| Popis: |
Nineteenth century photographs of Cairo, especially the last quarter of it, were commonly represented in compiled albums which followed to a fair extent, visually, the section on Egypt in Francis Frith’s publications. Typically, they contained an assortment of topics revolving around archaeological monuments from Upper Egypt, the pyramids and panoramic views of Cairo such as the Citadel, in addition to facades and courtyards of Islamic monuments, mainly the mosques of Sultan Hasan and Ibn Tulun. Also available, although they seem as a marginal topic included as a touch of flavour, were the photographs of the “petits metiers”, the typical Cairene Street and close ups of the mashrabiyya lattice protruding balconies. Simultaneously, in the 1880s, the wide spread growing interest in the “Art arabe”1 but more precisely the creation of the Comite de conservation des monuments de l’art arabe2 in 1881 (hereinafter Comite), eventually redirected the photographic visuality into a new paradigm beyond the touristic repertoire that was already known. Since the Comite’s objectives and raison d’etre were to survey and salvage Cairene Islamic art and architecture, its assigned photographers were asked to focus on a wider range of monuments than they had done so far in their production for tourists and, thus, systematically produced the “before and after” photographs of monuments in question for restoration by the Comite. As such, over the course of the Comite’s seventy-year life span, an ext [...] |
