The City and the Territory: Imagining Cairo and Egypt

In August 1839, only two months after the official presentation of the new photographic method announced by François Arago at the French Academy of Science, the painter Horace Vernet, his pupil Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet and his nephew Charles-Marie Boulton boarded a ship heading towards Egypt. In their luggage they carried a new daguerreotype camera.
That was only the prologue of a genealogy of images that were then produced by the countless photographers who came to the country on the Nile. It appears to be a fruitful investigation and a good time to look at this fascination, which we consider to be an ongoing, continuous one.

Guest Editor: Harald R. Stühlinger

Content:

Harald R. Stühlinger, Ulla Fischer-Westhauser, Uwe Schögl: Editorial

Felix Thürlemann: Observing vs. Experiencing: Everyday Life in Egypt in Tourists’ Photographs of the Late 19th Century

Mercedes Volait: A Unique Visual Narrative of Historic Cairo in the 1880s – Unveiling the Work of Beniamino Facchinelli

Charlotte Malterre Barthes: Manipulative Iconographies of Nile Dams: The Political Image

Estelle Sohier: Egyptian Postcolonial Territory on behalf of Royalty: A Photographic Survey by Fred Boissonnas 1929–1932

Marlies Dornig: Conquering the Territory: The Suez Canal and its Early Depiction in Photography

Heba Farid: An Illustrated Reflection on Private Snapshots from a Mid-Century Notion of Territory

Milica Topalovic and Bas Princen in Conversation with Charlotte Malterre and Harald R. Stühlinger: The Visible and the Invisible World – Egypt, Landscapes and Territories

Harald R. Stühlinger: Myth and Phantasm. Egypt and Cairo in Photography now