Egypt in 1856. Frith was
a man of strong religious belief who determined
to
experience,
first
hand,
the locations mentioned
in the Bible - Egypt, Sinai and Palestine. At
the same time his business acumen, already well demonstrated
by his financial
independence
at
the early age of 34, recognised that his photographs
of such places would find a ready commercial
acceptance among
a like-minded
Victorian
public. The unquestioned veracity of the evidence
of
the photograph far outweighed the testament of
the written account or the
artistic interpretation of the modern traveller
in such questions.
Frith’s
first published work from this first voyage, a series of glass
stereo photographs, were shown at meetings
of the Photographic
Society in the spring of 1857 but not published
for fear of commercial piracy until very late
that year. They attracted wide public acclaim
in The Times, and The Athenaeum and in the
photographic press of
the day not only for their photographic quality
but also for their contribution to historical
and educational uses.
Frith
returned from Egypt in July 1857 only to set out in November of
that year for Syria
and
Palestine,
visiting
Jerusalem,
Baalbec,
Damascus and the great cedars of Lebanon
before returning in May of 1858. His third and final
journey to the
Near East was
undertaken
in the summer of 1859. Frith travelled some
1500 miles up the Nile to the region of the
Sixth
Cataract, the
first photographer
to
penetrate so far south, although the most
southerly of his photographs are
from Soleb, which is down-river from the
Third Cataract. Returning
to Cairo, Frith went by camel across the
Sinai by the ‘long
route’ to Gaza, Jerusalem, through
Palestine and thence to London via Jaffa,
the Bosphorus,
Constantinople and the Greek islands.
Frith
was dedicated to his aim of conveying an
accurate, truthful expression of what
he himself
had seen and,
to this end, Frith
made extensive use of the latest architectural
and archaeological scholarship
in researching his journeys and in checking
the accuracy of the captions that he wrote
to accompany
each plate.
Frith
made a considerable contribution to the publication of photographic
images.
His
own
experiments convinced
him that
there was as yet
no satisfactory photomechanical substitute
for the actual photographic print. His
Reigate firm
of F.
Frith & Co, which continued under
family control until 1968, operated to
the highest standards of modern printing
practice, using very carefully prepared
copy negatives
and
the most sophisticated methods of masking
and retouching
Egypt
and Palestine Photographed and Described, the first of Frith’s
planned publications contained 76 photographs,
appearing in 25 parts available on
subscription between January 1858 and the spring
of
1860 in separate English and American
editions. The price in England was
ten shillings per issue, a substantial sum
for the period.
The photographs are taken from the
material accumulated from the first
two trips made by Frith over the period
1856-58. Of particular note is the
comment by van Haaften (Egypt and the Holy Land
in
Historic
Photographs, 77 Views by Francis Frith,
Dover Publications, Inc., New York,
1980), that of the 274 subscribers to the English
edition
about 1 in 15 were members of the clergy.
Frith’s
output of photographically illustrated
volumes was such that by 1862 The
Photographic Journal reported “ The extent
of Mr Frith’s publications
is becoming almost alarming”.
The
Gallery’s volume Sinai and
Palestine published in 1862 was
part of a four-volume re-issue
of earlier
publications. The
series was initially available
by subscription, and is uniform
with
the
earlier publications except that
the 148 albumen prints are arranged
by region, thus Sinai and Palestine;
Lower Egypt, Thebes, and the Pyramids;
Upper Egypt and Ethiopia; and Egypt,
Sinai and Palestine.
Supplementary Volume. The texts,
apart from those on Ethiopia, are
mostly reprints of those appearing
with the original or similar
views.
The
second of the items to be examined, The Ordnance Survey
of the Sinai
Peninsula, has
a more curious
background. While it
was carried
out by members of the Royal Engineers,
all of its expenses, including
the salaries of
the military
staff, were
met by public subscription.
Indeed, the Director General
of the Ordnance Survey,
Major
General Sir Henry James, actively
solicited subscriptions for its
support. The military staff were
selected
by
James and granted permission
to participate by the Secretary
of State
for War. Yet the
all of the results of the survey
clearly remained the property
of the British
Government as shown by the permission
to publish granted by
the Secretary of State for War.
Given the fact that the Indian
Navy
had earlier
surveyed the whole of the coast
of Sinai,
there can be little doubt that
the Government had
an eye to
the possible
future
military use
of the information. Certainly
the very careful surveys of Palestine
taken
by another member
of the Royal
Engineers while a member
of the Palestine Exploration
Fund were used by General Allenby
in planning
his Palestine campaign in 1917.
