Jerusalem in Original Photographs, 1850-1920.

• Author: Long, Burke O.
• Position: Book Review

Jerusalem in Original Photographs, 1850-1920. By SHIMON GIBSON. London: STACEY INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, 2003. Pp. 204, photos. [pounds sterling]25.

This attractively designed and produced work is the first of three planned volumes, which draw upon extensive archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London. As a staff member of the PEF from 1989 to 1995, archaeologist Gibson helped catalogue and research these photographs, some of which were taken by commercial artists and others by PEF archaeologists, such as Bliss, Macalister, and Garstang.

The book offers fascinating glimpses of Jerusalem from the late Ottoman to early Mandate periods. The arrangements of photos and commentary offer a picture-book tour in which Gibson, with sepia-toned photos, commentary, and quotes from past travelers' accounts, leads us to contemplate the city and environs, her people, walls, holy places, and water works. The journey ends with the "New City," a 1920s project of modernization and increasing European influence. The book includes biographical information about the photographers, a bibliography, and an index to people and places.

Gibson, and of course the PEF archives, richly document nineteenth-century cultural practices--the ethnographical, archaeological, political, and religious interests that early explorers and photographers brought to their endeavors. In some ways, this book is a part of that same tradition. Tourism, religious pilgrimage, historical exploration, Orientalism, and geopiety flavor the narrative artifice through which Gibson invites readers to undertake a journey to Jerusalem by imagining long-ago travel and peering at locations they are familiar with now. This book tour of fantasy/realism reaches for visual history and what PEF chairman Jonathan Tubb and PEF honorary secretary David Jacob call "the very essence of old Jerusalem--timeless and deeply rewarding" (preface).

Despite much commentary that fosters archaeologically and historically grounded ideas of the past, these old photos are also pressed into the service of malleable myth, the many Jerusalems made to speak to the present...