The Ideal Other: Photography and Colonialism in the Middle East

Image from a photograph album of the Middle East and Europe, 1876

Traveling in North Africa in the late 1890s, British journalist Robert Barr remarked, jokingly, that the first thing the French did when they colonized a city was to lay out a boulevard lined with cafes and lit with electric lights. In Tunis, which France captured from Turkey in 1881, the boulevard ran to the city gate. “Passing through the gateway, the change is startling,” Barr wrote. The “European” side was bright and cheerful. On the other, one found “narrow slits of thoroughfares, darkness, silence, stealthy movements of hooded, cloaked, masked, mysterious figures, and an undefinable sense of impending danger… A cold shiver up the backbone seems to anticipate the sudden thrust of a hidden knife, and one goes hurriedly back through the gate again, with a feeling of relief to be in the blaze of electricity once more.”

Barr’s description of Tunis is a classic example of the binary thinking that characterizes a genre of literature and art that scholars have termed Orientalist. For some, this way of viewing the world simply satisfied their hunger for romance and adventure. For others, the image of a dark, disordered, violent Middle East at odds with how the West liked to see itself served a more practical purpose in that it justified European colonial rule. Whether intentionally or not, images like these created what Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said called “the ideal other.” In Orientalism’s heyday in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was rare, Said observed, to find realistic or positive descriptions of Middle Eastern cultures. Instead, the focus was on strangeness, separation, and the sense that something was wrong, as this made it easier to claim that the colonial system was necessary to move these societies forward.

There was already a tradition of Orientalist painting and printmaking when photography came along in the mid-nineteenth century. Though cameras were initially used in the Middle East by European scholars to document ancient art, buildings, and inscriptions, commercial photographers soon began producing stock images for sale to tourists, who were venturing to the region in large numbers for the first time. Most of these images, made as souvenirs and later reproduced in books and magazines for an even wider audience, reinforced partial truths and stereotypes of the Islamic world and tended to pathologize the people who lived there.

Men were commonly portrayed as threatening, dishonest, and distrustful, women as seductive and a source of weakness, and children as uneducated, unhealthy, and unhappy—vast generalizations, of course, which some Westerners used to defend the argument that it was their moral responsibility to bring light, literally and figuratively, to “primitive” or “backward” peoples. Nearly all such images, however, were staged (or what we might now call “fake”). With the aid of studio backdrops, props, and models eager to earn a little money, photographers built businesses out of Westerners’ desire to see only what made “Orientals” seem like oddities and holdovers from an earlier age. Scholars maintain that photos such as these, despite being highly suspect as documentary images, not only helped to build a case for why colonialism was needed, but also distracted attention from the exploitation of both humans and the environment.

Other photographs give the impression that hardly anyone lived in the Middle East. Landscapes and architectural scenes often contain no people at all. If they do, the figures are tiny and there mainly to give a sense of scale. The focus is on empires of the past—Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome—which provide a historical precedent for modern-day empires. It also bolsters the idea that the Orient, however alluring it may be to tourists, is frozen in time and needs Western help to modernize (a notion captured by the title of Barr’s book, The Unchanging East). Arabs are seldom seen, and their history is minimized, reflecting the disdainful attitude of people like Charles Piazzi Smyth, a British scholar of the pyramids, who, in 1897, commented that “the modern Arabs of Egypt are such ephemeral occupiers of the soil, that they have no right to any place amongst the more ancient monuments of Egypt.”