-Caveat Lector- http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/033/living/Early_snapshots_of_ancient_worlds A battle over Jerusalem's sacred sites, with the West weighing in heavily: It's not a new phenomenon. In the 19th century, photographs of a Holy Land in ruins, its unwashed, uneducated populace clad in rags, were used as ''proof'' that the Middle East was a backward place in need of Christian salvation and shoring up by the British Royal Engineers.Some of those photographs are included in ''Sight-seeing: Photography of the Middle East and Its Audiences, 1840-1940,'' an exhibition at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, with works drawn from various Harvard collections, including those of the Semitic Museum, and from outside lenders. Organized by a gifted graduate student, Julide Aker, the show features images by professionals and amateurs, made for a market of armchair travelers infatuated with the mysterious East, and, after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 simplified access to the area, made by the increasing number of tourists themselves, who came carting their Kodaks. The show has a companion. Across the street at the Sackler Museum is ''Antoin Sevruguin and the Persian Image,'' 50 modern prints made from the original glass-plate negatives, which were themselves made in the late 19th and early 20th century by one of Iran's great early photographers. The traveling exhibition was organized by the Smithsonian Institution; its Harvard coordinator is Rochelle Kessler. Born in Tehran to Armenian parents, Sevruguin devoted a long career to documenting life in Iran, through subjects ranging from wrestlers to carpet weavers to uninhabited landscapes. While he empathized with his subjects more than the photographers in the ''Sight-seeing'' show did with theirs, he, too, on occasion fabricated costumes, settings, poses - and meanings. He also gained access to the Persian Royal Court and to its late 19th-century ruler, Nasir al-Din Shah, himself a keen amateur photographer. Both Sevruguin and the shah saw photography as a modern scientific phenomenon: Hence their pictures of airplanes and railroads, just the kinds of unpicturesque subjects that didn't appeal to the ''Sight-seeing'' crowd.What Van Dyck was to Charles I, Sevruguin was to Nasir al-Din Shah. The photographer captured the ruler in poses both formal and surprisingly casual - having his mustache dyed by a Western barber in one. More typical is the photo of the shah on the peacock throne, a study in both the symmetry and the Rembrandtesque play of light and shadow that are Sevruguin hallmarks.Western influences pervade Sevruguin's work just as they penetrated late-19th-century Iran. In ''Interior in Gulistan Palace,'' the shah is seated in the murky depths of a vast room filled with European furniture. Behind him is a mirror, in which Sevruguin and his camera are reflected, a familiar device in Western painting. Sevruguin had compositional flair and a fine sense of where to stand to capture the most dramatic view. See ''Mountain Landscape, Luristan,'' a series of horizontal bands of architecture, light and shade, capped by a rocky cliff made of slashing diagonals. For a dramatic view of a human subject, his ''Veiled Woman With Pearls'' ranks high. The sitter's identity is unknown, and adding to the enigma is the gauzy, lace-bordered shroud that hides her face. Its windswept look contrasts with the stasis of the figure, weighed down by velvet and brocade robes and yards of pearls. That Antoin Sevruguin is not as well known as he might be is because Middle Eastern politics intervened: Most of his work - up to 7,000 glass plate negatives - was destroyed during the political turmoil in early-20th-century Iran.Remains of the day''Sight-seeing'' opens with an early version of virtual reality: a stereoscope. The device commands your whole field of vision, and gives a sense of depth. Look through it and there's a steep view of Egyptians climbing the rugged facade of the Great Pyramid. You are there, looking up at them, just steps away. Another 19th-century invention that gave stay-at-homes a sense of being on the spot was the lantern slide, a 25- to 30-foot projection used to accompany lectures by the likes of the American Reverend Clarence William Smith, who would dress up in Arab costume while delivering his talks on Palestine. Scale also helped put the viewer into the picture. Francis Frith, an Englishman who first went to Egypt in the 1850s, printed from oversized plates, enhancing the feeling that you were looking at the Pyramids through a window. Frith became enormously successful as a commercial photographer and propagandizer. ''By turning his camera primarily toward ancient remains and recording only negative aspects of present-day reality, Frith created visual and verbal representations that perpetuated Western prejudices,'' Aker writes in the excellent free brochure accompanying the show. He did so in an era when people took for granted that photography, unlike painting, by definition told the truth. It was quite a while before the public absorbed the fact that photography's ''truth'' was selective, and shaped by the person behind the camera. A two-volume, luxurious, so-called ''Queen's Bible'' in the Fogg show, published in an edition of just 170, matched Frith's photographs to text. The contrived pairings will make contemporary viewers wince. Frith's ''View of Jerusalem and Site of the Temple'' accompanies the Psalm that starts ''O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled.'' The ''heathen'' had to be swept away.The French-born Bonfils family of photographers relocated to Beirut in 1867, opened branches in Alexandria and Cairo, and prospered by playing up stereotypes including a view of a ''Turkish Sheikh Praying,'' an old man kneeling and facing the viewer, who becomes a stand-in for God. The Bonfils Studio's ''Palmyra, Sculptured Capital, Syria'' shows a local boy sleeping on an ornately carved capital that has fallen from its column. The message is that a great civilization has likewise fallen, and that the current inhabitants of this once-glorious place are now oblivious, asleep. This condescension toward the ''natives'' of the Middle East contrasts sharply with the contemporaneous photographs of African-Americans by F. Holland Day, which are part of the Museum of Fine Arts' current Day retrospective. Even when Day had his black subjects play dress up, he portrayed them as dignified; you sense his connection to them. The attitude toward the ''other'' in Aker's show is closer to the one examined so entertainingly in the ''Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930'' show at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown last year, which featured high art and low, paintings of harems and slave markets and ads for cigarettes with names like ''Fatima'' and ''Omar.'' The ''Orientalism'' show also featured Rudolph Valentino clips: There's a photograph in ''Sight-seeing'' that depicts the very same sort of suave heart-throb. The images in ''Sight-seeing'' weren't meant to hang on museum walls, or, for the most part, even in homes. They were pasted into albums. Aker has included some of these books in the show, along with cartes de visite and postcards that were produced by the millions and helped spread Orientalist stereotypes. Postcards were available to all, whereas a large work by Frith would be costly enough to be accessible only to the few. Nor were the pictures in ''Sight-seeing'' intended as fine art. Some were straight topographical records: Viscount Allenby used photos made by the Royal Engineers to guide his historic invasion of Palestine in 1917. Others were propaganda. Some, though, are frankly beautiful, transcending practical purposes. The French painter Auguste Salzmann was sent to Palestine in 1854 to photograph architectural remains; the photos were to be used as evidence that Solomonic ruins still existed there. Salzmann called his images ''brute facts,'' but to contemporary eyes there is romance and beauty in his salt print of ''Jerusalem, Temple Enclosure, Details of the Reservoir.'' A close-up of a crumbling wall, it is a flat, hazy, richly textured image that will appeal to people who like the more luscious strains of abstract painting. In many of these photographs, human figures are so dwarfed by colossal remnants of ancient architecture that you have to hunt to find them. The figure in Frank Mason Good's c. 1866-'72 ''Site of Petra'' is small, too, compared to the famous carved cliffs that rise before her. But this figure dominates. She's a Western woman, dressed in a voluminous skirt, looking for all the world like Queen Victoria come to domesticate the wilderness. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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