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Survey Practices and Landscape
Photography Across the Globe

This edited volume considers the many ways in which landscape (seen and unseen) is
fundamental to placemaking, colonial settlement, and identity formation. Collectively,
the book’s authors map a constellation of interlocking photographic histories and
survey practices, decentering Europe as the origin of camera-based surveillance.
The volume charts a conversation across continents—connecting Europe, Africa,
the Arab World, Asia, and the Americas. It does not segregate places, histories, and
traditions but rather puts them in dialogue with one another, establishing solidarity
across ever-shifting national, linguistic, racial, religious, and ethnic. Refusing the neat
organization of survey photographs into national or imperial narratives, these essays
celebrate the messy, cross-cultural reverberations of landscape over the past 170 years.
Considering the visual, social, and historical networks in which these images circulate,
this anthology connects the many entangled and political histories of photography
in order to reframe survey practices and the multidimensionality of landscape as an
international phenomenon. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history,
history of photography, and landscape history.

Sophie Junge is an assistant professor at the Institute of Art History at the University
of Zurich.

Erin Hyde Nolan is a visiting assistant professor of art history at Bates College and
lecturer at Tufts University.
Photography, Place, Environment
Series Editor: Liz Wells
University of Plymouth, UK

Photography, Place, Environment publishes original scholarship and critical thinking

exploring ways in which photography contributes to, or challenges, narratives relating
to geography, environment, landscape and place, historically and now.
International in scope, and innovatory in placing imagery as both the object and
the method of enquiry, the series includes single-authored and edited volumes by new
scholars as well as established names in the feld. By critiquing relationships between
land, aesthetics, culture and photography, the books in this series also foster debates
on photographic methodologies, theory and practices.

Coal Cultures
Picturing Mining Landscapes and Communities
Derrick Price

Landscapes between Then and Now

Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Performance and Video Art
Nicola Brandt

Photography and Environmental Activism

Visualising the Struggle Against Industrial Pollution
Conohar Scott

Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe

Edited by Sophie Junge and Erin Hyde Nolan

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Photography-Place-Environment/book-series/BLPHOPPE
Survey Practices and Landscape
Photography Across the Globe

Edited by Sophie Junge and Erin Hyde Nolan

Cover image: Gohar Dashti, “Untitled #1” from the series “Land/s” / 2019 /
Courtesy of the artist.
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sophie Junge and Erin Hyde Nolan;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Sophie Junge and Erin Hyde Nolan to be identifed as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent
to infringe.
ISBN: 978-0-367-67209-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-67211-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-13026-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003130260
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of Figures viii

List of Contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xviii

1 Introduction: Survey Practices Across the Globe 1

ERIN HYDE NOLAN AND SOPHIE JUNGE

PART 1
Landscape, Heritage, and the Colonization of Space 15

2 The Great Game: The Making of Dunhuang as “Heritage” Site in

Photography (1900–1945) 17
MIA YINXING LIU

3 Historical Topographies: Thomas Johnson Westropp,

Antiquarianism, and Cultural Identity 42
JUSTIN CARVILLE

4 Surveying in the Dutch Colonial Archive: Reproduction, Authorship,

and Postcolonial Ownership 64
SOPHIE JUNGE

5 Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes 83

LOTTE ARNDT AND SAMMY BALOJI

PART 2
Border Control: From Sea to Shining Sea 87

6 Colonial Aesthetic or Military Narrative? On the Violence Behind the

Foureau-Lamy Saharan Mission (1898–1900) 89
SAMIA HENNI
vi Contents
7 Claimed, Imagined, Idealized: Survey Photographs from the
Northwest Boundary Commission, 1857–1862 106
ELIZABETH ANNE CAVALIERE

8 Imperial Violence in the Chilean-Argentine Boundary Case of 1902 138

MATTHIAS JOHANNES PFALLER SCHMID

PART 3
Landscaping: The Cultivation of Environment and Image 155

9 Annie Lady Brassey’s Photographic Albums and Writings: Botanical

Gardens in the Creation of Empire and Place 157
NANCY MICKLEWRIGHT AND THERESE O’MALLEY

10 A Land’s Desire: History, Landscape, and Photography in

Ottoman Palestine 189
ANJULI J. LEBOWITZ

11 Collective Memory and Landscape: The K.F. Wong Collection in the

National Archives of Singapore 210
CHARMAINE TOH

PART 4
Sites of Excavation: Unearthing Untold Photographic Histories 229

12 “Close Your Eyes and Imagine a German”: The Alps as a

Postmemorial Landscape of Black Europe in Maud
Sulter’s Photomontages 231
SARAH PHILLIPS CASTEEL

13 Searching for California Hang Trees 251

KEN GONZALES-DAY

PART 5
Practices of Resistance: The Science of Observation 255

14 The Surveyor’s Gaze: Reconsidering Nineteenth-Century Modalities

in Ottoman Visuality 257
DENIZ TÜRKER

15 Witness, Evidence, and the Environmental Archive 280

CHRIS MALCOLM
 Contents vii
16 Terrazo 299
PABLO LÓPEZ LUZ

17 Epilogue: Land/s 302

GOHAR DASHTI

Index 305
Figures

1.1 Picturing Power: Wherein one, in the name of knowledge, measures

everything, gives it a name and publicises this, thereby claiming it. 2
2.1 Cave 46, northwestern corner. 25
2.2 Mission Pelliot Touen-Houang IV Academy of Dunhuang:
Cave n°046; Paul Pelliot: Cave n°120f. 26
2.3 a–e Photos of Yungang Cave 3, published in Mizuno Seiichi and
Nagahiro Toshio, Yun-Kang, Kyoto: Humanities and Science
Research Institute at Kyoto University, 1951–1956, vol. 3. 31
2.4 Photograph, Cave 169 of Mogao. 33
2.5 Cave 158, sculpture of Nirvana Buddha, west wall. 33
2.6 Mission Pelliot Touen-Houang IV Academy of Dunhuang:
Cave n°046; Paul Pelliot: Cave n°120f. 34
2.7 Photography print, Cave 328 of Mogao. 35
2.8 Cave 16, entranceway, north wall, opening to the hidden library. 37
3.1 Album Vol. IV. 43
3.2 Album Vol. I. 46
3.3 Album Vol. I, 1898, “Breastagh-Ogham of the son of Carbry Son
of Awley—Probably 5th Cent.” 49
3.4 “Fenagh,” Kilronan Album. 52
3.5 Album Vol. I. 53
3.6 Album Vol. VII. 56
3.7 Album Vol. IV. 57
4.1 Photograph on gallery wall showing the Red Bridge, Siola
Surabaya Museum, Surabaya. 71
4.2 Het Stadhuis van Batavia. 73
4.3 Session of the “Landraad”, a law court for indigenous afairs, in
Pati presided by the Resident P. W. A. van Spall, Central Java. 73
4.4 Screenshot of a Facebook post from Surabaya Tempo Dulu +. 76
5.1 Mine à ciel ouvert noyée de Banfora #2, Lieu d’extraction minière
artisanale (Flooded open-cast mine in Banfora #2, site of
manual extraction). 84
5.2 Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes. Exhibition View.
Museumspavillon, Salzburg, Austria, July 25–August 17, 2019
(curated by Lotte Arndt and Simone Rudolph). 85
 Figures ix
6.1 General itinerary of the Saharan Mission Foureau-Lamy, from
Algiers to Chad (1898–1900). In Atlas dressé par le Capitaine
Verlet-Hanus, d’après les travaux exécutés sur le terrain par F.
Foureau et par les ofciers de l’escorte militaire. 16 planches en
couleurs contenant l’itinéraire général de la mission entre Ouargla
et Bangui, avec un levé détaillé du cours du Chari aux basses eaux,
entre Fort-Lamy et Fort-Archambault. 91
6.2 Aïn Taïba: en errivant près de la mare. I: 619 phot. de la Mission
saharienne Foureau-Lamy, 1898–1900, Sahara algérien, Niger.
Enregistré en 1933, p. 45. 93
6.3 9 novembre 1898, Temet Chadi: camp des tirailleurs sahariens
du lieutenant Roudenoy I: 619 phot. de la Mission saharienne
Foureau-Lamy, 1898–1900, Sahara algérien, Niger. Enregistré en
1933, p. 75. 94
6.4 27 octobre 1898: Dupanorge s’apprêtant à tirer: lieutenant
Roudeney à gausch. I: 619 phot. de la Mission saharienne Foureau-
Lamy, 1898–1900, Sahara algérien, Niger. Enregistré en 1933, p. 139. 96
7.1 “A Camp on the Boundary Line.” In John Keast Lord, The
Naturalist in Vancouver Island and British Columbia
(London: Richard Bentley, 1866), 2:frontispiece. 107
7.2 No. 59 Stone pyramids on the 49th parallel on left bank of Mooyie
River—looking east. 108
7.3 “Exploring Expedition in Vancouver Island and British Columbia,”
Illustrated London News. No. 1113 Vol. XLI, Saturday, March 1,
1862, 218. 115
7.4 “Vancouver Island Crabs.” In John Keast Lord, The Naturalist in
Vancouver Island and British Columbia (London: Richard Bentley,
1866), 2:262. 117
7.5 “A Group of Spokan Indians.” In John Keast Lord, The Naturalist
in Vancouver Island and British Columbia (London: Richard
Bentley, 1866), 1:frontispiece. 118
7.6 “Indian oman and hild, the Latter with Head Bound up.” In
Richard C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver
Island (London: John Murray, 1862), 242. 121
7.7 “Indian Lodges.” In John Keast Lord, The Naturalist in Vancouver
Island and British Columbia (London: Richard Bentley, 1866),
2:255. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries. 122
7.8 “No. 50 Indian Encampment at Fort Colville left bank of
Columbia River.” Royal Engineers—49th Parallel. 123
7.9 “Indian Burial Ground.” In Richard C. Mayne, Four Years in British
Columbia and Vancouver Island (London: John Murray, 1862), 271. 124
7.10 “An Indian Burial-Ground.” In John Keast Lord, The Naturalist in
Vancouver Island and British Columbia (London: Richard Bentley,
1866), 2:103. 125
7.11 John Keast Lord, naturalist with the Commission survey,
full-length portrait, seated, facing right, holding dog whip. 127
x Figures
7.12 “British and United States Boundary Line—Yank River.” In
Richard C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver
Island (London: John Murray, 1862), frontispiece. 129
8.1 The Tableland Between the Rivers Mayo and Coyaiken Where
the Continental Divide Occurs, and the Depression of the Upper
River Aisen, from the book Argentine-Chilian Boundary. Report
Presented to the Tribunal . . ., ed. Argentine Border Commission.
London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1900, plate CXVI. 141
8.2 Preliminary Map of the South-Western of the Argentine Republic.
Showing the Diferent Points from Which Photographs, Reproduced
in the “Argentine Evidence,” Have Been Taken. Published by W. &
A. K. Johnston Limited. 142
8.3 Patagonian Indians. Halftone print, 11.4 × 9.2 cm. Printed in Thomas
Holdich, The Countries of the King’s Award. London: Hurst and
Blackett, 1904, 233. 144
8.4 Río Palena-Expedition. Isla de los Nidos. 146
8.5 Toldo de indios a millas de Arroyo Verde (Tent of Indigenous Miles
from Arroyo Verde). 147
8.6 Indian Guides, 1902. From the book The Countries of the King’s
Award. Thomas Holdich. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1904, 393. 148
9.1 Lady Annie Brassey and family on deck of the Sunbeam, ca. 1878.
Volume 70, page 21. 158
9.2 Robert Taylor Pritchett in In the Trades, the Tropics and the
Roaring Forties, facing page 23. 160
9.3 A room in the Brassey Museum set aside for albums and other
books. The Hastings Library. 161
9.4 Botanic Gardens Ballarat. Volume 3, page 13. Lady Annie
Brassey Photograph Collection, the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. 163
9.5 The Azbakiyya neighborhood [detail], from General Map of Cairo.
Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 164
9.6 L’Ezbekieh-Parc paysager public au Caire, in “Les promenades et
les jardins du Caire” by G. Delchevalerie. 166
9.7 E. Béchard, Béchard’s Photo Shop, volume 30, page 50. Lady
Annie Brassey Photograph Collection, the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. 167
9.8 E. Béchard, Ezbekieh Gardens, volume 32, page 37. Lady Annie
Brassey Photograph Collection, the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. 168
9.9 De tuinen van Azbakiyya, Cairo. 169
9.10 Marianne North, Dragon Tree at Orotava, Tenerife, Painting 506,
Marianne North Galleries, Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. 172
9.11 Marianne North, The Famous Avenue of Royal Palms at Botafogo,
Painting 063, Marianne North Galleries, Royal Botanical Gardens,
Kew. 175
9.12 Robert Taylor Pritchett, “Fern Walk,” in In the Trades, the Tropics
and the Roaring Forties, page 235. 176
9.13 Marianne North, View in the Fernwalk, Jamaica, Painting 179,
Marianne North Galleries, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 177
 Figures xi
9.14 “Master’s Gully and Wombat Gully on the Road to Fernshaw,”
Volume 3, page 37. Lady Annie Brassey Photograph Collection,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 179
9.15 Plan of the Melbourne Botanic Garden. 180
9.16 “Still Life on board the Sunbean,” Volume 14, page 30. Lady
Annie Brassey Photograph Collection, The Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. 182
10.1 Jérusalem, Enceinte du Temple, Vue générale de la face Est, Pl. 1. 190
10.2 Jérusalem, Enceinte du Temple, Vue générale de la face Est, Pl. 2. 190
10.3 Jérusalem, Enceinte du Temple, Vue générale de la face Est, Pl. 3. 191
10.4 Jérusalem, Enceinte du Temple, Côté Ouest, Heit-el-Morharby. 197
10.5 Jérusalem, Enceinte du Temple, Mosquée El-Aksa, angle Sud-Ouest. 198
10.6 Jérusalem, Enceinte du Temple, Porte hérodienne. 199
10.7 Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, abside. 201
10.8 Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, détails des chapiteaux. 202
10.9 Jérusalem, Chemin de Beit-Lehem. 205
11.1 Dawn. 211
11.2 New Year’s at the Padang, albumen print. 213
11.3 Victoria Memorial Hall and Theatre. 215
11.4 Cavenagh Bridge. 216
11.5 The Padang, City Hall, and Supreme Court. 217
11.6 A Symbol of Peace, c 1950 in the catalogue of the Second Open
Photographic Exhibition (Singapore: Singapore Art Society,
1951), n.p. 221
12.1 Syrcas: Noir et Blanc: Un. 232
12.2 Syrcas: Noir et Blanc: Deux. 232
12.3 Syrcas: Noir et Blanc: Trois. 233
12.4 MSyrcas: Noir et Blanc: Quatre. 233
12.5 Syrcas: Noir et Blanc: Cinq. 234
12.6 Circus Performers. 237
12.7 (French, 1834–1917), Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus. 238
12.8 Karawankenkamm Süd Loibl. 243
13.1 About a Hundred Yards from the Road, Searching for California’s
Hang Trees Series. 252
13.2 Nightfall II, 2007 Searching for California’s Hang Trees Series. 253
14.1 Orman (The Forest). 258
14.2 Still Life with Orange. 259
14.3 Talim Yapan Erler (Soldiers in Training). 261
14.4 Students of the Imperial Military Academy in their formal uniforms. 264
14.5 Drawing periodical for middle schools established in the provinces,
1900/1901, an ice cream box and a seascape through a door,
signed “Rıza.” (Author’s own copy). 265
14.6 Panoramic photograph of “the township of İnönü,” from the
1886 survey of the Ertuğrul Sub-Province, later inserted into a gift
album for Otto Von Bismarck. Ömer M. Koç Collection, Album 3,
153–155–156–157. 267
14.7 “Interior view of the Imperial Wagon” (rükūb-ı şāhāneye mahsūs
vāgonuñ dāhilī manzarası), Istanbul University Library, Rare ˘  
˘ 
Works Collection, 93283. 268
xii Figures
14.8 Postcard representing the troop of engineers utilizing the surveyor’s
plane table from the double-bound copy of Captain Ali Haydar’s
Harita Tersimi Atlası (The Atlas of Map-Making) and Captain
İbrahim Halil’s Küçük Plançete (The Small Planchette). 269
14.9 Lithographic prints of the Ottoman surveyor in action from Ali
Haydar’s Harita Tersimi Atlası (The Atlas of Map-Making). 270
14.10 Lithographic prints of the Ottoman surveyor in action from Ali
Haydar’s Harita Tersimi Atlası (The Atlas of Map-Making). 271
14.11 Illustrating the planchette’s use in topographical measurement,
from the double-bound copy of Captain Ali Haydar’s Harita
Tersimi Atlası (The Atlas of Map-Making) and Captain İbrahim
Halil’s Küçük Plançete (The Small Planchette). 272
14.12 Erenköy’den Manzara (An Erenköy Landscape). 273
14.13 Autumn Landscape (View of Mount Chocorua). 274
15.1 The al-Turi cemetery in al-Araqib. 283
15.2 Still from Killing in Um al-Hiran. 287
15.3 Nature Represents Itself. 290
15.4 Nature Represents Itself. 291
16.1 Vista Aérea de la Ciudad de Mexico, XIII. 300
16.2 Vista Aérea de la Ciudad de Mexico, VI. 301
17.1 “Untitled #4” from the series Land/s. 302
17.2 “Untitled #9” from the series Land/s. 303
Contributors

