Pasha and Bedouin

1858

Roger Fenton

While some photographers travelled, others recreated the East in their studios, as in the case of Roger Fenton (1819−1869). This pupil of the French painter Delaroche, who thus inherited a formidable repertoire of imagination and technical skills, including a taste for detail and descriptive precision, is known to have covered the Crimean War as a photographer. The Middle East remained, however, unknown to him. He staged his first tableaux vivants, in which he also played a leading role, in London in 1858. Far from seeking to disguise their inherent ambiguity, midway between theatre and painting, these highly posed photographs present an ordinary event as a faux Eastern snapshot, as in this example.