We can begin to understand the complex position that Whiting held, despite the sometimes critical interpretations that contemporary readings bring to the archive.Ĭan we relate to the Diary in Photos as an autonomous corpus, in which the creator documented the Middle East in a manner that reflects the multiple identities of the subjects depicted against a constantly changing backdrop? Did his ethnographic knowledge, personality, biography and status within the American Colony in Jerusalem influence his attitude toward the various individuals, communities and places with which he interacted? Is this influence expressed across the body of the work or in specific series? Are we, as interpreters, able to read the Diary in Photos in its entirety? By looking at the corpus in its entirety, rather than extracting sections dealing with discrete narratives, we encounter a cartographic rendering of people, places and events Whiting encountered during his trips and exploration of the Middle East and his life as a member of the American Colony in Jerusalem. The underlying assumption of this work is the existence of a reciprocal relationship between the photographer and the photographic subject and between the photographer and the landscape. In its entirety, this corpus offers the reader a rare cultural panorama of the region in the period before 1948. Whiting’s Diary in Photos series (1934–1939) offers a rare example of a visual genre intertwined with major events, daily life, family relations and personal emotive observations, sketching a rich ethnographic portrait of private and public life in Mandate Palestine and neighbouring cultures during the 1930s. Set in 1930s Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey, John D. Contemporary photographers and cultural workers are crafting new mechanisms for memorialising history through photography as they and their fellow citizens experience it, effectively creating an archive where they belong.
Over centuries, Western artists and media have created a potent visual archive of the Middle East that is largely made up of clichés of violence, chaos, and Orientalist tropes of exoticism.
0 kommentar(er)