Lotte Arndt is a researcher and curator (Paris) who accompanies the work of artists
who question the postcolonial present and the antinomies of modernity in a trans-
national perspective. As part of the international project Reconnecting Objects.
Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums (Tech-
nische Universität Berlin), she is currently conducting a research project on bioc-
ides and the antinomies of curation in ethnographic museums. She is co-founder
of the online journal Trouble dans les collections. Selected publications: Candice
Lin. A Hard White Body (ed. with Y. Umolu) 2019; Magazines Do Culture! Post-
colonial Negotiations in Parisian Africa-related Periodicals (2047–2012) 2016;
Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Afect (ed. with M. K. Abonnenc and
C. Lozano), 2016; Hunting & Collecting. Sammy Baloji (ed. with A. Taiaksev),
2016.
Sammy Baloji lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. His work is an ongo-
ing research on the cultural, architectural, and industrial heritage of the Katanga
region, as well as a questioning of the impact of Belgian colonization in the DRC.
His use of photographic archives allows him to manipulate time and space, compar-
ing ancient colonial narratives with contemporary economic imperialism. His video
works, installations, and photographic series highlight how identities are shaped,
transformed, perverted, and reinvented. He is currently working on the artistic
research project “Contemporary Kasala and Lukasa: Towards a Reconfguration
of Identity and Geopolitics” at Sint Lucas Antwerpen. A Chevalier des Arts et des
Lettres, he has received numerous fellowships, awards, and distinctions, notably at
the African Photography Encounters of Bamako and the Dakar Biennale, and was a
laureate of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Sammy Baloji co-founded
in 2008 the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi. His recent personal exhi-
bitions include Sammy Baloji: Other Tales, Lund Konsthall and Aarhus Kunsthal
(2020); Congo: Fragments d’une histoire, Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg (2019). He
has recently participated in the Sydney Biennial (2020), documenta 14 (Kassel/
Athens, 2017), the Lyon Biennial (2015), the Venice Biennial (2015), the Photoquai
Festival at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, 2015).
Justin Carville teaches historical and theoretical studies in photography at the Insti-
tute of Art, Design, and Technology, Dun Laoghaire. His publications include
Photography and Ireland (2011); and as editor Visualizing Dublin: Visual Culture,
Modernity and the Representation of Urban Space (2013); and with Sigrid Lien,
Contact Zones: Photography, Migration and Cultural Encounters in the United
xiv Contributors
States (2021). He is currently researching a book-length project on photography,
ethnography, and the racialization of Ireland tentatively titled The Ungovernable
Eye, for which he has been awarded a Yale Centre for British Art Fellowship
(2022–2023).
Sarah Phillips Casteel is a professor of English at Carleton University, where she is
cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative
Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. Her most recent books are Calypso Jews:
Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2016) and the co-edited volume
Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice (2019). She
has held the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities and has been a vis-
iting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her current book
project is Making History Visible: Black Lives under Nazism in Literature and Art.
Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere is a lecturer at the Ontario College of Art and Design and
Queen’s University in Canada. She has held an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship,
was the Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky
Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, and a Lisette Model Fellow at the National
Gallery of Canada. Her research in the feld of Canadian art histories focuses on
photographic, landscape, and institutional histories. She has writing in Environ-
mental History, Journal of Canadian Studies, Histoire Sociale/Social History,
Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, RACAR, and Journal of
Canadian Art History.
Gohar Dashti’s artistic practice consists of lens-based media, photography, and video.
She is fascinated with human-geographical narratives and their interconnection to
her own personal experiences. She believes that nature is what connects her to the
multiple meanings of home and displacement, both as conceptual abstractions and
as concrete realities that delineate and contour our existence. Dashti’s works are in
the permanent museum collections such as V&A, London; the Mori Art Museum,
Tokyo; MFA Boston; the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC; the Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the
history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational
systems, from lynching photography to museum displays. Gonzales-Day’s work
has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Getty,
LACMA, École des Beaux Arts (Paris), Nation Portrait Gallery, and the Smithso-
nian American Art Museum, among others. His monographs include Lynching in
the West: 1850–1935 (2006) and Profled (2011). Gonzales-Day holds the Fletcher
Jones Chair in Art and is a professor at Scripps College and is represented by Luis
De Jesus Los Angeles.
Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments and an
assistant professor of history of architecture and urbanism at Cornell University.
She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution:
The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017, EN; 2019, FR); the editor of War
Zones (2018) and Deserts Are Not Empty (2022); and the maker of exhibitions,
such as Housing Pharmacology (2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the
French War in Algeria (2017–2022). She was formerly Albert Hirschman Chair at
 Contributors xv
the Institute of Advanced Study in Marseille, a Geddes Fellow at Edinburgh School
of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and a visiting professor at the Institute
of Art History at the University of Zurich.
Sophie Junge is an assistant professor at the Institute of Art History at the University
of Zurich, Switzerland. Her current research focuses on photographs from colo-
nized Indonesia and Singapore around 1900 and their postcolonial circulation. Her
dissertation, Art Against AIDS: Nan Goldin’s Exhibition Witnesses: Against Our
Vanishing, was published by De Gruyter in 2016. Her work has been published
in BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review, History of Photography, PhotoRe-
searcher, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and she has received major funding from
the Swiss National Science Foundation. She currently edited the thematic issue
“Den Blick erwidern: Fotografe und Kolonialismus” of the journal Fotogeschichte
(2021).
Anjuli J. Lebowitz is the inaugural Judy Glickman Lauder Associate Curator of Pho-
tography at the Portland Museum of Art. She joined the PMA from the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, where she contributed to a number of collections, exhi-
bition, and publication projects, including Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early
Work, 1940–1950 and American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams. As a
Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she curated
Faith and Photography: Auguste Salzmann in the Holy Land, the frst exhibition
devoted to the enigmatic nineteenth-century archaeologist’s photographic produc-
tion in Jerusalem. Her research interests include photographic albums, artistic
counternarratives, and cross-cultural networks. She earned her doctorate from Bos-
ton University and a BA from Williams College, both in art history.
Mia Yinxing Liu is an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture
Department at California College of the Arts. Her research interests focus on
cinema, photography, optical devices, and other issues of media in the history
of Chinese art and visual culture. Her frst book, The Literati Lens: Wenren
Landscape in Chinese Cinema (1950–1979), deals with how landscape in feature
cinema in Maoist China became felds of contesting visions. She also published
extensively on Chinese photography. Currently she is working on a book manu-
script on the intermedial dialogues between ink painting and photography in
modern China.
Pablo López Luz is a photographic artist based in México City. His work has been
internationally recognized, having solo exhibitions at Museo El Eco, Museo del
Chopo, Sasha Wolf Gallery, Botanique, and Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo among
others. He has also participated in collective exhibitions at Photographer’s Gal-
lery, Fondation A Stitching, Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other venues. He is the author of six mono-
graphs: Pablo Lopez Luz (2012), Pyramid (2014), Frontera (2016), Bajo la Som-
bra de la Pirámide (2018), Piedra Volcánica (2019), and Baja Moda (2021). His
awards include MAST Foundation Photography, Les Résidences de Photoquai,
the Syngenta Photography Award, Alt+1000 Photography Award, IILA Photog-
raphy Award. Public and private collections have acquired his work, including the
SFMOMA, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Denver Museum of Arts, National Gal-
lery of Canada, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
xvi Contributors
Chris Malcolm is an assistant professor of Environmental Humanities and coordina-
tor of the minor in Sustainable Ecosystems: Art and Design at Maine College of Art
and Design. Malcolm has a PhD in comparative literature from University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine, and has published or has forthcoming work in Resilience: A Journal
of the Environmental Humanities, Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Postmod-
ern Culture, and FIELD: A Journal of Socially-engaged Art Criticism. Their book
manuscript, Damage & Repair: The Management of Environmental Harm, brings
together humanities, social- and natural-scientifc texts in order to argue that anxi-
ety over complicity with environmental damage leads to fantasies of reparability.
Nancy Micklewright writes about the history of photography and fashion history in
the Ottoman Empire with a focus on gender and is currently working on her new
book, Dressing for the Camera: Fashion and Photography in the late Ottoman
Empire (working title). Her edited volume, Mohamed Zakariya: A 21st century
Master Calligrapher, is appearing in 2022. Most recently she was Andrew W. Mel-
lon Fellow in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art;
through 2019, she was head of Public and Scholarly Engagement at the Smithsoni-
an’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. She has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania
in the history of Islamic art and architecture.
Erin Hyde Nolan is a visiting assistant professor at Bates College and lecturer at Tufts
University. Her research examines photographic history and visual culture from
the Islamic world across Europe, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia. She is the
author of Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame (2021) and is currently work-
ing on two related manuscripts, Portrait Atlas: The Transatlantic Circulation of
Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Portrait Photographs and Reading Native American
Photographs in Ottoman (co-written with Dr. Emily Voelker). Her scholarship has
been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Kunsthistorisches
Institut-Florenz, Max-Planck Society, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Getty
Research Institute.
Therese O’Malley former associate dean at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1987–2021), specializes in
the history of landscape architecture and garden design in the transatlantic world.
Among her publications are Keywords in American Landscape Design (2010)—a
work that led to the website History of Early American Landscape Design (heald.
nga.gov); Modernism and Landscape Architecture, 1890–1940, co-edited with
Joachim Wolschke Buhlmann (2015); and The Art of Natural History, co-edited
with Amy Meyers (2008). She was president of the Society of Architectural Histo-
rians (2000–2006), and since 2010, she has been an advisor to the United States
Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Property.
Matthias Johannes Pfaller Schmid is a German photography historian and art cura-
tor. His doctoral thesis deconstructs the genre of national photographic histories
by way of a critique of its Eurocentric conceptual foundation. The dissertation,
based on photographic production in Chile between 1860 and 1960, was awarded
the Gisèle Freund Award for the Theory and History of Photography of Folkwang
University of the Arts. After internships at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others, he is currently a
curatorial fellow of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Foundation.
 Contributors xvii
Charmaine Toh is a curator at National Gallery Singapore. Her research primarily
looks at modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a focus on photog-
raphy. She is the editor of History and Imagination: Modern Photography from
Singapore (2021), Earth Work 1979 (2016), and Refect/Refract: Essays on Pho-
tography (2013). She is currently working on Living Pictures, a major survey exhi-
bition of photography in Southeast Asia scheduled for December 2022, and has a
forthcoming publication with Brill Books on pictorial photography in Singapore.
Deniz Türker is an assistant professor of Islamic art and architecture at Rutgers-New
Brunswick, who specializes in late Ottoman and Turkish visual and material cul-
tures. Her forthcoming book, titled The Accidental Palace (2022), traces the archi-
tectural and landscape history of Yıldız, the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul. She
also has a sustained interest in the history of Islamic art collecting (especially in the
nineteenth-century Ottoman and Egyptian domains). Her next project is centered
on Yıldız Moran’s photographic practice in the context of Anatolia’s rediscovery by
Turkish humanists in the 1950s.
Acknowledgements

