Middle East & Holy Land

Egypt and the Holy Land were among the first places on earth to be photographed seriously, and the reason is simple. Europeans and Americans already knew them by heart. They had read about them in the Bible and in school, and they wanted to see whether the places were real.

Photographers went out almost as soon as the camera was invented. By the 1850s they were hauling heavy view cameras, glass plates and portable darkrooms up the Nile, developing pictures in tents in desert heat. The results were sold in albums and as stereo cards back home, and for many people they were the first true look at the pyramids or the walls of Jerusalem.

Tourism followed the camera. Steamers on the Nile and organized tours to Palestine became a fashion in the late 1800s, and the travelers wanted pictures to bring home. Studios in Cairo, Jaffa and Jerusalem answered the demand. In Jerusalem, the photographers of the American Colony, a religious community founded there in 1881, built up one of the great records of the region, and much of that work later came to the Library of Congress.

The pictures on this board fall into a few groups. Egypt means the pyramids at Giza, the Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Luxor, and the river life of feluccas and farmers along the banks. The Holy Land pictures show sites from the Bible, from Bethlehem to the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem has its own set: the Old City walls, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the crowded markets.

Look closely at the Sphinx in the older photographs. For long stretches of the 1800s it was buried in sand up to its shoulders, and only its head and back showed above the desert. The full body was not cleared until the 1920s and 1930s. The same kind of change runs through the Jerusalem pictures. Streets and walls that look timeless were in fact being rebuilt, crowded and changed all through the years these pictures were made.