Summary
Photographs that have survived from the 19th-century Middle East are dominated by shots of Baalbeck, Palmyra, Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem.
Photographers based in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th century, the show's organizers suggest, roamed the MENA region with the aim of framing the Orient for Western audiences.
Western photographers may have traveled to the MENA region intending to document the Orient.
So it is that 19th-century photographers often served up stereotyped depictions of this part of the world.
The images in this show suggest that – by emulating the earlier work of Orientalist artists and copying one another's work – Western photographers operating in the MENA in the late 19th and 20th centuries contributed to the creation of a common (not infrequently fictitious) imaginary of the Middle East.
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