‘In Search of Biblical Lands: From Jerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photography,’ on view at the Getty Villa through September 12, features more than 100 of the first photographic images of the Holy Land. The region at the eastern margins of the Mediterranean is one of the most photographed places on earth, both spiritually compelling and physically forbidding. The photographs on view in this exhibition reveal what the travelers of the 1800s discovered on their journey’remains of ancient kingdoms, evocative geography and timeless scenes of pastoral life’a landscape of belief and its people. The show features rare early daguerreotypes, salted-paper prints and albumen silver prints, created between the 1840s and 1900s. Highlights are photographs by English photographer Francis Frith, whose compelling images were made during three trips to the Holy Land in the late 1850s, and daguerreotypes by French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey from his three-year tour of the Near East. It is organized into five sections: Jerusalem, Early Views, Peoples of the Bible, Travels in Bible Lands and Expeditions Beyond the Dead Sea. Because of the delicate nature of the photographic materials that cannot be displayed for long periods, the exhibition is divided into two installments, each on view for three months. Subjects include Bethlehem, Nazareth, Petra, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Damascus Gate, Saint Stephen’s Gate, the Ecce Homo Arch, the Al Aqsa Mosque, Walls of the Temple Mount, The Garden of Gethsemane, the Dome of the Rock, the River Jordan, the Pool of Hezekiah and Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Museum visitors can also see the region up-close through stereoscope tours on two large stereo viewers that digitally create a three-dimensional immersive experience. Explorers, entrepreneurs, amateurs, academics and tourists descended upon the Holy Land in the 19th century to photograph sites previously only imagined. While the shared legacy of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths formed a space of enormous spiritual significance, there was pressure to create images that assured people that the landscape and places so important to them from Bible study or religious observance were real and even dramatic. It proved no easy task, as what they saw did not fit with the Holy Land of their imagination, fostered by idealized illustrations and common rhetoric’Jerusalem being the ‘shining city on the hill,’ or Palestine ‘the land of milk and honey.’ ‘There were no big ruins as in Egypt, no soaring mountains as in the American West, but the humble reality of small villages, ancient footpaths winding along steep hillsides had tremendous emotional weight for people,’ explains Kathleen Stewart Howe, professor of art history, director of the Pomona College Museum of Art and guest curator of this exhibition. For information, visit getty.edu.
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