The idea for this project emerged in the fall of 2017, following Photographic History
Research Centre’s conference “Diverse Migrations: Photography Out of Bounds” at
De Montfort University where we met for the frst time in a session titled “Shared
Authorship.” In the months and years after the symposium, we collaborated through
our own trans-atlantic reading group where we thought together about landscape as a
political representation, gesture of power, and image of memory. In 2019, we chaired
the session “Survey Style: Landscape Photography Across the Globe” at the annual
Association for Art History Conference in Brighton, UK. Our panelists included Justin
Carville, Elizabeth Cavaliere, Matthias Johannes Pfaller Schmid, and Martina Caruso.
It was their insightful thinking about survey photography that inspired this publica-
tion, and we are grateful for their individual research and collective collaboration.
This volume has been a longtime in the making, and came into being despite many
forces working against it including, but not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout the last four years, we have been indebted to the support of institutions,
libraries, archives, friends, and family. We gratefully acknowledge Photography,
Place, Environment series editor Liz Wells for her unwavering support for our project,
and for Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong for expertly guiding us through the edito-
rial and production processes. A grant from the Graduate Campus of the University of
Zurich allowed us to meet in person again in 2022 and fnalize the intellectual frame-
work of this book at a workshop with PhD students from the University of Zurich.
We would like to thank Anna Herren, Stella Jungmann, Merlin Pohl, and Saeedeh
RahmanSetayesh for their critical thoughts and the exciting discussion. We owe a
special thank you to Gohar Dashti for sharing her photograph as the cover image
for the volume and to Yee I-Lann for giving us permission to use her photographic
collage as the entry point for this book. Our own analysis would not be possible
without the generous support and mentorship of friends and colleagues, especially
Alexander Supartono, Aimée Bessire, Emine Fetvacı, Nanina Guyer, Stella Jungmann,
Chris Malcolm, Anjuli Lebowitz, Liesbeth Ouwehand, Casey Riley, Eva-Maria Tro-
elenberg, Emily Voelker. This book would not have taken shape without the dogged
perseverance of our authors, their rich and radical re-evaluations of landscape, and
their earnest commitment to reimaging photographic histories. Finally, not only have
our families also endured this manuscript production uncomplainingly, they have sup-
ported us unfailingly throughout its duration; for us, you are home.
1 Introduction
Survey Practices Across the Globe
Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge

As a montage of Dutch colonial photographs sourced from the Tropenmuseum in

Amsterdam, Yee I-Lann’s (b. 1971, Malaysia) image ofers no beginning and no end—just
futurity.1 Picturing Power #2: Wherein one, in the name of knowledge, measures eve-
rything, gives it a name and publicises this thereby claiming it breaks the horizon
line, resisting the linearity of colonial occupation in Indonesia (Figure 1.1). Rather
than unfurling across the page, Yee I-Lann’s mounted panorama zigs and zags; this
colonized landscape splits up the middle, leading to a hole in the sky. Boulders tum-
ble into the foreground, falling outside of the photograph’s frame. And inside this
fragmented space, we arrive not at the edge of the world but at a threshold between
rock and cloud, land and sky, colonialism and independence, violence and repair. The
way forward, the photograph suggests, is to survey Indonesian land—to measure the
mountains. Measure everything.
It is challenging to read this image as a map. It does not guide us from one place
to another or one time to another. Yee I-Lann’s vision is alinear and relational, only
legible when we view her photograph like one star in a larger colonial constellation.2
Within a single horizontal plane, Yee merges memories and experiences of colonized
Indonesia that have historically been kept separate.3 By intervening in the material
and archival histories of colonial occupation, Yee remediates place-based identity
with creative and asynchronous rhythm. These photographic fragments reimagine
the future as one of coexistence, justice, and reciprocity. She pictures the Indonesian
landscape as forged through topographic control and violent extraction as well as
formed by transnational encounters and diverse perspectives, therefore embodying
what Liz Wells calls “a site of the inter-relational.”4 While survey photographs from
the Tropenmuseum historically render Indonesian land and people as specimens to
be observed, owned, and consumed by European settlers, Yee I-Lann redraws this
act of colonial possession from her perspective as a contemporary Malaysian art-
ist. With right angles, long rulers, and uncharted, open photographic space, she
recalibrates the relationship between colonial and postcolonial landscape imagery,
asking, Who belongs to this land? Who gets to make the landscape? Whose land is
this, anyway? By severing systems of land ownership from hegemonic and imperial
power structures, Picturing Power #2 presents a ferce critique of nineteenth-century
European survey practices and reimagines the Indonesian landscape.
When considering the questions of who belongs to the land and in the landscape,
we feel it is imperative to acknowledge our own positionality as scholars who are

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130260-1
2 Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge

Figure 1.1 Yee I-Lann, Picturing Power: Wherein one, in the name of knowledge, measures
everything, gives it a name and publicizes this, thereby claiming it, 2013, giclée print
on Hahnemühle photo paper, 63 × 180 cm, courtesy of the artist.

geographically and culturally bound.5 To this project, we each bring our train-
ing, points of view, and personal histories as Erin Hyde Nolan, a white American
female art historian studying photographic cultures in the Islamic Mediterranean
and Atlantic worlds, and Sophie Junge, a white German female art and photo his-
torian studying the colonial and postcolonial circulation of photographic images
from pre-independent Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Singapore.
Against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, increasing climate col-
lapse, and movement toward racial justice, we have collaborated from our homes
in Portland, Maine, the unceded territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy, which
includes the Abenaki, Micmac, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet Nations;
and in Zurich, Switzerland, an allegedly neutral but undoubtedly politicized mod-
ern nation state. With this project, we present a multifaceted approach to exploring
land—always knowing that as individual researchers from the Global North, we can
only sharpen, shift, or redefne our own understanding of landscape photography
and survey practices.

