Levant light in Middlebury

“Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza from an album entitled Egypt, Turkey, Greece, c. 1870‘‘ (albumen print), by an unknown photograper. Collection of Middlebury (Vt.) College Museum of Art, in the show there titled “The Light of the Levant: Early Photography and the Late Ottoman Empire’,’ through Dec. 10.

The museum says:

“This exhibition highlights the important role of the Levant region in early photography. In its broadest historical meaning, the area of the Levant, controlled by the Ottoman Empire during all or part of the nineteenth century, encompassed contemporary Greece, Turkey, and most of the Arab world.’’

“The region held a special role in the Euro-American imagination as a site of great antiquities, monumental architecture, religious importance, exotic otherness, and colonial ambitions. In addition, the region’s intense light rendered it a sought-out destination for many of photography’s earliest practitioners. As Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of the earliest photographic technology, stated in 1839, ‘Nature’s image will reproduce itself still more quickly in countries where the light is more intense ….”’