Photography, the Archive, and Imperialism in the

Nineteenth Century, Part Two

Nineteenth Century Imperialism in the Middle East
Part Two:Flix Bonfils and the Levant
The Levant was essentially a European imaginary configuration imposed upon a certain stretch of
the moribund Ottoman Empire, but more precisely, the Levant, a term derived from the French word
for rising, or levant,meaning to rise, like the sun or to get out of bed in the morning. For French
kings, the Levant was a ceremonial event, witnessed by privileged courtiers, and the importation of
a French word to an Arab speaking word speaks volumes of the rising Orientalism during the
nineteenth century. During the early decades of the century, the lingua franca of the coastal region
east of the Mediterranean Sea, was a simple version of Italian, but when the ties of the French
government and the Ottoman Empire strengthened, in the second half of the century, French
became the European language of the Levant. On one hand, the Levant was, since the fifteenth
century, a figment of European desires, on the other, its major port cities, such as Beirut and
Alexandria, signified the commercial role of the region as a conduit for European trade. As a map of
the area suggests, the Levant was border territory, a slice of land where East and West met, where
Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled, and where empires, British, French and Turkish sat down to
do business.

As the outward looking edge facing Europe, the Levant was comparatively familiar, while the
interior of the territories east of the trade coastwere virtually untouched by either the French or the
British, the key players in the Orient. But as the French were in the midst of building the Suez
Canal, in 1861 the Emperor Napolon III became uneasy over the unknown deserts stretching beyond
his control and knowledge. The blank map, todays Saudi Arabia, was a truly dangerous place for the
unwary and un-pious to visit, for here was the home land of the most virulently fundamental strain of
Islam, the site of the Wahabee beliefs. The individual selected by the Emperor to reconnoiter this
interiorin disguisewas one of historys strangest characters, William Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888).
Although he came from a privileged sector of British society, Palsgrave was one of those restless
Europeans who fled the conventional and banked like a pool ball around a variety of identities and
guises. He began as a Protestant, became a Jesuit, and, as a scholar of all things Arabic, Palgrave
was as close as any European could come to being an expert on Muslim society and religious beliefs.
In his 2003 bookIn Pursuit of Arabia,Rshid Shz attempted to untangle the complexities that were
Palgrave.
It is difficult to believe how Palsgrave, who came from a respectable British family the members of
which excelled in the service of Britain, could come to identify himself with France, a rival
Empire..The only way to reconcile theses two apparently contradictory identities was to assume the
role of a European imperialist rather than that of a British or a French one. This enabled him to see
the world divided into two blocs, European and non-European, Shz explained.
Like all Europeans, especially missionaries, such as Palgrave, this spy for the Emperor believed
firmly in European superiority. The result of his journey, the purpose of which was to examine and
diagnose the extent to which these savage and ignorant people could be elevated or saved, was a
polyglot volume, The Personal Narrative of a Years journey Through Central and Easter Arabia

(1865). The Narrative mixed facts, especially ethnographic descriptions of heretofore unknown tribal
peoples, with the European assumptions and fantasies about them, a combination that did not please
exacting scholars of the Orient, but, during the decades when France and England were sharing the
power in the Levant between them, delighted the more causal readers, eager for narratives of
imperialism.

Flix Bonfils. The Sphinx (1870s)

But Palgrave deserves our attention today, for he was literally the first European to enter into the
capital of what Shz termed the Wahabee Empire, Riyadh. This empire was an internal one, tucked
inside the Ottoman Empire, but, because of power of its unique religious beliefs, the region could
resist and indeed lead a revolution against European interests. Unfortunately, Palgrave conflated a
fringe view of Islam with the broader Muslim faith, and, given that only Saudi Arabia is still the
heartof Wahabeeism, this confusion stillexists today. Still, his writings on the Wahabees, the first of
their kind in the 1860s, echo eerily today: he writes of how this branch of the faith was spread
though the sword and forced marriages, similar to the tactics ISIL uses in the twenty-first century.
The adventures of Palgrave in the lands of Saudi Arabia, the interior beyond the civilized lands of the
Levant, blazed a trail for T. E. Lawrence to follow during the Great War, when, bringing the
predictions of Napolon III to fruition, he allied the British with the Wahabee regime against the
Turks. In contrast to the dark and unenlightened interior space of fanaticism, the coastal Orient was
a place of tourism, rapidly being modernized by the presence of railroads and, of course, the Suez
Canal, which opened in 1871.