Mapping Lines of Inquiry

This volume aims to connect the diverse bodies of photographic materials and prac-
tices of modern surveillance culture. Central to our approach is reading indigenous
histories into the landscape, therefore articulating an intimacy fashioned by survey
images and the kinds of experiences, materials, and knowledge that these pictures pro-
duced across the globe.6 Such a methodology goes beyond understanding the asym-
metrical power dynamics refected in the employment of local colonial subjects by
photographic missions, for example, and demands that we look at longer histories of
contact and exchange—histories in which people and land were reordered, replaced,
and reimagined. Even when the state-sponsored archive and institutionalized canon
of photo history obscures aggressive national agendas, racial hierarchies, and impe-
rial violence, these other photographic histories remain—visible or invisible—inside
the photographs. What is surveyed but not seen? By seeing survey photographs as
stars in a larger colonial constellation, this volume locates luminous image bodies that
have yet to be recognized. Just as mapping stars in the night sky always depends on
both the observer’s location and the annual equinox, our inquiry reorients our lateral
 Introduction 3
relationship to the land, a viewing across which emphasizes distance and prescribed
vanishing points. This radical shift in perspective marks photography’s emphasis on
verticality.
By their very nature, landscape photographs visualize the desire to control, map,
and appropriate land, manifesting in dizzyingly large numbers of historical reposito-
ries, many of which live today in European and US-American institutions. Record-
ing rapid and violent territorial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
these images legitimized imperial politics in the name of (proto-)national identity.
Our project addresses territoriality, migration, and borders—concepts that rou-
tinely defned photographic survey campaigns and are constantly shifting within
current geopolitical contexts. Considering recent travel bans and entry restrictions
(exacerbated by the pandemic), the tenets of citizenship, war, global migration,7 and
our increasingly volatile planet, photographs of land now more than ever warrant
renewed attention. In their role as relics of colonial enterprise—both as Bartheian
“certifcate(s) of presence” and a certifcates of possession—nineteenth- and twentieth-
century survey campaigns resonate as unique but interlocking global practices.8
As such, the photographic survey, invariably includes more than one single image,
often a series of images, a storytelling report, or a sequential album. It is, as Elizabeth
Edwards reminds us, “concerned with narrations of past, present, future,” gesturing in
many directions at once—outward toward empire, inward to the everyday, backward
at nostalgia, and forward to the future all at the same time.9 Our investigation mirrors
this multidirectionality and hinges upon the belief in photography’s unruly nature.10 As
an instrument of measurement, the survey photograph—whether ofcial or amateur—
cross-pollinated academic discourses, media environments, and imperial sovereignties,
negotiating diferent temporal realms, and diplomatic arenas. This volume emphasizes
the many ways the survey embodied modern technologies of vision, which emerged in
tandem with the academic felds of anthropology, biology, archaeology, and art history,
and through its unbridled circulation, photography authenticated a larger survey cul-
ture. Did these images remain within their intended “reception routes”? Did their move-
ment detach the images from the land they represent and photographically displace the
people from their indigenous environment?11 Such detachment performs a kind of social
othering—an act intertwined with the renaming of lands and social bodies through sys-
tems of empire building. Alan Trachtenberg critiques this act, suggesting that “the name
lays claim to the view. By the same token, a photographic view attaches a possessable
image to a place name. A named view is one that has been seen, known, and thereby
already possessed.”12 Vital to the maintenance of imperial control, photographic sur-
veys produced scripted ways of seeing where landscape (and not land) became a way
to understand colonial space. When viewed as an inclusive and international phenom-
enon, land survey practices extend outward to many spaces that we do not always see,
and others that have yet to be institutionalized, preserved, or publicized.13
Our approach honors global connections and is intentionally expansive. By treat-
ing dialogues about land, survey histories, and their relationship to systems of pho-
tographic representation as capacious, we seek new stories. From a distinctively
interdisciplinary vantage point, the essays included here extend beyond institutional
accounting and state management; they understand survey photographs as ofcial
records, used (historically) as scientifc and military documentations, while also rec-
ognizing that these photographs are never neutral and highlighting how landscape
images made in the service of empire or as part of settler-colonial occupation will
4 Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge
always bear the imprint of extraction and displacement. In what Mark Sealy might
term “acts of decolonial care,” the authors in this book ask how we might attend to
ideas of place, identity, sovereignty, power, and geography in ways that are restora-
tive, celebrating connection, collaboration, and cross-cultural contact.14
More than a century after the renaming of Native American territories by the United
States Geological Surveys, to which Trachtenberg refers, the essays here—like the more
recent designation of American military bases that commemorate the Confederacy
and uphold white supremacist values—resist legacies of imperialism, assert anti-racist
attitudes, and retell stories from multiple viewpoints, and using many names.15 By
establishing a constellational methodology that is predicated on interconnectedness,
the essays collected here bring into conversation histories from outside the discipline’s
dominant Eurocentric narratives. They connect related notions of land and landscape
by viewing Paris through the lens of Ottoman Jerusalem, or the Austrian Alps through
the lens of Accra, or ancient China through the lens of modern China.16
This volume not only formulates a critique against the colonial expropriation of
land from the “majority world” but also develops a tool kit for reading landscape
photographs as gestures of power that have yet to be fully recognized for their politi-
cal and ideological potential.17 It decenters the white, patriarchal, Eurocentric vision
that has canonized and celebrated histories of landscape photography and situated
survey practices in positions of imperial “progress” and global expansion. Such excep-
tionalism and colonial declarations have for too long existed as comfortable assump-
tions and ultimately enacted a kind of intellectual carelessness, racial blindness, and
historical erasure of photographic histories in geographies outside of Europe and the
United States.
Like Rebecca Solnit’s characterization of the North American wilderness as a white
male fantasy, the authors in this book consider landscape as a “quixotic myth” that
can be viewed through the intersectional lens of feminism and critical race theory.18
They expose places “pure” and “unsullied” as mythical failures. By identifying colo-
nial visual strategies—the emptying of the land, the erasure of people, the picturesque
composition—they seek to understand how photographs turn land into landscape
and place into property.19 Treating image-making and image-taking as a networked
system, rather than a comparative or hierarchical model, these essays understand sur-
vey practices and landscape photography through a transnational and synchronous
interdependence.
And yet while landscape was utilized as a tool for imperial and colonial control,
it does not always have to be so.20 What if landscape can also articulate self-deter-
mination, artistic autonomy, and creative resistance? Contemporary photographic
practices, like that of Yee I-Lann, suggest that imperial endeavors were not always suc-
cessful and could be undermined by local actors.21 The inclusion of four short image-
based texts by the artists Sammy Baloji, Gohar Dashti, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Pablo
López Luz further expand extant colonial frameworks that have contained the history
of photography. These artists actively reinterpret our relationship to global histories,
mapping new worlds and acting “where there are not charters.”22 Such contemporary
voices speak to notions of the invisible landscape, quiet histories of oppression, and
personal places of memory, charting a new celestial pattern, one that burns brightly
with photographic futurity.
As with Yee I-Lann’s collage, our inquiry is not an exercise in delineation; it eschews
any kind of linear perspective where the eye travels along a parallel, drawn to only
 Introduction 5
one point in space. Our editorial interest is not in demarcating territory but rather in
making it appear infnite. Refusing the neat organization of survey photographs into
national histories, the essays in this volume celebrate the cross-cultural reverberations
of landscape over the past 170 years. We do not intend to be encyclopedic in scope.
Instead, these case studies map a conversation across continents—connecting Europe,
Africa, the Arab World, Asia, and the Americas. They do not segregate places, his-
tories, and traditions but rather put them in dialogue with one another, establishing
solidarity across national, linguistic, racial, religious, and ethnic borders. Together,
these arguments insist on a critical revision of the term global (or globe as it reads in
the title of the volume), dismantling the very notion of universal global completeness
by unraveling the ties that binds the survey as an encyclopedic enterprise.23 The essays
presented here reject the European positivist belief that it is possible to contain all
(global) knowledge within a physical form (the photograph) and vigorously disassoci-
ate photographic vision from absolute knowledge. What if what we see is not always
what we know? Our authors are exacting in their archival examinations and identify
“precise and documented points of interconnectedness,” as Alex Dika Seggerman has
advised.24 While we cannot complete the incompleteness in the discipline, this volume
opens space for scholarly innovation; it moves beyond the lines of longitude and lati-
tude, deeper than rock, mud, and sediment, allowing for a kind of intellectual platonic
shift, which in turn remaps geopolitical borders and reimagines land and space.

Redefning Survey and Land/Scape in a Transnational Context

At the center of our intervention is the belief that landscape (seen and unseen) is fun-
damental to identity formation, placemaking, and imperial settlement. Histories and
representations of land have been conceptualized as either documents of scientifc mis-
sions or aesthetic statements.25 While these may always be dialectical, we acknowledge
the complex relationship between vision and knowledge that sits at the very heart of
survey culture.26 This volume reveals the ways in which institutional and academic
binaries are not separate but overlapping. Photographic surveys began as an inter-
national phenomenon, embodying “a networked history of photographic exchange
in which objects’ epistemological values were transposed according to diplomatic
visions, political milieu, and colonialist agendas.”27 In the following sections, we lay
out the theoretical framework that structures this book’s inquiry. We consider three
terms: survey, land/scape, and (across the) globe, to demonstrate the many ways in
which these terms have been understood historically in scholarship, art, and science as
well as how these concepts are entangled across academic discourses.

Survey
Thus far, scholarship has grounded the discussion of survey imagery frmly in a Euro-
American narrative of expansionist ideology and political nationalism. Historically,
academic literature on survey enterprises has examined photographic surveys within
the binary of art and science. By conducting a contextual analysis of iconography and
style in photographs from the American West, Robin Kelsey regards the survey as a
cultural practice out of which a new modern iconography developed by reacting to the
“unfamiliar demands” of the survey impulse.28 Alternatively, Elizabeth Edwards con-
centrates on the scientifc meaning produced by survey photographs from England and
6 Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge
how they became part of a national historiography in the mid-nineteenth century.29
She is less concerned with questions of composition and style and more interested in
the meaning of local and national identity seen across survey projects. Indebted to
these foundational studies, this volume forcefully expands on such arguments, heed-
ing Tina Campt’s call to “listen” to images of land and landscape through an expan-
sive and interdisciplinary lens.30 While the individual essays collected here interrogate
the formation of canonical histories, which most often serve to institutionalize survey
culture, this volume is not a survey of these histories. It is not comprehensive, nor is it
categorical. Neither does this project seek simply to redress Eurocentric photographic
histories by inserting parallel narratives from the Global South. Rather, it looks to
the margins of the discipline for a more inclusive understanding of survey practices,
observing intimate intersections and transnational connections across geographies,
survey methodologies, and photographic histories between the nineteenth and twenty-
frst century. In our increasingly globalized world, a colonial constellation illuminates
stars that have for too long been hidden in the darkness.

Land/Scape
Our engagement with the term landscape and, more broadly, our defnition of land
grew out of our interest in writings from a diverse group of scholars and thinkers,
such as T. J. Demos, Tina Campt, Elizabeth Edwards, Derek Gregory, Donna Har-
raway, Joy Harjo, Robin Kelsey, Lisa Lowe, W. J. T. Mitchell, Christopher Pinney,
James Ryan, Christina Sharpe, Sujit Sivasundaram, Joan Schwartz, Liz Wells, and
Kathryn Yusof.31 We follow this literature in defning landscape not as a fxed concept
or existing on a continuum but as an active practice. It is our belief that the camera
naturalizes and unifes vision, transforming land into landscape. Through its mechani-
cal eye, earth, soil, and sea are not a reality but a representation, composed, framed,
and artifcial, but nonetheless presented as an objective document. By observing this
special expectation that we have of landscape photographs,32 our project builds upon
W. J. T. Mitchell’s proposition that landscape operates as a verb (“to landscape”) and
not a noun, a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.33 Land-
scape, therefore, includes not only the natural but also the human, referencing people
who are often indigenous to that land and physically connected to that landscape on
both sides of the camera.

