The history of photography is a history of disappearances and exclusions.

The birth of photography precipitated departure. Within weeks of François Arago’s 1839 announcement of Louis Daguerre’s invention to the French chamber of deputies, the first photographic ‘explorers’ – including Noël Paymal Lerebours, Pierre Joly de Lotbinière, as well as French painter Horace Vernet and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet – were heading eastwards upon their Excursions Daguerriennes, to use the term Lerebours gave to his landmark 1841 publication.³ A wide, lucrative market was created, and via numerous means – prints, books, the illustrated press and the great universal exhibitions of the nineteenth century – photography became a primary way by which largely urban mass audiences in the West gained visual access to ‘the Orient’ and the wider world, thus coming to ‘know’ it.⁴ Oliver Wendell Holmes described photography’s distillation of the world into image-objects – an extraction of ‘form from matter’ – that allowed viewers to see distant corners, indeed seemingly to tread in those parts themselves and form an intimate connection to them: ‘I pass, in a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.’⁵ Photographs retained this element of magic, but the knowledge that they offered was essentially predicated on an understanding of them as pieces of incontestable objective truth. These were held to be, in the words of Auguste Salzmann who was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855 for his recent depictions of Jerusalem, ‘not narratives, but facts endowed with a conclusive brutality’.⁶ Salzmann belonged to the generation that followed in the wake of the earliest pioneers, a generation that included Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, Francis Bedford, James Robertson and Felice Beato, ‘avatars of art, science, adventure, and opportunism’, entangled in a variety of discourses and enterprises.⁷ Yet it was art that won out as these figures were inducted into aesthetic and connoisseurial histories of photography over the course of the twentieth century. Abigail Solomon-Godeau can be found lamenting an art history of the medium that had set about removing photographs from their original orbits. ‘The tendency to lump together willy-nilly under the unifying rubric of art’ a multitude of diverse photographic practitioners, she declares, ‘has resulted in the neglect, if not obfuscation, of important questions of intent, context, and production.’⁸ It was a tendency that only further domesticated and naturalized their narratives, for, contrary to Salzmann, narratives are precisely what photographs present. The constructed nature of photography’s visions of the East passed largely without notice or comment for most of the camera’s history, until Edward Said, emphasizing ‘representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient’, asserted that the image of the East consumed in the West was one specifically produced by the West, and produced as part of its wider political consumption of the region.⁹ Just as such representations should not be thought of as natural, so too should they not be considered politically neutral but rather implicitly linked to the imperial circumstances in which they were created, bound up in those power relations and implicated in the establishment and maintenance of Western dominance.