Early twentieth century tourism and commercial photography in Egypt and the Holy Land

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tourism, photography and ancient monuments are intimately linked and have a history stretching back to the beginnings of photography and to early mass-tourism. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many tourists either did not own cameras or preferred to rely on professionally produced photographs. Foreign travel for many was the experience of a lifetime and for those visiting Egypt and the Holy Land the desire to have images of places familiar only from the words of the Bible provided a ready market for commercial photographers. This paper takes a rare surviving collection of images from Egypt and the Holy Land, reconstructs the itinerary which the tourist probably took and examines how the images might have been acquired. In this instance, the images are in the form of lantern slides and to have a complete collection survive is rare, and the images offer a window into a now vanished relationship between the tourist and the commercial photographer whose role it was to provide atmospheric, often iconic, views of the monuments and the countries visited. Part of that role may have been to create scenes corresponding to what has become known as the ‘tourist gaze’.