Globe
In reference to the recent global turn in the humanities, our study seeks to diver-
sify understandings of landscape photography and survey practices. We actively use
the term globe in direct contrast to the alternative: global. As Alex Dika Seggerman
reminds us, “the colloquial use of ‘global’ is often a euphemism for the non-Western
or non-white.”34 Our use of “across the globe,” thus, does not oppose the West against
“the rest,” where global becomes a catchall for anything non-Euro-American, nor does
it suggest a thorough encyclopedic examination of every landscape and all surveys
from around the world. Rather, the case studies collected here chart a cross-cultural
constellation of contact and encounter, where images, iconographies, and ideologies
are shared, exchanged, imitated, and manipulated in relationship to one another.
 Introduction 7
Part 1: Landscape, Heritage, and the Colonization of Space claims landscapes, espe-
cially in their photographic form, as territories of projection and negotiation. Not
only are colonial geographies contestable, they are also unstable, even fragile, as Yee
I-Lann points out in her pictorial fragmentation of colonial space. What happens to
histories of colonial control when we acknowledge such instability?
With photographs of the ancient caves of Dunhuang, situated in present-day
China’s northwestern Gobi Desert, Mia Yinxing Liu evaluates representations of
Chinese heritage as protean sites of ambivalent heritage. Revealing how, since the
late nineteenth century, European, Japanese, and Chinese photographers utilized
technologies of vision to gain access to and knowledge of the caves, Liu charts the
photographic treatment of Dunhuang as it changed status from a European “dis-
covery,” to Pan-Asian cultural identity, and most recently to a symbol of Chinese
national heritage.
Similarly, Justin Carville analyzes the aesthetic and ideological tensions in the British
imperial photographic representations of the post-famine Irish landscape at the turn
of the nineteenth century. Focusing on an amateur photographic survey by English
antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, Carville argues that photography is not only
a historical document but something that shapes history and historical consciousness
equally. With the British occupation of Ireland, survey images amassed a topography
textured with what Carville calls “the antiquarian imagination.”
Sophie Junge’s essay examines a case of postcolonial diplomatic negotiations
between Indonesia and the Netherlands about restituting—or rather surveying and
reproducing—photographs of colonized Indonesia from Dutch archival collections.
She argues that the act of rephotographing Dutch colonial image collections by repre-
sentatives of the Indonesian National Archive in Jakarta in the late 1970s changed the
photographs’ status—from colonial icons to postcolonial or rather post-independent
heritage—through shifts in ownership.
In their short image-based essay on the exhibition Extractive Landscapes (2019),35
photographer Sammy Baloji and curator Lotte Arndt refect on the visual and episte-
mological operations that position an environment and its inhabitants as exploitable.
Baloji’s photograph Mine à ciel ouvert noyée de Banfora #2 understands landscape to
be social and political order. With its mammoth scale and sensuous use of color, the
image unsettles perceptions of photographic place as natural. It reveals the bodies of
miners working inside a red chasm, preserving (at least on the surface of the image)
a precarious ecosystem and legacy of colonial settlement in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo.
Part 2: Border Control: From Sea to Shining Sea brings together images that were
taken as part of international state-sponsored enterprises to demarcate borders and
assert related expansionist agendas. As a strategy of national and imperial control,
survey practices regularly remove human presence from the land. The photographic
ritual of transforming cultural place into empty space has been a tactic employed by
surveyors since Napoleon commissioned his description de l’égypte.36 The authors in
Part 2 ask, What do these “empty” photographs cover up? How does this emptiness
embody forced migration and human resettlement?
Taking up these questions, Samia Henni argues that photographs of the Sahara
became more than measuring tools for territorial expansion and were also weapons
of the French colonial acquisition and appellation. Authenticated by an aesthetic uni-
formity and “scientifc sameness,” these images were used to legitimize the annexation
8 Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge
of the Algerian Sahara by the French colonial government. They erased and replaced
the name of an existing Algerian village, photographically reinscribing the violence of
Commander Lamy and the Foureau-Lamy Mission.
Similarly, Matthias Johannes Pfaller Schmid’s essay makes visible the invisible con-
struction of national borders in the Andean mountains created during the dispute
about the topographical boundary between Chile and Argentina in the 1880s. By
restoring the presence of Indigenous populations in these photographs—those who
were actively omitted as part of systematic colonial expropriation, Pfaller Schmid
uncovers visual patterns of iconographical emptiness in survey practices, referencing
Ariella Azoulay’s argument that “these [local, indigenous] worlds were transformed
into a construction site” where every kind of resource was seen as extractible, raw
material, and available for imperial seizure.37
In an alternate example of border negotiations throughout the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere looks at survey photographs from the North American
boundary commissions created to legitimize British colonial and capitalist expansion.
Recognizing the mutability of borders, she articulates the many ways in which pho-
tographs materially demarcated this boundary line. Cavaliere examines the fuidity of
the photographic medium and its translation into the illustrated press, advocating for
the interaction of photography within the wider network of cultural technologies that
made its production possible in the frst place.
Part 3: Landscaping: The Cultivation of Environment and Image explores how
the topography of survey photographs mirrors the topography of diverse climates.
By tracing the intersection of visual narratives about cultural belonging and those
of remembrance, the essays in this section articulate how national claims of owner-
ship were projected onto land as well as onto the land’s photographic representations
through the images adherence to colonial racial and gendered hierarchies.
Nancy Micklewright and Therese O’Malley’s examine Annie Lady Brassey’s trans-
oceanic garden design imagery, revealing how representational practices are rigidly
tethered to aesthetic conventions.38 In Brassey’s archive, these conventions empha-
sized the clean, ordered, and controlled appearance of botanical gardens while bury-
ing their status as naturalizations of indigenous land. Traveling always within the seat
of empire, she had a privileged opportunity—circling the globe by private yacht—to
document a wide range of landscapes, highlighting some of the changing roles, mean-
ings, and purposes of gardens, around the world between 1876–1877.
In her analysis of Auguste Salzmann’s Jérusalem, Anjuli J. Lebowitz recognizes the
photographic album as a form of landscape, controlled and contained “by its leather
covers and moved through with the turn of each page.” For Salzmann’s French audi-
ence, his albums—in all their formats—mapped Paris onto Jerusalem, codifying this
Mediterranean landscape with French photographic terms. Lebowitz studies whole
image series, showing that multiplicity was inherent to survey practices as rarely do
such photographic endeavors engage only in single-image studies.
Related to Lebowitz’s reading of Jerusalem as a projection of topographic simi-
larities and French cultural values, Charmaine Toh studies how photographs were
appropriated and turned into icons of national history. She concentrates on images
by the Malaysian artist KF Wong (Wong Ken Foo, 1916–1998) whose landscape pho-
tographs of colonized Singapore were purchased by the National Archives in 1988.
Toh shows that their inclusion not only automatically conferred upon them a certain
 Introduction 9
authority as historical records but that the images soon became “privileged sites of
collective national memory.”
Part 4: Sites of Excavation: Unearthing Untold Photographic Histories follows the
seemingly simple but most difcult task of visualizing an invisible history. Sarah Phil-
lips Casteel takes up this charge in her essay on the 1993 photomontage series Syrcas
by the Scottish Ghanaian artist and writer Maud Sulter (1960–2008). Casteel dis-
cusses the disappeared African diasporic histories in Nazi-Germany through Sulter’s
photomontages of the Southern Tyrol. These assemblages bring Alpine idylls and eth-
nographic imagery together within the same visual plane, exposing their shared capac-
ity for erasure, and moreover, the power of landscape to “naturalize certain identities
at the expense of others.” Similarly, Ken Gonzales-Day reveals untold histories in his
photographic series titled Hang Trees (since 2002) and confronts ritualistic narratives
of erasure through a survey of trees used for lynchings within the state of California.
The absence of bodies in Gonzales-Day’s landscapes is articulated by his own presence
to see the trees again, therefore, repopulating the land and insisting on a historical
correction.
Part 5: Practices of Resistance: The Science of Observation examines the survey-
or’s gaze and contemporary photographic surveillance technologies, which together
map scientifc terrain and cartographic regimes. In her precise reconsideration of
nineteenth-century modalities of Ottoman military observation, Deniz Türker probes
various technologies’ simultaneous potential in conceptualizing and enhancing the
surveyor’s gaze. Her research relies on bureaucratic visual archives, arguing that the
imperial military schools (mühendishane and harbiye) produced polymathic stu-
dents and instructors whom the State consistently commissioned to undertake grand
documentary and building projects. These projects often demanded the utilization of
student’s multidimensional expertise in cartography and surveying methods, photog-
raphy, drafting, and painting.
From the perspectives of Mexico City and the Negev Desert, Pablo López Luz and
Chris Malcolm, respectively, go even further in their investigation of the earth’s surface
as a photographic recording device and medial witness to environmental injustice. In
his Terrazo project, López Luz’s aerial photographs of Mexico City reveal the fragil-
ity of the social and spatial ecosystem of the city that teeters on the verge of collapse.
Malcolm considers the surface of the earth as a material witness to climate crisis and
contemporary racial violence by discussing the work of environmental artist Susan
Schuppli as well as Eyal Weizman and his research agency, Forensic Architecture. Mal-
colm argues that together Schuppli, Weizman, and Forensic Architecture tend toward
empirical techniques and engage longstanding survey styles. These artist-authors illu-
minate the photographs as objects of “topographic authority” and unearth images
from the archive to articulate landscape and survey practices as cultural concepts.39
In the fnal chapter, Gohar Dashti works within twenty-frst-century networks of
photographic production with Land/s series. As a member of the Iranian diaspora,
she also addresses the paradox of identity and belonging. Her process is itself transna-
tional; she takes photographs in the United States, brings her flm to Iran, produces the
images in Tehran, and then takes a second set of photographs picturing the American
landscapes on Iranian soil all the while obscuring the theatrical fabrication of these
images as photographic constructions.
Conceived of as a scientifc topographical discourse, survey practices measure both
geological features and cultural customs through the lens of the camera. Although
10 Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge
undeniably less quantifable, photographs of land also calibrate violent histories of
extraction, dispossession, and extermination. This project asks us to think about the
geographies that we create. Governable bodies produce ungovernable images. In their
circulation, landscape photographs create a colonial constellation, but constellations
shift. Collectively, the essays in this volume remind us that we must illuminate these
shifts. We, too, need to move and change our vantage point; we must look up, down,
east and west, north and south, forward and backward in order to see all points of the
constellations burning across the globe, and make maps for new worlds.

Notes
1 Yee I-Lann’s work is a powerful representation of transnational colonial critique: Yee is a
Malayan artist working with photographs from Dutch archival collections that show the
colonized landscapes of the Indonesian archipelago. She does not reference the British colo-
nial occupation of her own country, Malaysia, but overcomes the borders of former colo-
nial powers, today’s nation, as well as the national framing of postcolonial art and academic
research.
2 While the conceptual use of the term constellation has a long history of use in the twentieth
century by philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, we take its meaning from more recent
scholarship, including the work of Okwui Enwezor, Timothy Mitchell, and Eva-Maria Tro-
elenberg, who writes, “The concept of a ‘postcolonial constellation’ therefore provides the
potential to restrict the power of overarching hierarchical viewpoints and perspectives. As
such, it can supersede the panoptic, directed gaze that has informed visual culture since
the nineteenth century, while ultimately serving as a central paradigm for an age of cross-
cultural communication,” in “Key Terms: Constellation,” in Reading Objects in the Contact
Zone, eds. Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Kerstin Schankweiler and Anna Sophia Messner (Hei-
delberg University Publishing (heiUP), 2021), 214–215. See: Okwui Enwezor, “The Post-
colonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in
African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 57–82; Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (1989): 217–236; Alex Dika Seg-
german, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary
(UNC Press Books, 2019).
3 The central photograph of the railroad bridge in Yee’s collage is an albumen print from
the region of Solo, Java, taken around 1870–1900 by an unknown photographer. It is
part of the collection of the National Museum of World Cultures, NL: https://hdl.handle.
net/20.500.11840/5438.
4 Liz Wells, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (Bloomsbury Pub-
lishing, 2011), 12.
5 Inspired by Monica Bravo and Emily Voelker in the introduction to their special issue,
“Re-Reading American Photographs,” we have written our own self-refective acknowl-
edgement of our scholarly positions. See: “Re-Reading American Photographs,” Panorama:
Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020), https://doi.
org/10.24926/24716839.10844 (accessed May 9, 2021).
6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015).
7 Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography and Migration (Routledge, 2018).
8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
Hill and Wang, 1981), 87.
9 Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian (Duke University Press, 2012).
10 The word unruly is inspired by Elizabeth Edwards’ text, Raw Histories: Photographs,
Anthropology and Museums (Routledge, 2001).
11 Sujit Sivasundaram, “Towards a Critical History of Connection: The Port of Colombo,
the Geographical “Circuit,” and the Visual Politics of New Imperialism, ca. 1880–1914,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 2 (2017): 346–384. When thinking
about the circulation of images, we need to keep in mind what François Brunet has called
the “non-circulation” of images to consider the numerous images that were not reproduced,
circulated, and distributed—images that we can only imagine having existed. See: François
 Introduction 11
Brunet, “Introduction: No Representation without Circulation,” in Circulation, ed. by
François Brunet (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10–39.
12 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to
Walker Evans (Hill and Wang, 1989), 125.
13 This idea is derived from Derek Gregory’s essay “Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Prac-
tices and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839–1914,” in Picturing Place: Photography and
the Geographical Imagination, eds. by Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (I.B. Tauris &
Co. Ltd., 2003), 195–225.
14 Mark Sealy, “Global Photography: Out of Time,” Zoom Symposium, September 9, 2021,
hosted by the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
15 Michael Levenson, “These Are the 10 U.S. Army Installations Named for Confeder-
ates,” New York Times, June 11, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/military-bases-
confederates.html
16 This act of decolonial decentering is inspired by Steven Nelson’s, “A Questionnaire on
Decolonization,” eds. Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit and Pamela M. Lee, Octo-
ber, no. 174, 2020, 89.
17 The term majority world refers to countries based on size of the population, and the major-
ity world is the part of the globe where most people reside. Alternatively, the minority world
refers to countries that are home to fewer people but also more often considered historically
as “developed” or, problematically, as “frst world” nations.
18 Rebecca Solnit, “Reclaiming History: Richard Misrach and the Politics of Landscape Pho-
tography,” Aperture 120 (1990): 30–35.
19 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell
(University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–4.
20 Esther Gabara’s, Errant Modernism: Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University
Press, 2008) takes on such a framework in an unexpected way.
21 Deborah Poole’s scholarship on Andean photography is an excellent example of local actors
and alternative frameworks. See: Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the
Andean Image World (Princeton University Press, 1997).
22 In her book, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Audre Lorde
reminds us that “only within that interdependency of diferent strengths, acknowledged and
equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively ‘be’ in the world generate, as well as the
courage and sustenance to act where there are not charters,” The Master’s Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master’s House (Penguin, 2018).
23 Erina Duganne, Heather Diack and Terri Weissman, Global Photography: A Critical His-
tory (Routledge, 2020).
24 Seggerman, Modernism on the Nile, 4.
25 Edwards describes survey photographs of land and people as multidirectional, images that
were concerned with narratives of past, present, and future. See Elizabeth Edwards, The
Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918
(Duke University Press, 2012), 6–7. Our reading of landscape expands canonical studies
on survey photography, such as those by Edwards and Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photo-
graphs and Illustrations for U.S. Survey, 1850–1890 (University of California Press, 2007).
26 The critique of photographic isolationism is an important issue that is accounted for by
specifc essays, including Deniz Türker’s and Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere’s essays. Collectively,
we view this volume in conversation with recent photographic studies, such as The “Public”
Life of Images, edited by Thierry Gervais in 2016 (especially Geofrey Batchen’s “Double
Displacement: Photography and Dissemination”), Geofrey Belknap’s From a Photograph:
Authenticity, Science and the Periodical Press, 1870–1890 (2019), and Elizabeth Edwards,
“The Thingness of Photographs,” in A Companion to Photography, ed. Stephen Bull
(2020), that consider the intermedial environment within which photographic practices,
including survey ones, take place.
27 Erin Hyde Nolan and Emily Voelker, “Reading Native American Portraits in Ottoman:
A Networked Analysis of Photographs in the Abdülhamid II Collection” on Transatlantic
Cultures Digital Platform, https://tracs-edition.univ-lr.fr/app/en/index (December 2021).
28 Kelsey, Archive Style. See also: Malcolm Daniel, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, 1994).
12 Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge
29 Edwards, The Camera as Historian. See also Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Pho-
tography and the American West (Yale University Press, 2002).
30 See Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017).
31 Therefore, we do not ofer a review of survey histories here but instead look to diverse
voices who share untold stories. See T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art
and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press 2016); Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the
Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016); Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and
Tales (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents
(Duke University Press, 2015); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake. on Blackness and Being
(Duke University Press, 2016); Kathryn Yusof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
(University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
32 Campt, Listening to Images.
33 W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
34 Alex Dika Seggerman, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the
Contemporary (UNC Press Books, 2019), 4.
35 Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes was curated by Lotte Arndt and Simone Rudolph and
took place at the Museumspavillon in Salzburg, Austria (July 25–August 17, 2019).
36 description de l’égypte.
37 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), 8.
38 Wells, Land Matters, 6; Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson, “Introduction,” in Colonial
Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (Routledge, 2002); Erin Hyde Nolan, “Land/
scaping: Todd Webb’s Representations of the Changing Topography of Africa,” in Todd
Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame (Routledge, 2021), 123.
39 See Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power
in Silence,” Archivaria 61 (September 2006): 215–233; Georges Didi-Huberman and Knut
Ebeling, Das Archiv brennt (Merve, 2007).

