Art review: Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East, Queen’s Gallery

RECENT pictures in the press of Prince Charles in the Tube being shown how to use an Oyster card remind us how remote from ordinary reality our royals generally are.

Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East

Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

*****

But it was not always so. When Victoria and Albert considered what their son, the prince of Wales and future Edward VII – a long way in the future as it turned out – should do after he had finished university, they decided on an adventure.

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Although he was not yet 21, he had already travelled widely in Europe and also in Canada and the United States where he was the first ever royal visitor, but the adventure his parents chose for him was of a different order. He was to travel through the Middle East. The plans were tragically interrupted by Albert’s death in 1861, but Victoria insisted the trip should go ahead nonetheless.

The Prince of Wales set out from London in February 1862 with a small party of chosen companions. The Rev Dr Arthur Stanley was included in the party to give guidance on the biblical sites in the Holy Land, but also to preach to the prince every Sunday. (He later published his sermons.) The party went by train to Venice and thence to Alexandria in the royal yacht. They visited Egypt, then went by sea to Palestine and for six weeks rode on horseback through Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, picnicking under the trees and camping in the desert. They then sailed to Constantinople and Athens, returning to Britain in July. The Middle East was almost as dangerous then as it is now. The Ottoman Empire was in decline, the Sultan’s control shaky. But this situation was perhaps part of the reason for the journey. While it was certainly an educational adventure, there may also have been a political motive as a reminder of the British interest in the region. This was not yet because of oil, but the construction of the Suez Canal had begun in 1859. Whoever controlled the Middle East when Ottoman rule finally collapsed would control the route to India.

Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were interested in photography. In 1842, Albert had been the first royal to be photographed, so it was decided a photographer should record the journey. A couple of years earlier, as a gift for Prince Albert, Queen Victoria had commissioned Francis Bedford to make an album of photographs of Coburg, the prince’s home in Germany. This was evidently a success, so Bedford was chosen. His previous career did not make him an obvious choice. He was an early specialist in the photographic reproduction of works of art, a job he had come to through work as a lithographer, but as a photographer of record he is superb and his marvellous photographs are the main element in the exhibition, Cairo to Constantinople, at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh.

Bedford’s pictures are amongst the earliest photographs of many of the sites he visited, and are certainly the first of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, where he was given exceptional permission to take pictures. In the exhibition, however, his photographs are also supported by pictures of the people involved by other photographers, by other work by Bedford himself, by documents related to the journey, including several paintings, and a even a copy of the Rev Stanley’s sermons.

There is also a small display of the antiquities that the prince acquired. This is mainly a miscellany of Greek and Egyptian objects, but also includes some rather beautiful jewellery with ancient stones in modern settings, their Egyptian style a kind of proto Art Deco. The prince’s own private tastes are hinted at in one particular Egyptian object, a rather sexy ceramic spoon in the form of a girl swimming.

Bedford’s pictures, though, are the main thing. Large plate cameras were the only available equipment at the time. The exposures were long, the prints made directly from the negatives. This gives them a unique quality. Enhanced by the relatively simple optics of the lenses, his pictures have marvellous unity of light and an extraordinary depth of pin-sharp focus. You go into them as you never could with a modern photograph. They also have an irreplaceable sense of discovery. The historic places that he records, and that have since become tourist destinations, are deserted. They seem hardly to have been disturbed by a human presence in the millennia since they were functioning monuments in the extraordinary series of civilisations that shaped the region.

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On their way down the Adriatic, the royal party stopped on the Croatian, Albanian and Montenegrin coasts as well as at Corfu, then under British control. In Albania, Bedford took the first of several pictures of local bodyguards assigned to the prince along the way. Here, as when later he photographed a group of Bashi-Bazouks guarding the prince’s safety in Beirut, they are so ferocious-looking they seem as likely to have struck fear into the hearts of those they protected as of anyone with hostile intent.

In Egypt, Bedford’s beautifully composed, luminous images of the Great Gateway of the Temple of Edfu, for instance, or of the Hall of Columns at Karnak, convey the grandeur of the buildings as few pictures have done since. His only rival was his immediate predecessor, David Roberts, who had painted these sites 20 years earlier. It would have been nice to see some of Roberts’s pictures here alongside Bedford’s who would certainly have known Roberts’s work well as it had been reproduced in lithograph, Bedford’s own medium, by people with whom he worked. Bedford also took some striking pictures of the streets of Cairo where he was preceded not only by Roberts, but by David Wilkie and an Orientalist, JF Lewis, who had lived in Cairo for a decade in the 1840s. It is another Scottish artist who actually appears in one of his photographs, however. Jemima Blackburn was in Egypt. She was photographed with the royal party at Karnak whom she had apparently encountered by chance. She also painted the scene when the prince was present at an excavation at Thebes a couple of days later.

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Bedford’s pictures of Baalbek and Palmyra, the great Roman sites in modern Lebanon, are magnificent. So too are the photographs he took in Athens. The holy places that the party visited in Palestine like Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives seem in his photographs as timeless as though the events of the New Testament could still be enacted there. This was the quality that took Wilkie to the Holy Land in search of an authentic biblical imagery. It would surely have moved even the least spiritual visitor. How spiritual the prince himself was, we cannot say, however, but his courage cannot be in doubt. Wild landscapes like the barren valley of the River Barada that the party rode through leaving Damascus look daunting even without the invisible threat of bandits or hostile tribesmen. But then in counterpoint we see the prince and his companions picnicking under a vine at Capernaum.

It seems not all the locals were hostile, however. A painting by Carl Haag shows the prince meeting the Bedouin chieftain, Agyle Agha, in his tent in the desert. Agyle Agha had won credit by protecting Christians from massacre by the Druze in a brutal sectarian struggle that had happened just two years earlier. Bedford’s photographs record the destruction in Damascus that resulted from these upheavals and the pictures seem tragically topical. Indeed all these remarkable pictures and the prince’s journey itself seem topical. The journey was undertaken in the knowledge that the Ottoman empire was on the point of collapse. This did not come finally until 1918, but its aftershocks still shape our world today. In a small way, the prince was sowing the wind. We are still reaping the whirlwind.

• Until 21 July

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