It is important to make the distinction between the myth of imperialism and the actual extent of the
literal power of those Europeans, who would dominate in the Middle East, and the limits of the
territorial power of the Turks, the British and the French, can be measured by the careful incursion
of W. G. Palgrave into the land of Wahabeeism and danger. Indeed, it can be argued that Orientalism
can be geographically located in the Levant, a crossroads of global influences, where the European
control both begins and ends. Here, it is easy to imagine the mysterious east, in the process of being
mapped and measured and occupied both mentally and physically by Europeans in such a way to
make it safe and preserve its mystery. During the significant event of opening the Canal in which
ancient Egypt was dragged into the modern world and placed beneath the imperialism of European
rule, a remarkable family of French photographers, headed by Flix Bonfils (1831-1886)were
carefully photographing the entire architecture and archaeology of the region. Setting up in Beirut
in the Maison Bonfils, the activities of Bonfils extended to Jerusalem and Egypt and even to Greece,
all under the nominal control of the Ottoman Empire while being confusingly but peacefully

occupied economically by the British and the French. This all-encompassing generational project by
a single family paralleled the consolation of European power in the Middle East and established a
visual and pictorial terrain of scenic vistas that constructedthe collective European imagination of
possession and empire.

Flix Bonfils. Jews at the Western Wall. Jerusalem (1870s)

At a time when intrepid Europeans were roaming over the Middle East, collecting souvenirs of
various sizesworks of art, mummies, and in the case of the Germans, entire temples, photographs
became a more acceptable way of removing historical artifacts from their place of origin. Flix
Bonfils, who had studied photography under the nephew ofNicphore Nipce,Nipce de St Victor, had
worked in Arles, until his sonAdrien developed respiratory ailments. Bonfils had served with the
French military in Lebanon and remembered its dry climate, excellent for those with breathing
problems. The entire family moved to Beirut and all became involved in the serious business of
photographing the Levant and Egypt, resulting in what is claimed to be 15,000 images, including
some 8,000 stereographs. Upon the death of his father in 1885, the son took up the business,
assisted by his mother, Lydia. Adrien, in fact, seems to have move on by 1900, but Lydia, who had
been in charge of making the albumen for the wet plates, remained so active that she had to be
removed from Lebanon in 1917 when the Great War finally arrived to put thecoup de grceto the
Ottoman Empire.
The interests of the family mirrored the imperialist mindset of the French and English: an interest in
mapping through images, creating an inventory of historical sites, and a careful record of an ancient
past, often related to the Bible, that was under threat of modernization as the Ottoman influence
waned and the Europeans pressed their claims on what they considered to be their historic
(Christian) inheritance and the cradles of their civilization. In the 2011 exhibitionIn Search of
Biblical Lands: From Jerusalem to Jordan in Nineteenth-century Photographyat the Getty Museum,
curators noted thatMilitary and economic aims merged with religious fervor and the advent of
archaeologyand photography played an important part in the imperialism of the period. Maison
Bonfils was engaged in a frankly commercial enterprise, aimed at tourists and at those who traveled
via photographs. Today, we possess as individuals, obsessively taking images wherever we go. In the
nineteenth century, this kind of inventory was the domaine of professional photographers, such as
Flix Bonfils. He knew his audience, religious pilgrims who sought the authentic Bible, adventurers
tired of the familiar and hungry for the novel, and the entire panoply of military and government
staffs who occupied the Levant. The audience at home, back in Paris or London or New York, wanted
information, places to attach to names, and, while the work of Bonfils did not function as evidence,
his photographs were straightforward documents.

