ReViews

Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine

Kathleen Stewart Howe (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1997) 144 pp., $60.00 (hardback), $29.95 (paperback)

Before the modern West conquered the Holy Land militarily, it conquered it first with its eyes. It is no accident that the rise of British and French power in the Near East in the mid-19th century coincided with the invention of photography. Pioneers of the new medium quickly established thriving businesses specializing in selling views of the Holy Land’s sacred geography. These, in turn, stimulated travel and pilgrimages and stoked the religious imagination of the faithful in Europe.

From seeing the Holy Land it was a very short step to desiring it; from desire to acquisition was not much longer. By 1869, France had cut, with Egypt, the Suez Canal. And with the defeat of the already tottering Ottoman Empire in the First World War, England emerged as the other great Western power in the Middle East.

“Photographers journeyed to Jerusalem to capture permanent likenesses of that ancient and holy city almost from the moment an image could be fixed,” writes Karen Sinsheimer, curator of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, in her forward to this collection of 90 of these earliest likenesses. The volume serves as the catalogue of a traveling exhibit originating at the museum.