From: borrel@sigallah.dhhalden.no (Borre Ludvigsen)
Subject: Bonfil GIFs INFO
Reply-To: borrel@sigallah.dhhalden.no (Borre Ludvigsen)
Organization: Ostfold College
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 09:49:24 GMT

                   BONFILS PHOTOGRAPHS FROM LEBANON

                         Barre Ludvigsen
                       <borrel@dhhalden.no>
		       
** Please note that the captions on the scans are the actual handwritten 
titles of the pictures. Your are also requested to read the following  
bonfils.msg file. These images, deposited on liasun3.epfl.ch, are the 
copyright of the Harvard Semitic Museum and published for research  
purposes only.**

Theses photographs were made by the Bonfils family of photographers
living in Beirut between 1867 and 1907. The scans are from a selection
of slides made from the originals in the collection of the Harvard
Semitic Museum. The Bonfils family travelled around the eastern end of
the Mediterranean in the last half of the 19th century taking
photographs for the growing tourist trade. Tourists to the area needed
images to take back after their travels. The trade was particularly
profitable before the advent of the picture postcard and subsequently,
the Kodak. But the Bonfils' motives were not only commercial. In 1898,
Arien Bonfils writes the following introduction to a never-published set
of biblical photographs:

"In this century of steam and electricity everything is being
transformed... even places: already in the ancient Plain of Sharon is
heard the whistle of the locomotive.... The immortal road to Damascus
which witnessed the conversion of the Apostle Paul has become no more
than a vulgar railway!

The moment is probably not far off, when the holy Mount of Olives and
Tabor will each possess its funicular like Mt. Righi [outside Lucerne]!

Before that happens, before Progress has completed its destructive
work, before this present - which is still the past - has disappeared
forever, we have tried, so to speak, to fix and immobilize it in a
series of photographic views..."


In the catalogue to the Bonfils collection of photographs, Carney Gavin,
curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum, writes:

"If the Bonfils images cannot be regarded as the earliest, most
numerous, most acclaimed, most scholarly, or rarest photographs of the
nineteenth-century Levant, HSM consultants with current investigators
throughout the regions recorded by Bonfils lenses suggest that the
family's photographic records can today provide the most useful
repertoire of early visual documentation of the area for four reasons:

- Bonfils prints were meticulously processed originally, so that, even
when adverse environmental factors have caused some subsequent physical
deterioration, excellent technical standards maintained by the family
workshop can often yield invaluable visual data to modern
image-enhancement techniques.

- Bonfils subjects were selected in a consciously encyclopedic spirit the
has preserved a vast range of data for the geographical, ethnographical,
biblical, archaeological, architectural, and historical studies that the
Bonfils intended to promote.Further, we are able today to scrutinize
background details(often recorded incidentally) for various
geomorphological, demographic, and agronomic investigations as well as
explorations in other disciplines unanticipated when the photographs were
being made.

- Bonfils activity spanned the period when the most profound changes
began to alter Eastern landscapes and ways of life irretrievably, so
that the family was consciously able to record scenes unchanged for
millennia as well as (toward the end of Adrien Bonfils' activity) the
advent of occidental technology and mores.

- In contrast to most early Western photographers, who sought primarily
to capture exotic or romantic aspects of the local population, the
Bonfils portrayed these men and women (among whom they freely chose to
make their home), along with their daily life, venerable skills, and
human character, with love and respect.

By no means should it be inferred from these four characteristics that
each Bonfils photograph should be accepted uncritically as a
straightforward, unimpeachably accurate document. Contrivances - in
selection of the subject, image composition, and costuming of sitters -
abound in Bonfils pictures. Bonfils manipulations during various stages
of the photographic process (making an exposure, printing a negative,
retouching a print, and even in the labeling of an image) have been
detected in many cases and are suspected in others."

Over 800 Bonfils prints are part of a vast collection of photographs
from the MIddle East at the Harvard Semitic Museum. The Bonfils
Collections has been recorded on microfiche and has been the subject of
several exhibitions, one in Beirut in the late 80's. The microfiches
can be viewed by appointment with the museum and slides or prints for
research or publication ordered at a reasonable price.

The catalogue which describes the Bonfils family and the collection,
Images of the East, Photographs by Bonfils from the Harvard Semitic
Museum, by Carney E. S. Gavin, is published by the HSM and can be
ordered from them.

The collection is also the subject of several articles in the
November-December issue of the Aramco World Magazine.

Finally, it is worth noting that the collection itself has been the
property of the HSM for many years until it was rediscovered in 1970.
After a "benign" bomb attack in 1970 on the offices of Henry
Kissinger's Center for International Affairs (who were renting space in
the HSM building) the prints were found stacked away in hundreds of
boxes in the attic exposed after the blast. The boxes contained more
than 28000 prints , slides and stereoscopic views, among them the
Bonfils prints.

The Harvard Semitic Museum is at 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA
02138. Their telephone number is 617 495 4631 and fax 617 496 8904.

In order to bring you the modest selection of images from Lebanon,
Polaroid prints were made directly from the slide. The as the slides
were mounted in thin frames, the prints became slightly out of focus
and do not by any means reflect the superb quality of the slides
provided by the HSM or the original prints.

----------------------------------------------------------------- 

The images and sound being contributed to the liasun3.epfl.ch ftp
server is part of an ongoing attempt to create a multimedia repository
of cultural material about Lebanon and the Middle East on the
Internet.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Barre Ludvigsen                                borrel@dhhalden.no
Associate Professor, Architect        borrel@sigallah.dhhalden.no
Ostfold Regional College                    bludvigs@ulrik.uio.no
Department of Computer Science          73277.3443@Compuserve.com
Os Alle 9                                             ***********
N-1750 HALDEN, Norway                                 NeXTMail OK
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 phone479185400/fax479185485/home479341922/direct479185577ext219
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Finger: borrel@sigallah.dhhalden.no or borrel@fenris.dhhalden.no
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon