From ‘Scenes and Types’ to Shehrazade and El Sham: studio photography in the Arab world

The value of a photograph – its principle charm, at least – is its infallible truthfulness. We may have long revelled in the poetry of the East; but this work enables us to look, as it were, upon its realities¹.

So said the 19^th century Orientalist, Sophia Poole. Poole’s perception of photography’s unique ‘claim to truth’² was widely held by early photographers from the West, to whom the colonial realms of the Middle East provided their principal training grounds³. In her seminal book, On Photography, Susan Sontag challenged the ‘presumption of veracity’ that had long been associated with photography, arguing that photographs are ‘as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings’⁴. But to what extent is this appreciated today? Whilst many claim to have developed their understanding of the art from the idea of a visualised ‘truth’ to a moment of representation, people continue to search for realities within photographs, particularly withinarchives. How useful is it to mine such documents for historical and social ‘realities’? Can these momentary representations of individuals, as captured in a photograph, be extrapolated to speak of an entire society, time, or people?

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