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Part 1

Landscape, Heritage, and the

Colonization of Space
2 The Great Game
The Making of Dunhuang as
“Heritage” Site in Photography
(1900–1945)
Mia Yinxing Liu

Dunhuang, famed for its magnifcent caves flled with murals, sculptures, manu-
scripts, and other objects dating back to the fourth century, is a name that evokes
fascination and marvel. Situated in modern China’s northwestern Gobi deserts,
the town of Dunhuang was once an important stop on the ancient Silk Road.
Today it is a mecca of Buddhist art, a popular tourist destination, a UNESCO
World Heritage site, as well as a Chinese national emblem. Although this site in the
midst of an arid landscape was once a bustling center in the world history of trade
and travel, its modern “discovery” has been credited to late-nineteenth-century
European expeditioners as it was a stop on their itineraries of survey missions
to Central Asia. The European “discovery” was quickly followed by expeditions
sent by the modern Japanese Empire in the frst decades of the twentieth century.
The Japanese expedition, in a colonialist and imperialist design that was not dis-
similar to those by the European powers, came to Dunhuang from the other side
of the globe and intended to reshape and reclaim Dunhuang with a diferent set of
lenses. The Chinese government, then Kuo-Ming-Tang (Nationalist) regime, even-
tually decided to send their own team to Dunhuang to “end” this “great game”
in the 1940s, when the Chinese nation was bogged down in a long and trying war
against the Japanese invasion (1936–1944). A photographer couple by the name of
James C. M. Lo (1902–1987) and Lucy Lo (b. 1920) reached Dunhuang in 1943,
spent over a year there photographing, and made a collection of Dunhuang photos
now known as thorough documents and for their great artistry. It was a mission
shrouded with a sense of mystery. To this day there is still confusion about the
nature of the assignment as the Los themselves have not claimed any direct sponsor
to report to. Instead, they insisted it was a personal vacation. This paper focuses
on James and Lucy Lo’s photography of Dunhuang, the last iteration of more than
half a century’s race of photographing this site by multinational agents. Locating
the Los mission in the historical context of the previous European and Japanese
photographic expeditions, as well as the convention of the Dunhuang photogra-
phy, this paper also examines the departure of the Los’ photos in this lineage. The
goal is twofold: while the Los’ photos have been generally valued as a faithful and
thorough documentary of Dunhuang art, I propose to see them also as an inter-
ventional agency in the evolving construction of the image of Dunhuang. In turn,
I demonstrate how this case study helps us understand the role of photography in
the construction of sites of heritage and, more importantly, helps ask a necessary
question: whose heritage?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130260-3
18 Mia Yinxing Liu
James and Lucy Lo’s “Mission” to Dunhuang
In the spring month of April 1943, James and Lucy Lo, with another photographer by
the name of Gu Tingpeng (dates unknown), arrived in Dunhuang, with a plan to thor-
oughly photograph the site.1 The Los, brilliant photographers as they were, had no
academic expertise or ofcial assignment. Before this trip, James Lo held the position
as the head of the department of photojournalism at Central News Agency (Zhong-
yangshe), the journalist organization founded and owned by the Chinese Nationalist
(KMT) government. Lucy Lo was also a skilled photographer, well educated in an
culturally elite family in cosmopolitan Shanghai. In 1942, the Los’ three-person crew
few in a military airplane to Lanzhou from Chongqing, the then capital city of the
KMT government, and reached Dunhuang by road in March in 1943. Bringing with
them their own photo equipment, including a 6 × 8 inch folding large-frame camera, a
4 × 5 inch Grafex Speed Graphic camera, and a 35 mm Leica camera, as well as flm
stock and solutions, the Los started photographing Dunhuang in April in 1943. They
worked in Yulin Caves frst, then moved on to Mogao Caves, and fnished flming
around June in 1944. During this process, James and Lucy Lo lived in Leiyin Temple
in the Mogao Caves area. Besides the minimal crew members, the photographing
condition was by no means ideal. There was no electricity, so the lighting was very
difcult. All Dunhuang caves open to the east, and some have a sizable pillar in the
center that further blocks the sunlight from reaching the back of the cave. They there-
fore had to shoot in the morning with the help of mirrors and refective boards to relay
light into the deep recess of these caves.2 The Los also contrived their own makeshift
darkroom on site with water drawn from a creek nearby, where they developed the
flms in the evenings.3
In mid June 1944, the Los fnished the photographing and left Dunhuang. In the
following months, China was soon embroiled in yet another war between the Nation-
alists and the Communists. Upon the defeat of the Nationalist KMT regime, the Los
followed the KMT’s exodus to Taiwan. Their Dunhuang photos did not have a chance
to be widely published, exhibited, or used in these tumultuous years. James Lo did
not resume his previous job at Central News Agency but gave lectures at Chinese
Culture University in Taipei on topics of Dunhuang. The couple also opened a book-
store in Taipei in 1952, specializing in English language books of arts and literature.
They christened the store with the English name Caves, and its Chinese name was
straightforwardly, Dunhuang. Meanwhile, the Los also founded their own art studio,
Yimei’an, dedicated to the retracing and reproduction of Dunhuang murals based on
the photos they took. They would make transparencies out of the flms, project them
onto a wall, then trace onto paper pasted on the wall to produce reproductions close
to the murals’ original sizes. Though their photos were all black-and-white, the Los
had these reproductions colored according to their mental and physical notes of the
original colorful Dunhuang murals. Some of these reproductions were exhibited at
the World’s Fair in New York in 1964 in the Taiwanese pavilion.4 Eventually, the Los
moved to the United States, taking the collection with them. After these photos were
purchased by Princeton University in 1968, they have been included in a few exhibi-
tions in the past decade and will be published in the coming year as a catalogue by the
Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University.5
Overall, it is estimated that James and Lucy Lo took more than 2,000 photos. There
are about 3,221 of photo prints (printed by the Los themselves) collected in the Lo
 The Great Game 19
archive at Princeton. They are mostly photographs of the murals and sculptures in the
6

caves of Dunhuang, including 2,872 prints taken in the 327 caves of Mogao and 187
taken in the 21 caves of Yulin. There are also photos of the exterior of the caves, as
well as the life and landscape in the Dunhuang area. Hailed by Dunhuang scholars for
their documentary thoroughness, the Lo photo archive is now part of the invaluable
visual source for the studies of a site where conservation and damage are at a peren-
nial tug of war.7

