Photographic and Prophetic Truth: Daguerreotypes, the Holy Land, and the Bible According to Reverend Alexander Keith

Abstract

In 1859, Reverend Alexander Keith published the thirty-seventh edition of his Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion Derived from the Literal Fulfilment of Prophecy; Particularly as Illustrated by the History of the Jews and by the Discoveries of Recent Travellers. Included in the illustrations were eighteen engravings from daguerreotypes, presenting the landscape of Palestine and Syria in order to demonstrate the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies regarding its desolation. In this article, Keith’s use of photographic reference is presented as it relates to the illustration of specific biblical texts and to his evangelical characterisation of the camera’s empirical point of view. Keith’s notion of photographic truth, while grounded in the mid-nineteenth-century’s conceptualisation of the medium’s indexical science, is revealed through his theology of the literary landscape, his telescoped teleology, and the ‘more than human’ capacity of the lens. The author argues that with the interdisciplinary engagement of biblical studies a deeper critical understanding of such an explicitly confessional position attributes greater complexity and specificity to the role of religious ideology in shaping early Holy Land photography.