The Written Valley, Sinai 1855 - 1859

This photograph was taken by Francis Frith, who in the 1850s traveled extensively in the Middle East, recording his journeys using the collodion process. This required preparing, exposing, and developing glass plates in a portable darkroom, right there in the desert. Think about that process for a moment, and the amount of labor it would have involved in this harsh environment. The image itself shows a vast, seemingly untouched landscape. But the very act of capturing it was a form of incursion, a mark of Victorian England's expanding global reach. Frith's photographs were popular back home, feeding a public appetite for images of distant lands. They also contributed to a particular view of these places, often framing them as exotic, timeless, and ripe for exploration – obscuring the complex realities of life for the people who actually lived there. So even a seemingly straightforward landscape photograph is embedded in layers of process, social context, and, ultimately, power.