Gezicht op Jeruzalem met de Sint-Annakerk op de voorgrond 1859 - 1861

Editor: So this is Francis Frith’s "View of Jerusalem with the Church of St. Anne in the Foreground," taken between 1859 and 1861. It's a gelatin-silver print, and the city feels incredibly…dense, almost overwhelmingly built up from stone. What strikes you most about this image? Curator: I'm immediately drawn to the materiality of the photograph itself, and how that interacts with the subject matter. This gelatin-silver print wasn't just capturing Jerusalem, it was *producing* a certain vision of it for a European audience. Think about the process – the labour of the photographer in the field, the chemical processes involved in creating the image, and then the distribution and consumption of the print. Editor: Consumption, like it was another orientalist souvenir? Curator: Precisely! The very act of turning Jerusalem into a commodity through photography. The way the photograph flattens and simplifies the architecture makes the city seem uniform. It reinforces pre-existing notions of the 'Orient' as monolithic and unchanging. We see the means of representation being as potent as any other material used to define cultures. Look closely – can you see any specific signs of labour in this photograph? Any hint of the hands that built the city or took the picture? Editor: It's so crisp for an outdoor photograph from that time. But I see what you mean – it's been processed to feel...decontextualized, more like a packaged scene than an inhabited space. It seems posed more than authentic. Curator: Exactly. It's easy to look at this and think we're seeing "Jerusalem," but we're really seeing a carefully constructed *image* of Jerusalem, filtered through Victorian-era expectations and desires. This helps reinforce and disseminate this era's colonialist and class structures. Editor: So it’s less about the place and more about how it's being manufactured and marketed. Fascinating – it changes my perception completely. Curator: That is materiality: questioning the story that the art appears to be telling on the surface. Always ask whose story the piece appears to champion.