Photorientalist

  I recently visited the Al-Massala obelisk in Cairo’s northeastern district of Matariyyah, once the heart of ancient Heliopolis. It was my first time seeing the site, despite nearly 50 years of association with Egypt, and I arrived with a sense of curiosity shaped by old photographs. In my archives are numerous vintage images of the obelisk, dating from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, and in each it stands alone, rising majestically above open agricultural fields.   The reality today is strikingly different. The obelisk now emerges from a dense urban landscape, framed by a vast, newly built apartment complex. For a moment, I felt I had arrived too late, imagining that only a few years earlier the fields might still have existed. But after speaking with the site’s caretaker, I learned that even this view was not new—the modern buildings had simply replaced older ones— “much uglier,” he assured me. During the New Kingdom (c. 1539–1075 BCE), when [Read more...]

INTRODUCTION Photographs by Norbert Schiller At the dawn of the 20th century, Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard Empain envisioned a new kind of city rising from the desert northeast of Cairo — a “City of the Sun” he called Heliopolis. Conceived as a self-contained garden suburb, Heliopolis was designed with wide boulevards, lush public gardens, elegant arcades, and a distinctive architectural style blending European Art Nouveau with Moorish Revival influences. At the heart of this ambitious development stood the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, completed in 1910. When it opened, it was among the largest and most luxurious hotels in the world, offering a level of grandeur that rivaled Europe’s finest establishments. Designed by Belgian architects Ernest Jaspar and Alexandre Marcel, the hotel featured lavish interiors, vast courtyards, and ornate domes inspired by Islamic and Pharaonic motifs — a symbol of Egypt’s cosmopolitan spirit during its belle époque. Over the decades, the [Read more...]

One of my greatest accomplishments as a collector of 19th and 20th century photographs from the Middle East and North Africa is to make the images accessible to those who are interested in a visual exploration of the past. It is for this reason that I created the website Photorientalist. What is even more fulfilling is when a gallery or museum discovers my collection and expresses interest in featuring some of the works. In December 2023, I was contacted by the head curator at the Abu Dhabi-based Bassam Freiha Art Foundation , Michaela Watrelot, who came across my website while sourcing photographs for the museum’s inaugural exhibition titled Echoes of the Orient. Ms. Watrelot was interested in displaying images alongside paintings with the same Orientalist theme. The museum describes the focus of the inaugural exhibition as follows: “Centered on the theme of femininity as envisioned through the Orientalist art movement – from candid representations of odalisques in the [Read more...]

Since I started collecting 19th and 20th century photographs from the Middle East and North Africa four decades ago, I have noticed many trends in the evolution of photography. One of the most revolutionary innovations to hit the industry was the introduction of the handheld camera which allowed anyone who could afford such a device the ability to take their own candid family snapshots. Although the first amateur handheld box camera was invented by Eastman Kodak in 1888, this novelty did not become a threat to established photo studios until the mid 1920s when the 35mm camera was introduced and the proliferation of the compact camera exploded. As I examined images in my collection, I discovered a trend in amateur photography that baffled me for years before I was able to crack the mystery behind it. I first came across this phenomenon as I examined pictures of Greeks living in Alexandria, Egypt, in which the subjects were captured walking on the street alone, with friends, or with [Read more...]