[audiobook] The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professionals by Jo Devereux in Arts-Photography

Description

In the decades after its invention in 1839; photography was inextricably linked to the Middle East. Introduced as a crucial tool for Egyptologists and Orientalists who needed to document their archaeological findings; the photograph was easier and faster to produce in intense Middle Eastern lightmdash;making the region one of the original sites for the practice of photography. A pioneering study of this intertwined history; Camera Orientalis traces the Middle Eastrsquo;s influences on photographyrsquo;s evolution; as well as photographyrsquo;s effect on Europersquo;s view of ldquo;the Orient.rdquo;Considering a range of Western and Middle Eastern archival material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Ali Behdad offers a rich account of how photography transformed Europersquo;s distinctly Orientalist vision into what seemed objective fact; a transformation that proved central to the project of European colonialism. At the same time; Orientalism was useful for photographers from both regions; as it gave them a set of conventions by which to frame exotic Middle Eastern cultures for Western audiences. Behdad also shows how Middle Eastern audiences embraced photography as a way to foreground status and patriarchal values while also exoticizing other social classes.An important examination of previously overlooked European and Middle Eastern photographers and studios; Camera Orientalis demonstrates that; far from being a one-sided European development; Orientalist photography was the product of rich cultural contact between the East and the West.