Changing Lenses: From European Adventurers, Japanese

Expeditions, to Chinese Missions
Dunhuang was part of a wide region known as Chinese Turkestan in Central Asia that
in the late nineteenth century became an arena for a race of military and archaeological
survey among Western nations, especially between the British and Russian Empires.
The race, called “The Great Game” by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim, was the
competition for the military, political, and economic control of a crucial region strad-
dling Asia and Europe. It also was a rivalry among archaeologists and other scholars
of many burgeoning modern academic disciplines, as the region was deemed as the
site where civilization frst formed, the so-called cradle of humanity.8 In this “Great
Game,” it was difcult to separate the militarist interests of the empires from the
academic pursuits of the scholars, as one became the vehicle and aid of the other, and
vice versa.9 On the practical level, the military expansion of the area needed reconnais-
sance and mapping work. Many of the European adventurers into the region, whether
overtly academic, mercenary, or militarian, fulflled the task of charting the land and
marking sites such as Dunhuang on modern cartography.
In addition to literally putting sites like Dunhuang on the (European) map, these
expeditions also provided visual and textual accounts of the journey, including descrip-
tion of the art and life there and the experience of the landscape. One of the earliest
such European adventurers to the Dunhuang region was Sven Hedin (1865–1952), the
Swedish German explorer who conducted four expeditions to Central Asia between
the late 1880s and the early 1900s. He was the person who made many sites in the so-
called “last uncharted areas of Asia” frst known to the West, such as the Tarim Basin,
Xinjiang, and Tibet. Hedin became the sole holder of the exclusive knowledge to the
navigation of the region as he alone had the coordinates and routes for this otherwise
blank space on European maps then.10 Hedin was also an explorer with an intense
interest in visual documentary. Besides making watercolor illustrations along the way,
he also took his own photographs.11 However, Dunhuang was not a prominent inter-
est in Hedin’s itinerary as he only visited there once, as a casual stop, and only took
one photo.12
In 1889, Dunhuang became the center of a sudden intense interest among the Euro-
pean explorers because of a discovery of a Buddhist manuscript by a British Captain
Bower in Khotan.13 A decade later, an even more sensational piece of news broke out,
that the Taoist guardian of the caves, Wang Yuanlu, accidentally stumbled upon a
secret chamber in Cave 16 in Mogao, which turned out to be a massive library flled
with rolls of ancient manuscripts untouched throughout the ages. This piece of infor-
mation set the explorer world ablaze. But it was the British Hungarian explorer Aurel
Stein (1862–1943) who is forever remembered as the one who started the trend of
lugging away many of its treasures by cartloads with transactions little short of plain
20 Mia Yinxing Liu
robbery.14 Stein arrived in Dunhuang frst in 1907 and managed to take 24 cases of
manuscripts and four cases of paintings and other artifacts and relics on his caravan
and transported them back to Britain that are now housed in the British Library in
London.15
Stein employed photography on his groundbreaking enterprise in Central Asia,
mostly funded by the British Raj and the British government, to give the European
world a photographic picture of the landscape. His mission, being the frst that pro-
vided ample photographic accounts of the expeditions, marked a new page in the
visualization of the area, including Dunhuang, on the modern world stage.16 Stein’s
photos of the landscape of snowy mountains and ruins in the desert were certainly
breathtaking, and his photos of Dunhuang, in particular the one with the library cave
in which piles of precious scrolls and manuscripts were still laid in its chamber, is
especially evocative, witnessing a history of “glorious discoveries” that was the loss
and scar of others.
In the following decades, Dunhuang saw a succession of European visitors. Among
the most notable was the French explorer Paul Pelliot, who reached Dunhuang in
1908, soon after Aurel Stein’s sensational haul.17 While both Sven Hedin and Aurel
Stein had some credentials of scholarly training in languages (though neither spoke
Chinese) and archaeology, it was Pelliot that had the apparent academic interest and
the dazzling linguistic talent. His mission also stands out with an overall emphasis on
photography, which produced a tremendous impact for the future decades.
The young Pelliot was initially chosen to direct a French-government-sponsored
archaeological mission to Chinese Turkestan in 1906. As the Pelliot-led expedition
team approached China, the news of Aurel Stein’s triumph in Dunhuang reached the
French team, and Pelliot quickly changed course to a swift trip to Dunhuang. The
Pelliot mission was equipped with a small but efcient apparatus: he himself was
fuent in Chinese, Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Mongolian, and Sanskrit, among other
languages, and the three-man team included an army medical ofcer and the photog-
rapher Charles Nouette (1869–1910).18 The extensive Dunhuang photos Pelliot and
Nouette took, over ffteen hundred in number, are now in the collection of the Musée
Guimet in Paris. They are important for their archaeological and documentary value,
as Landon Warner, heading the American Harvard Fogg Museum mission in 1924,
lamented that 16 years after Stein and Pelliot’s visit, the site had been damaged exten-
sively: “400 Russian Prisoners who were quartered here for six months two years ago
have done an enormous job of irreparable damage to the walls. No such photographs
as those of Stein and Pelliot can be taken now.”19 Indeed to this day, the Pelliot mission
photos, marked with a design to provide a thorough and comprehensive documentary
of the site as an art and archeological survey, are reference points for Dunhuang schol-
ars, whether their focus is on manuscripts, Buddhist visual art, or the study of the Silk
Road. In addition, the Pelliot mission’s photographs stood out for a few more reasons.
Photography was not an auxiliary tool but integral to the mission. The Pelliot mission
fully explored the multifaceted functions of the photographic medium. According to
Marine Cabos’ study, Pelliot, over the course of the survey, was already preparing the
sequence of the photographs that would be published after their return, judging from
his manuscripts and notes.20 Therefore, Pelliot was indeed surveying Dunhuang “pho-
tographically.” Secondly, Pelliot intended and managed to communicate with inter-
national and local Chinese scholars to exchange results and ideas along his mission
to Dunhuang, mainly via photographs.21 Lastly, there was also the commercial and
 The Great Game 21
proftable side of these photos, which generated funding opportunities for the crew to
pay of the monetary debts incurred during the trip. Photography also was a great tool
to maximize the popular exposure to the public media in both Europe and China, as
Pelliot used the photographs as a crucial component in his publications. L’Illustration,
a popular French periodical that extensively covered Pelliot’s expedition, lent Pelliot
the opportunity to tell his story through photographs. Pelliot also gave preeminence
to photography in the fnal publication of the mission, Les grottes de Touen-Houang,
for which he wrote, “It seems to me that, in order to initiate the work, it was necessary
frst and foremost to publish the photographs of the sanctuaries.”22
These European expeditions reached Dunhuang through terrain previously
uncharted by modern cartography and vied in their photographic representations of
the trek, the “discovery,” and the survey of sites. Through photography, the region
emerged as a scientifcally and mechanically produced image, while also deeply embed-
ded in colonial imaginations. Dunhuang, part of colonialist and orientalist fantasy,
was also made “visible” with a sense of irrefutable evidence. With the truth-claim aura
that photographic medium was regarded to possess, photography also served as evi-
dence of each claim—Russian, British, or French—to the “ownership” of the territory.
Responding to these claims, the Japanese empire, the increasingly powerful nation in
Asia, was compelled to participate in the race as well.
Since the race was already a theater of power, the Japanese entry was intended as a
formal induction to the pantheon of the modern nations. Count Ōtani Kōzui (1876–
1948) was the Japanese leader for this initiative, who plunged right into the game at
the turn of the century. Ōtani paid personal tributes to the European celebrities who
successfully constructed the enterprise of knowledge of Central Asia at the time.23
The Japanese participation was not met with embracing arms from these European
peers. Not only were these European expeditions part of the imperialist and colonial-
ist expansion of the West, but these explorations themselves have taken on a rather
colonialist structure in a literal sense. Aurel Stein had his route marked and almost
patented. Sven Hedin similarly made it known that he had the exclusive knowledge of
the routes and sites, such as Lop Lake, and therefore claimed the exclusive access to
the vast regions such as the Lop Desert. Others who ventured into these areas would
need to be sanctifed with his permission. In other words, an expansion of territory
in the Asian continent had been marked, routes were divided among the nations in
the West, often in the name of supremacy in scientifc knowledge and modern study
of this land. The Japanese advocates for expeditions to Central Asia were well aware
that Japan’s entry to this race also demanded that Japan learn and adopt an (Euro-
American) “adventurer’s” gaze on the “Orient,” even though Japan itself was also
already part of this “Orient.”24 Therefore, the Japanese adventurers to Dunhuang
faced a complex problem: how to view an important site in Central Asia that is a
mecca of Buddhist art as a modern Japanese explorer and archaeologist, armed with a
camera, as a delegate of the Japanese empire but à la mode of European expeditions.
Buddhism became the key to this question. Ōtani was greatly upset by what he
saw as not only an intercontinental aggression in the European expedition races to
the region but also an interreligious contention. He called to rectify the situation as a
Japanese man and also on behalf of Asia, as he exclaimed, “We cannot watch idly as
Christians adventure into Buddhist sites.”25 The “we” here is interesting. It meant “we
the Japanese” but also implied “we Asians,” or “we Buddhists,” and more impor-
tantly, “we” that blend all three into one that is a modern Japanese adventurer equal
22 Mia Yinxing Liu
to the European peers in every sense except for possessing the rightful and authentic
ownership to these Asian Buddhist sites as an Asian Buddhist. Therefore, the Japanese
expeditionary missions ofered to the photographic gaze on Dunhuang a refraction or
an optimization from the East, from both the “inside” as an Asian Buddhist and the
“outsider” position in the practice of modern European survey. Ōtani, the twenty-
second Abbot of the Nishi Hong’anji, a powerful Buddhist institution in Japan, was
also an active member in the modernization efort of Japan’s elite institutions, coming
from a prestigious family and connected to the royal house of Japan.26 He seemed to
be the perfect person that embodied that modern Japanese/Asian/Buddhist adventurer,
the outsider/insider that he envisioned.
Ōtani oversaw three trips to Chinese Turkestan between August 16, 1902, and
July 10, 1914. During the third trip, the crew (without Ōtani’s personal participa-
tion) reached Dunhuang on October 5, 1914.27 Besides acquiring ancient Buddhist
documents and artifacts, which were the main mission of the expeditions, Yoshikawa
Koichiro (later joined by Tachibana Zuicho) spent three months there and photo-
graphed the wall paintings and statues there in the Mogao Caves.28 The crew was
keenly aware of their identity as Buddhist adventurers. According to Ōtani, the quest
to Dunhuang was not only an adventure but also a pilgrimage. Dunhuang and other
sites in the region played a crucial role in the spread of Buddhism from India to China,
Japan, and the rest of Asia. In Dunhuang lay the answer, so he hoped, to questions
such as why many other religions from the West, such as Christianity and Islam, took
roots in China but only Buddhism made its way farther east to Japan. Dunhuang, to
Ōtani, was the primal scene of this transmission, the place where the roots of Japanese
Buddhism might still be excavated and restored.29
The inside/outside gaze on Dunhuang and the blend of expedition and pilgrimage
started with Ōtani’s ambitious design but found its eloquent realization two decades
later in Mizuno Seiichi (1905–1971) and Nagahiro Toshio (1907–1990)’s expedition
to Yungang Caves, another iconic Buddhist site in China. In the same year as the Los
embarked on their Dunhuang journey, Mizuno (and joined by Nagahiro later) was in
China doing his extensive research on Buddhist cave art, which was a long project of
seven expeditions in total between 1938 and 1944 with a focus on Yungang Caves in
Datong, Shanxi. In his Yungang Diary, Nagahiro described that the best way to gaze
upon the carved Buddha there was on the scafold while photographing. Through
such physically taxing work during, and because of photography, not only were new
discoveries made in terms of art historical research, but also the religious experience
reached a new height.

Neither inside the cave, or outside of the cave, or standing on the ground gives
one a point of view that can truly observe and admire it (the carved Buddha),
but on the scafold one can truly appreciate . . . Therefore, photography is of
ultimate importance, as we often spent the whole day dismantling and reassem-
bling the scafold, or holding mirrors (to redirect light to photograph), in this
appreciation.30

Nagahiro’s statements in 1939 presented a vision embodied by the Japanese expe-

ditionary photography in China: a vision superior to other Asian peers, including the
Chinese (since the Japanese photographer/scholar/Buddhist was on the scafold), but
intimate with the subject in ways the Westerners could not be. In other words, Japan
 The Great Game 23
would be the perfect and new man with a camera, equipped with both a body of living
piety and a camera eye.
At the core of this Japanese photographic gaze is the concept of synthesis. Besides
the inversive synthesis of the object and subject of the surveying gaze of European
expeditioner, it was also a synthesis of the scientifc vision with Japanese Buddhist
spirituality. Synthesis was, after all, the mantra of Japan’s political ambition in Asia.
The numerical and positivist revisualization of Asia, the land, its culture, and art
was well aligned with the center of the Japanese empire’s own colonial ambition.
As Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) famously wrote, “Asia is One!”31 In the Japanese
imperialist language, Japan was destined as the modern leader of Asia to counter
Western aggression. In the Japanese imperialist view prevalent at the time, the rest
of Asia, in all their reluctance to change and sluggishness to modernize, was doomed
to fall prey to the West, unless they rallied under the strong leadership of a modern
Japan. And Japan’s strength came precisely from being able to adopt the Western colo-
nialist methods and imperialist ideology, while remaining Asian. Okakura’s famous
frst line, “Asia is One,” was “celebrated posthumously by the Japanese military as
the most powerful expression of Japan’s goal of political ascendancy in Asia.”32 While
modernization was regarded as inseparable from, if not integral with, imperialism,
the Japanese imperialist design was predicated on an anti-West Pan-Asian rhetoric
that was also essentialist and totalist in nature. As Richard Jafe argues, the eventual
Japanese reconceptualization of Buddhism as a world religion that had originated in
India and reached the height of its eforescence in Japan was marked with concep-
tions of Pan-Asianism, and in this reconceptualization, the eastward advance of Bud-
dhism and the global spread of Buddhism contributed to the emergence of Japanese
imperialism.33 The Japanese expedition photography, while surveying the rest of Asia
via a Buddhist lens, was also an integral part in the implementation of this imperialist
design.

The Chinese Lens on Dunhuang and the Construction of National Heritage

The Los mission started in 1943, contemporaneous to Nagahiro’s pious invocation
of a Buddhist with a camera photographing the great Buddha of Yungang. To a large
extent, the Los expedition was a direct response to these ongoing Japanese surveying
tours in China. By 1943, the full invasion of the Japanese army in China had come to
the sixth year. Much of China, especially the eastern half of the Chinese map, was under
Japanese occupation. During this long war that lasted eight years, the Japanese military
occupation also made it easier for Japanese explorers, archaeologists, and Buddhist
scholars to gain access to important Chinese cultural and artistic sites. In fact, many of
these trips, though academic, were paid for by important war institutions, such as the
Japanese Manchuria Railway. Oftentimes Japanese scholars gained access to the sites
by riding with the army or fying on Japanese bombers or reconnaissance airplanes.34
During the war, the Republic of China under the rule of the KMT had to move its
capital to Chongqing, a city in the mountainous area in southwestern China. With
this move, it also tried to shift the cultural gravity from the eastern metropolis, such
as Shanghai, to the Western part of China, the multiethnic terrain previously less
industrialized or culturally recognized. Meanwhile, the many Japanese expeditions in
the occupied areas gave Chinese intelligentsia nothing short of a “jolt” (ciji) and cer-
tainly a painful sting on their pride.35 The ensuing expeditionary teams to the western
24 Mia Yinxing Liu
regions dispatched by Chinese institutions did not only stem from an ardent desire for
scientifc knowledge but also the chip on the national shoulder that China’s national
history was enunciated by someone else.36 The painter and sculptor Wang Ziyun
explained why he led the troupe to Dunhuang:

Because Yungang Buddhist caves in Datong, Tianlongshan caves in Taiyuan, and

Baidaishan caves in Hebei all fell into the enemy’s hands in the occupied area, our
expedition team went to Mogao caves in Dunhuang, Tianshui Maijishan caves in
Tianshui, Longmen caves in Luoyang to explore our heritage.37

It was clearly proclaimed as a Chinese race against Japan. In this race, Dunhuang—in
the unoccupied region—became a crucial site for Chinese heritage. On the one hand,
the Chinese academia realized Dunhuang and other Buddhist sites, under the pious
investigative gaze of Japanese expeditioners, became an icon in either a broad site
vaguely named “saiiki” (Western Region) or a Pan-Asian Buddhist landmark, with
Japan as both the starting point and the destination of this paradigm. China in this
paradigm grew less important as a stop, if not entirely discredited and vanquished.
Such a cultural and historical remapping was made especially upsetting in the context
of Japan’s active military invasion. On the other hand, the overall gravity point shift
to the western regions of China also made it possible to rethink China’s postcard herit-
age sites outside of the comfort zone in the monoethnic (Han-centered) eastern coastal
regions. A notion gained increasingly more traction in the 1940s, suggesting that Dun-
huang best represented an ideal of a Chinese cultural empire based on an imagination
of the great Tang dynasty, one that was multicultural, multiethnic, prosperous, poised
at the nerve center of the world’s commerce and communication. Therefore, Chinese
expeditionary photography of Dunhuang, in many ways, was a retaliative insertion of
a nationalistic vision, out of the awareness of being subsumed from the gaze of both
the West and Japan. However, the Los mission, being the last iteration during this long
race, faced its own complex question: what is a Chinese expeditionary photographic
gaze? How was it diferentiated from its many predecessors and competitors?
To this challenge, the Los’ photos demonstrate a rather eclectic yet innovative
approach. As discussed previously, the photographs of the Pelliot mission were
impactful in the institutionalization of Dunhuang in visual culture in the following
decades.38 Pelliot’s photos served as not only an informative guide for the following
photographers but also a source of iconography in the establishing of a Dunhuang
photographic tradition. Chen Wanli (1892–1969), another photographer who went
to Dunhuang in the 1920s, directly acknowledged that Pelliot’s pictures, which he
studied intensely, served as a blueprint for his planning the vantage points prior to the
trip.39 The Los’ photos appear to have continued the convention. James Lo must also
have studied the Pelliot photos very carefully in planning his photographing. Besides
a matter of expediency and convenience, and perhaps paying tribute to the photog-
raphers who visited these magnifcent caves before them, there are also comparative
purposes in repeating the iconographic convention of Dunhuang photography: if we
compare the Los’ photo in Cave 46 with Pelliot’s (Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2), we see
the animal statue has been relocated, and one of the bodhisattvas on the right side
became missing, perhaps due to plunder. On the very same spots, punctuated with a
few years or decades, photographers took pictures with the same framing but expected
the alterations that time and circumstances have brought upon the site.
 The Great Game 25

Figure 2.1 Cave 46, northwestern corner.

