Books in Brief

The Image of the East: Nineteenth-Century Near Eastern Photographs by Bonfils

Carney E. S. Gavin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 115 pp. with 10 microfiche transparencies, $70.00

In 1890, the curators of the newly established Harvard Semitic Museum acquired a collection of approximately 28,000 prints, negatives, and lantern slides depicting the peoples, landscapes, and ancient monuments of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor and Greece. The creators of this collection were the Bonfils family of Beirut, well-known in their time as purveyors of scenic photographs to western tourists traveling throughout the Middle East. Unfortunately, as the decades passed and academic interests moved on to other concerns, this massive collection was relegated to the museum attic and its existence was eventually forgotten. In the autumn of 1970, however, the Bonfils collection was suddenly rediscovered and its historical importance was recognized for the first time. As the largest collection of 19th-century photographs of the Middle East from a single source, it provided invaluable visual information on the ethnography, geography, and archaeology of the lands of the Bible in the period before modernization.