Dawn - The Camel Patrol Setting Out 1919

Curator: Ah, yes. Let’s discuss James McBey’s "Dawn - The Camel Patrol Setting Out," created in 1919 using the etching technique. Editor: Stark, isn't it? The sheer scale of that sky presses down. You immediately sense the figures' insignificance. It makes me think of an unforgiving, almost biblical landscape. Curator: Observe the horizon line. McBey employs a very high horizon line, which compresses the depth of field, focusing the visual weight into the sky itself, almost rendering the figures silhouettes. Editor: Right, and the camels themselves become symbols of endurance. Camels have always been a potent symbol of the nomadic life, of trade routes, journeys into the unknown. Curator: The drypoint detailing here in rendering the figures and animals gives them almost brutal presence—compare that, however, with the sky which reads as continuous and without incident. We understand immediately there is an impending arduous journey to be made, no? Editor: Absolutely. The 'Orientalist' label fits here; that style used exoticism and romantic notions to examine colonial encounters, and I see that play in the camel patrol itself. Are they discoverers or invaders, the men atop those beasts? The figures could almost stand for dogged, historical inevitability... or maybe foolish disregard? Curator: Perhaps the linear perspective further augments the themes; the figures diminishing as they journey into that sky, giving us a reading not simply of depth but, effectively, doom. Editor: Doom, or perhaps a heroic charge towards the unknown. In our own time we still seem drawn towards stark landscapes and those who inhabit them. This echoes ancient archetypes; it shows how little some things change in the collective psyche. Curator: A rigorous deployment of stark compositional contrast, wedded to subject matter whose implications resound profoundly, generations on. Editor: An image that continues to evoke our deepest mythic pasts, re-framing them through technique and form.