Tea and Sepia
Nigel Ryan follows the footprints
in the sand
This article originally appeared in
Al-Ahram Weekly, October 14-20, 1999
There is a great deal of posturing in L'Orient: The photographs of
Lehnert & Landrock, exhibition occupying both the Sony and Ewart galleries,
and it is largely choreographed, one must assume, by Rudolf Lehnert
(1878-1948), the half of this increasingly celebrated duo who actually
stood behind the camera.
That many of the images on show would sit happily in that by now
notorious series of turn of the century postcards, Arab Types, is
a reflection of earlier taxonomic imperatives, as discredited as photography's
contemporary invention, the spurious science of phrenology. Though
it need not lead to instant dismissal, it must be borne in mind. The
anthropological veneer claimed by later apologists should, too, be
taken with a large pinch of salt: even when accompanied by apparently
precise labeling these photographs need neither so crude a justification,
nor should they be mired in such an Enlightenment conceit.
Most of these photographs are no more, or less, than tourist trade
spin-offs and any documentary claims made on their behalf must be
conditioned by the knowledge that they portray nether a specific place
nor people, but represent a place to be visited, or a souvenir of
somewhere already left. (Tourists, especially the pre-package variety,
are, after all, the ultimate have-beens.)
There is no reason to assume that these images make any greater claim
to veracity than the reconstructed Nubian village in the garden of
a five -star hotel. Indeed, in several important ways the impulse
behind both is the same, it is just that photography retains, even
if by now subliminally, some claim to truth telling.
One cannot object, then, to the obvious posing of so many of the
subjects, nor to the retouching that is, in the Ewart exhibition of
original prints, at times ham-fisted: such complaints reflect nothing
more than a worrying desire to cling on to the desperate belief that
the camera does not lie. It does, of course, and consummately.
Lehnert and Landrock's desert is a place of solitude, an impossible
geometry of dunes, criss-crossed by footprints and occupied by Bedouins
who kneel on the crest of the dunes, alone except for a camel, praying
in the direction of Mecca.
Only in the foreground, of course, stands Rudolf, with tripod, and
camera, and the entire paraphernalia of the mini-caravan necessary
to record this solitude.
Several of the images hanging in the Sony Galley were taken in the
courtyard of Lehnert 's house in Tunis. A young girl flirts with the
camera while clinging to a twisted, barley-sugar column. Others prepare
food, the same column in the background, only they are not preparing
food but pretending to do so. It is not their house but Rudolf's,
not their courtyard but Rudolf's: this whole tableaux has been set
up by him for his customers. They are silent, social, inscrutable,
these subjects. They are seen in profile, and in three quarters view,
the better to see headdress and earrings. They are isometric drawings
dressed in black.
Sometimes, though, the iconography goes a little astray. Two women
from Ouled Nial sit on the floor and drink tea from implausibly dainty,
fluted china teacups. The imported chintziness must certainly have
been provided by the photographer. The effect is comically surreal.
Lehnert arrived in Egypt in 1923. The ewart gallery shows vintage
prints all, apparently, pre-1926, of various Egyptian scenes. Striking
is the clarity of detail, particularly architectural - here, at least,
the documentary potential of photography becomes objectively, if accidentally,
useful. Yet what is really being created is atmosphere: it may not
quite be ineffable - the arcs of the felucca sails, the outlines of
figures, human and animal, are sometimes so doctored that they resemble
nothing more than crudely executed lithographs - indeed, it is sometimes
a little too sludgily palpable, but it did, presumably, fill a market
niche.
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Tellingly, the photograph used for the cover of the catalogue, and
much reproduced elsewhere, is a head and shoulders portrait of an
Ouled Nial girl. It is without background, and thus any temptation
for the photographer to meddle by setting the scene. And because no
scene is set, the feeling of the dressing up box that lurks in so
many other photographs is diminished. A dramatically lit scene of
a street in Khan Al-Khalili looks like a film still, with the significant
action taking place elsewhere, slightly out of frame. And a group
of women washing clothes in the Nile, dark silhouettes against less
dark, muddy water, has the - rare virtue of appearing spontaneous.
The photographer, apparently, met with a lucky accident - and captured
something happening that fitted an image of what should happen.
More often though, this self-conscious aestheticising sounds a discordant
note, foregrounding the tricks of the trade as much as it foregrounds
the archway through which Ibn Tulun is viewed, or the madly out of
place tea-cups, or foot-prints on the dunes. These tricks are hardly
innocent. But then neither are they wicked. Views of a place that
in all likelihood would be unrecognizable were the spectator capable
of replicating Alice's looking glass trick. Yet there is little doubt
it is the place a great many visited, or remembered visiting. For
few are the travelers who do not wield their own mirrors. And fewer
still the successful travel entrepreneurs who fail to recognize this
fact.
The exhibition catalogue contains an interesting essay on the technical
aspects of the photographs by Chris Langtvet. The Sony Gallery should
be congratulated that this is provided free of charge.
