Gezicht op het klooster van Mar Saba before 1878

Curator: This is a fascinating double print by Fèlix Bonfils, "Gezicht op het klooster van Mar Saba," taken sometime before 1878. It's currently housed here at the Rijksmuseum, rendered with gelatin-silver print on ink and paper. The perspective captured here reminds me a bit of 19th-century Orientalist fascinations. Editor: "Fascinations" feels light, don't you think? I feel like I am looking into a fortress in the sky or clinging to the side of some impossibly high canyon. There is a heavy air around those pale buildings, and the whole picture wants to slip out of my grasp. It's uneasy! Curator: Uneasy is one way to interpret it. I look at this image, knowing when it was produced, and I consider how Western audiences might have understood the Eastern landscape in the late 19th century, or Bonfils himself—he became Roman Catholic and traveled to the Holy Land with his family! I would call his work religious as much as artistic, because it seeks to convey not only form, but essence. Editor: I suppose! I get more stuck on the tangible reality – those layers of rock that would scrape my knees, the merciless sun that is somehow bleached out. This "essence" comes from the stark exposure and high-contrast light for me, so there is a very specific physical sensation there in contrast to his background. Curator: Context shapes experience. Think about the power dynamics at play. Photography made places like Mar Saba more accessible to a European audience. They shape power relationships of the kind that still define relations today! It is hard to see just that stone when looking at how that stone was displayed. Editor: Perhaps—but maybe those physical realities were always tied in for me as a viewer anyway! It's a landscape captured in time by somebody with some strange story, sure, but first it is sand, wind, sun and stone! I see an empty theater here and not any clear, concise imperial message. Curator: And so the image continues to accumulate meanings, well beyond Bonfils' intentions, thanks to viewers like you. It's all layered, isn't it? Editor: It is—like sedimentary rock.