Flix Bonfils.Bedouin Women. Jerusalem(18780s)

Maison Bonfils could be counted on to print thousands of excellent, detailed, well-composed,
informative images of the Levant, a territory that was multi-cultural and international. The mental
position or the psychological attitude of the point of view of the Bonfils camera, whether single
image or stereograph, was one of and imperial gaze that reflected the colonial posture of France and
other European nations. The prevailing mindset of the Europeans during the nineteenth century was
nicely summed up in 1903 byHermann Vollrat Hilprecht, Immanuel Benzinger, Fritz Hommel
inExplorations in Bible Lands During the 19th Century. They write about Restlessly shifting nomads

in the north and ignorant swamp dwellers in the south have become the legitimate heirs of Asshur
and Babel. What a contrast between ancient civilization and modern degeneration! Driven by vanity
and unexamined assumptions of superiority, the Europeans overlooked the present and sought the
glories of the past to be retold in their own terms. The Bonfils family not only participated in this
antiquarian mindset of acquisition but also joined in the contemporary practice of making
encyclopedias of types of people. This early form of classification of population groups was greatly
enhanced by photography which allowed for a higher level of surveillance, and the massive
collection of Bonfils family photography included types of Semitic peoples found throughout the
Levant.

Many of these photographs of the inhabitants of the region were made, not for the individuals
photographed, but for a consumer base of Europeans who needed souvenirs and reassurance of the
exoticism of the Other. Often posed artificially in the Bonfils studio, with oddly un-Oriental
backdrops, the peoples of the Levant seem frozen in time, retaining their quaint folkways, while all
around them, the European civilization teems with industry and purpose. There are haunting
photographs of women in all enveloping burkas, while other women display their faces and gaze
straight at the camera.It is possible to assume that it was Lydia who photographed the women of the
region. This vast archive of the Middle East was distributed, along with the array of vistas, views,
and sites of the Orient, in Paris, London, and even in America. The ambitions of the Bonfils family
and its business sense can be seen in the translations of the labels which were published in three
languages, English. French, andGerman. Few of the original glass negatives have survived and most
of what has come down from Bonfils are the prints themselves. The most significant volume was,
oddly enough, produced by Bonfils after he returned to France in 1878,Souvenirs dOrient, which
won a medal in Paris on the occasion of theExposition universelleof the same year.

Very little has been written on Flix Bonfils, although there is an excellent catalogue dating from
1980, Remembrances of the Near East: The Photographs of Bonfils, 1867-1907, presented by the
Jewish Museum in New York. This seminal and to this day definitive exhibition was prepared by
Robert Sobieszek who used the term Romantic Orient to describe the cultural construction of the
Levant. The term is an appropriate one, for it evokes the romanticism of Eugne Delacroix and JeanLon Grme, painters who recreated what was an alien culture into visual terms the French people
could comprehend.Sobieszek referred to the work of Bonfils as
picaresque since they are images of travel and souvenirs of distant locales meant to instruct and
entertain. They are picturesque in that they depict the exotic as well as the natural in order to
pictorially delight. The curator also points out the formal and compositional correctness used by
Bonfils to create the prolixity of the Oriental dream..Bonfilss work is a veritable photographic
chrestomathy, like those selected Arabic texts complied earlier in the century and designed to teach
the language, except here it is the visual language of the look of the Orient.
The brief catalogue, which consisted of about two paragraphs, concluded with a list of the
publications of the family Bonfils: Architecture antique: Egypte, Grce, Asie Mineure. Album de
photographies (1872), Catalogue des Vues photographiques de lOrient (1876) and Souvenirs dorient.
Album picturesque des sites, villas et ruined les plus remarquables de lEgypt et de la Nubie (de la
Palestine, de la Syrie et de la Grce) (1878). Although all the photographs were signed Bonfils, it
must be assumed that many images were taken by family members.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette andArt History Unstuffed. Thank you.
[emailprotected]
http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/photography-archaeology-and-imperialism-in-the-nineteenth-cen
tury-part-two/