Certainly
the Royal Engineers of that
time were the pre-eminent
experts in
large-scale
survey.
The then
Captain Wilson
who would command the Survey
in
Sinai had already established
his reputation
in large-scale
surveys. He had
served as secretary to the
expedition of 1858 to survey
the boundary
between America and
Canada, the North American
Boundary Commission; been appointed commander
of the
Ordnance Survey of Scotland;
commanded the privately funded
Ordnance Survey
of Jerusalem,
established for the purpose of endeavouring
to improve the
sanitary state of the city,
and, following the Parliamentary
reform Act
of 1867, was appointed
as Assistant Commissioner to enquire into
the existing boundaries of
the parliamentary
constituencies
of the West
Midlands District
of England. When the notion
of a survey of the Sinai was announced,
Wilson wrote to Sir Henry
advising that he
was prepared to go out for nothing and
undertaking to raise £200 from
among his friends.
The
central purpose of the Survey is conveyed in the words of the Reverend
Williams in
the introduction “That there is
a great need to carry out such a survey
must
be manifest to all students of Old Testament
history; among
the most important
and interesting questions which are now
subjects of inquiry are the locations
of the Passage of the Red Sea, the Route
and
Encampments of the Israelites,
and the identification of the Mountain
of the Law Giving.”
Sir
Henry’s
instructions to Captain Wilson noted “all
the existing maps of the peninsula
of Sinai are said to be extremely defective,
and the object
of the Ordnance Survey is to produce
an accurate map of so much of the peninsula
as can be made in the time allowed
for
it....This map is especially required
by Biblical scholars and the public,
to illustrate the Bible history, and
to enable them, if possible, to trace
the routes which were taken by the
Israelites in their wanderings in the
wilderness
of Sinai and to identify the mountain
from
which the Law was given.” They
were also instructed to examine the
monastic and other remains of antiquity
in the
peninsula, collect information on water
supply, meteorology, geology and natural
history with particular reference to
the native nomenclatures, Arab traditions,
Sinaitic inscriptions and Egyptian
monuments in the country.
Included
in the party was Colour-Sergeant James
McDonald, chosen for his expertise
both as
surveyor and photographer.
The Royal
Engineers, and their
predecessor
Corps, the Royal Sappers and Miners,
were probably the first public body
to institute
formal training
in photography
as
a part of normal
training.
Just as Allegro
in France had advanced the potential
of photography as a mechanism for
accurately recording Egyptian
hieroglyphs, Alexander Gordon
had lectured
the Institute
of Civil Engineers in England in
1840 on
its uses for civil engineering. The
Royal Engineers Establishment at
Chatham, founded
in 1812 rapidly
expanded its brief military curriculum
to include
practical architecture
in 1826 and
surveying in
1833. Astronomy and submarine mining
followed with the Corps
being involved in a great range of
civil construction projects, including
the building
and early
running of the South Kensington Museum,
the Great Exhibition of 1851 and
the Paris Exhibition
of
1855. The earliest
known use of
photography
by
the Corps
was the despatch of two members of
the
Sappers and Miners to the Crimean
War in 1854. Sadly both were drowned
in Balaclava Harbour and their equipment
lost.
MacDonald had been a member of the
earlier survey of Jerusalem, again
funded by
private subscription
but
with the Engineers
providing the
leadership and technical staff. On
this occasion MacDonald was chosen
for his
skill as a
surveyor but
had the added task of taking photographs
of significant holy places in the
city when
not
engaged in surveying.
This latter
task was
a personal charge
placed
on him by Sir Henry James who provided
the necessary photographic equipment
at his own
expense.
The
resulting images contained in the published accounts of these two
Surveys
are among
the finest examples
of nineteenth century
topographical landscape
photography. Far from being just
simple records, MacDonald’s
photographs show a careful attention
to the selection of viewpoint,
the use of light and
shade and often
subtle placing of figures to provide
the eye with some reference for
scale and distance.
Nineteenth
century expeditionary
photography played a major role
in popularising
the medium and in
the development
of a general
belief that travel was
increasingly within the means
of the ordinary person. But
its most important contribution
was in broadening the social
and cultural horizons of nineteenth
century Western civilisation,
of taking its
citizens out of the familiar
comfort of their
own surroundings by exposing
them to
cultures,
customs and people whose civilisations
were often far
older.
The
National Gallery is fortunate to have two pristine examples of
this
important phase in
the evolution
of photography.
© Robert Deane 2000