1032
hands, rhythmically placed above her head for the long
exposure.
Other signifi cant studios, established in the Middle
East, included the Maison Bonfi ls, Abdullah Freres,
Sébah and Joaillier, and Lehnert and Landrock. Félix
Bonfi ls studied photography initially with Nièpce de
Saint Victor. With his wife Lydia, who took studio
portraits while he photographed throughout the Middle
East, Bonfi ls established a successful business in Beirut,
beginning in 1867, the fi rst French photographer to relo-
cate to the region. In 1871 he submitted prints of Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, and Greece to the French Photographic
Society and received its medal. His son, Adrian, who
had mastered Arabic, took over the Maison Bonfi ls in
1885 when his father died. While many of the studio’s
images are posed, the photographs nonetheless are both
documentary and artistic representations of 19th century
Oriental cultures and monuments, that are important to
consider in studying this era and region.
The Abdullah Freres were three brothers of Armenian
origin who were particularly noted for their photograph-
ic work in Istanbul, often photographing royal guests in
Istanbul. They also served as offi cial photographers to
Sultan Abdul Aziz in 1863, and later to Sultan Abdul
Hamid II. For a brief period from 1886–1888, Kevork
and Housep Abdullah established themselves in Cairo.
The brothers sold their studio to Sébah and Joaillier in
1899.
Pascal Sébah initially worked in collaboration with
Henri Béchard. Sébah received medals at International
Exhibitions in Paris, Vienna and Philadelphia. With such
success he opened a second studio in Cairo in 1873. In
1884 Policarp Joaillier became his partner in Istanbul.
Noteworthy in Sébah’s career was his collaboration with
the Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey, whom he met
in 1873. Sébah took photographs of models according
to Bey’s specifi cations for Bey’s paintings and also ex-
perimented with light and shade. In his paintings, Bey
often reacted to the cliché of the Oriental woman as sex
object. Sébah also photographed models in traditional
Turkish dress for an important album and Ottoman
exhibition in Vienna in 1873.
Rudolph Lehnert, born in Bohemia (part of the Aus-
trian-Hungarian Empire) in 1878, made his fi rst trip to
Tunis in 1903 and fell in love with the country. In 1904
he opened a studio with his friend, Ernst Landrock from
Saxony. The two were captivated not only by the exotic
beauty of people and places of North Africa, but also
wished to capture a purity they felt was rapidly disap-
pearing. From 1904–1930 the two worked closely. Their
photographs of the Ouled Nail tribe in and around the
Bou Saada oasis are particularly striking. During World
War I their studio was confi scated by the British. In 1920
they founded a new company, Orient Kunst Verlag, and
in 1924 they restarted their commercial enterprise in
Cairo. By 1930, Lehnert returned to Tunisia where he
died in 1948. The business they founded still continues
in Cairo today, selling postcards and reproductions at
44 rue sherif Pasha.
In response to some Orientalist representations of
Middle Eastern life by Western photographers that were
perceived to be more fi ction than fact, the Ottoman Sul-
tan Abdul Hamid II, at the occasion of the 1893 World’s
Colombian Exposition, presented fi fty-one photography
albums to the National Library of the United States
(now in the Library of Congress). The ornate albums
containing 1,819 photographs by various Istanbul pho-
tographers emphasized reform and modernization. One
sees for example, images of the elaborate Dolmabahçe
Palace, constructed in 1856 that contains Eastern and
Western architectural elements, or photographs of facto-
ries, docks, libraries, or a group of girls in a girls school,
in simple uniforms, their heads uncovered.
By the 1890s the larger prints of some of the above
photographers or photographers such as Francis Bedford,
Robert Murray or Antonio Beato, had begun to become
less popular. Such was in part due to the development
of the PZ print, produced by Photoglob, Zurich. The
process referred to as photochromy produced delicate,
fairly accurate colored images. Not color photography,
the process involved the use of collotype photolithogra-
phy with a solution of asphaltum of ether, and involved
as many as sixteen printings of different colors. This
color process was applied to postcards, which became
most popular when new postal regulations in 1894 al-
lowed pictures to be mailed on postcards. And by 1900
the invention of the box camera brought competition to
the staged Orientalist image, both large and small, as the
family snapshot gained increase popularity.
Yet the impact of Orientalist photography still con-
tinues as the complexities of fact and fi ction, dream
and reality, continue to be studied. As Amelia Edwards
wrote in 1892, “It may be said of some very old places
as of some old books, that they are destined to be for-
ever new...Time augments rather than diminishes their
everlasting novelty...” (Amelia Edwards, Pharaohs,
Fellahs and Explorers, New York, Harper and Broth-
ers, 1892, 3).
Katherine HoffmanSee also: France; Daguerreotype; and Calotype and
Talbotype.Further Reading
Baldwin, Gordon; Daniel, Malcolm; and Greenough, Sarah.
All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton,
1852–1860, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Beaulieu, Jill and Roberts, Mary, eds. Orientalism’s Interloca-
tions: Painting, Architecture, Photography, Durham and
London: Duke University Press 2002.