Photography was not widespread in archaeological practices until the 1880s, when
there was an increasing call for archaeology to provide feldwork and nonliterary evi-
dence. The photographic medium answered this need as it was believed to ofer vali-
dation of the authenticity of the information recorded, besides the convenience it as a
mechanical device ofered the archaeologist during feldwork. Archaeological photog-
raphy conventionalized a methodic shooting process that emphasized an abundance
of images, or visual data, on the subject in diferent light, from a variety of angles, in
details and views sharply in focus. It brought a “depersonalized vision” to archaeol-
ogy.40 Nevertheless, behind this new methodical and rational vision, in practice, the
person who efectively disappeared was only the photographer, not the archaeologist.
Few knew about Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein’s photographers, nor Pelliot’s indispensa-
ble Charles Nouette. But Stein and others were celebrated as rock stars that discovered
the world. The photos on these trips reached far beyond the scientifc evidence that
they were purported to provide, testifying and intensifying the “romance” of archaeo-
logical adventures: to venture into uncharted territory, to fght of elements of weather,
arid land, hostile forces and captivation, the narrow escapes, and so on. These photos
displayed his (the male adventurer’s) bravado and knowledge conquering a land that
was arid, therefore pure theater, rich and ripe for “discoveries.”
But the Japanese intervention in these expeditionary photo history ofered a varia-
tion to the “depersonalized view” of archaeology photography and the expeditioner
as a romantic hero. What emerged behind the camera was no longer a rational and
savant archaeologist, nor an Indiana Jones who saves the world, but an Asian man
with emotion, an emotion confgured as Buddhist piety. Instead of merely record-
ing the dry data, Nagahiro believed their mission was signifcantly diferent from
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 All this is as wrong-headed as it can be. While he is filling his museum
he does not seem to understand that he is denuding every necropolis in
Egypt. I will give one or two instances of the destruction wrought by western
museums. I take them at random from my memory.
In the year 1900 the then Inspector-General of Antiquities in Upper Egypt
discovered a tomb at Thebes in which there was a beautiful relief sculptured
on one of the walls, representing Queen Tiy. This he photographed, and the
tomb was once more buried. In 1908 I chanced upon this monument, and
proposed to open it up as a show place for visitors; but alas!—the relief of
the queen had disappeared, and only a gaping hole in the wall remained. It
appears that robbers had entered the tomb at about the time of the change of
inspectors; and, realising that this relief would make a valuable exhibit for
some western museum, they had cut out of the wall as much as they could
conveniently carry away—namely, the head and upper part of the figure of
Tiy. The hieroglyphic inscription which was sculptured near the head was
carefully erased, in case it should contain some reference to the name of the
tomb from which they were taking the fragment; and over the face some
false inscriptions were scribbled in Greek characters, so as to give the stone
an unrecognisable appearance. In this condition it was conveyed to a dealer’s
shop, and it now forms one of the exhibits in the Royal Museum at Brussels.
In the same museum, and in others also, there are fragments of beautiful
sculpture hacked out of the walls of the famous tomb of Khaemhet at
Thebes. In the British Museum there are large pieces of wall-paintings
broken out of Theban tombs. The famous inscription in the tomb of Anena at
Thebes, which was one of the most important texts of the early Eighteenth
Dynasty, was smashed to pieces several years ago to be sold in small
sections to museums; and a certain scholar was instrumental in purchasing
back for us eleven of the fragments, which have now been replaced in the
tomb, and with certain fragments in Europe, form the sole remnant of the
once imposing stela.
One of the most important scenes out of the famous reliefs of the
Expedition to Pount, at Dêr el Bahri, found its way into the hands of the
dealers, and was ultimately purchased by the museum in Cairo. The
beautiful and important reliefs which decorated the tomb of Horemheb at
Sakkâra, hacked out of the walls by robbers, are now exhibited in six
different museums; London, Leyden, Vienna, Bologna, Alexandria, and
Cairo. Of the two hundred tombs of the nobles now to be seen at Thebes, I
cannot, at the moment, recall a single one which had not suffered in this
manner at some time previous to the organisation of the present strict
supervision which was instituted by Mr. Carter and myself.
The curators of western museums will argue that had they not purchased
these fragments they would have fallen into the hands of less desirable
owners. This is quite true, and, indeed, it forms the nearest approach to
justification that can be discovered. Nevertheless, it has to be remembered
that this purchasing of antiquities is the best stimulus to the robber, who is
well aware that a market is always to be found for his stolen goods. It may
seem difficult to censure the purchaser, for certainly the fragments were
“stray” when the bargain was struck, and it is the business of the curator to
collect stray antiquities. But why were they stray? Why were they ever cut
from the walls of the Egyptian monuments? Assuredly because the robbers
knew that museums would purchase them. If there had been no demand
there would have been no supply.
To ask the curators to change their policy, and to purchase only those
objects which are legitimately on sale, would, of course, be as futile as to ask
the nations to disarm. The rivalry between museum and museum would
alone prevent a cessation of this indiscriminate traffic. I can see only one
way in which a more sane and moral attitude can be introduced, and that is
by the development of the habit of visiting Egypt and of working upon
archæological subjects in the shadow of the actual monuments. Only the
person who is familiar with Egypt can know the cost of supplying the stay-
at-home scholar with exhibits for his museums. Only one who has resided in
Egypt can understand the fact that Egypt itself is the real place for Egyptian
monuments. He alone can appreciate the work of the Egyptian Government
in preserving the remains of ancient days.
The resident in Egypt, interested in archæology, comes to look with a
kind of horror upon museums, and to feel extraordinary hostility to what
may be called the museum spirit. He sees with his own eyes the half-
destroyed tombs, which to the museum curator are things far off and not
visualised. While the curator is blandly saying to his visitor: “See, I will now
show you a beautiful fragment of sculpture from a distant and little-known
Theban tomb,” the white resident in Egypt, with black murder in his heart, is
saying: “See, I will show you a beautiful tomb of which the best part of one
wall is utterly destroyed that a fragment might be hacked out for a distant
and little-known European or American museum.”
 To a resident in Europe, Egypt seems to be a strange and barbaric land,
far, far away beyond the hills and seas; and her monuments are thought to be
at the mercy of wild Bedouin Arabs. In the less recent travel books there is
not a published drawing of a temple in the Nile Valley but has its
complement of Arab figures grouped in picturesque attitudes. Here a fire is
being lit at the base of a column, and the black smoke curls upwards to
destroy the paintings thereon; here a group of children sport upon the lap of
a colossal statue; and here an Arab tethers his camel at the steps of the high
altar. It is felt, thus, that the objects exhibited in European museums have
been rescued from Egypt and recovered from a distant land. This is not so.
They have been snatched from Egypt and lost to the country of their origin.
He who is well acquainted with Egypt knows that hundreds of watchmen,
and a small army of inspectors, engineers, draughtsmen, surveyors, and other
officials now guard these monuments, that strong iron gates bar the
doorways against unauthorised visitors, that hourly patrols pass from
monument to monument, and that any damage done is punished by long
terms of imprisonment; he knows that the Egyptian Government spends
hundreds of thousands of pounds upon safeguarding the ancient remains; he
is aware that the organisation of the Department of Antiquities is an
extremely important branch of the Ministry of Public Works. He has seen the
temples swept and garnished, the tombs lit by electric light and the
sanctuaries carefully rebuilt. He has spun out to the Pyramids in the electric
tramcar or in a taxi-cab; has strolled in evening dress through the halls of
Karnak, after dinner at the hotel; and has rung up the Theban Necropolis on
the telephone.
A few seasons’ residence in Egypt shifts the point of view in a startling
manner. No longer is the country either distant or insecure; and, realising
this, the student becomes more balanced, and he sees both sides of the
question with equal clearness. The archæologist may complain that it is too
expensive a matter to travel to Egypt. But why, then, are not the expenses of
such a journey met by the various museums? Quite a small sum will pay for
a student’s winter in Egypt and his journey to and from that country. Such a
sum is given readily enough for the purchase of an antiquity; but surely
right-minded students are a better investment than wrongly-acquired
antiquities.
It must be now pointed out, as a third argument,
The author standing upon the cliffs between the Temple of Dêr el Bahri and the Valley of the Tombs of
the KingsThe author standing upon the cliffs between the Temple of Dêr el Bahri and the Valley of the
Tombs of the Kings

that an Egyptologist cannot study his subject properly unless he be

thoroughly familiar with Egypt and modern Egyptians.
A student who is accustomed to sit at home, working in his library or
museum, and who has never resided in Egypt, or has but travelled for a short
time in that country, may do extremely useful work in one way or another,
but that work will not be faultless. It will be, as it were, lop-sided; it will be
coloured with hues of the west, unknown to the land of the Pharaohs and
antithetical thereto. A London architect may design an apparently charming
villa for a client in Jerusalem, but unless he know by actual and prolonged
experience the exigencies of the climate of Palestine, he will be liable to
make a sad mess of his job. By bitter experience the military commanders
learnt in the late war that a plan of campaign prepared at home was of little
use to them. The cricketer may play a very good game upon the home
ground, but upon a foreign pitch the first straight ball will send his bails
flying into the clear blue sky.
An archæologist who attempts to record the material relating to the
manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians cannot complete his task, or
even assure himself of the accuracy of his statements, unless he has studied
the modern customs and made himself acquainted with the permanent
conditions of the country. The modern Egyptians are the same people as
those who bowed the knee to Pharaoh, and many of their customs still
survive. A student can no more hope to understand the story of Pharaonic
times without an acquaintance with Egypt as she now is than a modern
statesman can hope to understand his own times solely from a study of the
past.
Nothing is more paralysing to a student of archæology than continuous
book-work. A collection of hard facts is an extremely beneficial mental
exercise, but the deductions drawn from such a collection should be regarded
as an integral part of the work. The road-maker must also walk upon his road
to the land whither it leads him; the ship-builder must ride the seas in his
vessel, though they be uncharted and unfathomed. Too often the professor
will set his students to a compilation which leads them no farther than the
final fair copy. They will be asked to make for him, with infinite labour, a
list of the High Priests of Amon; but unless he has encouraged them to put
such life into those figures that each one shall seem to step from the page to
confront his recorder, unless the name of each shall call to mind the very
scenes amidst which he worshipped, then is the work uninspired and
deadening to the student.
A catalogue of ancient scarabs is required, let us suppose, and the
students are set to work upon it. They examine hundreds of specimens, they
record the variations in design, they note the differences in the glaze or
material. But can they picture the man who wore the scarab?—can they
reconstruct in their minds the scene in the workshop wherein the scarab was
made?—can they hear the song of the workmen or their laughter when the
overseer was not nigh? In a word, does the scarab mean history to them, the
history of a period, of a dynasty, of a craft? Assuredly not, unless the
students know Egypt and the Egyptians, have heard their songs and their
laughter, have watched their modern arts and crafts. Only then are they in a
position to reconstruct the picture.
The late Theodore Roosevelt, in his Romanes lecture at Oxford, gave it as
his opinion that the industrious collector of facts occupied an honourable but
not an exalted position; and he added that the merely scientific historian
must rest content with the honour, substantial, but not of the highest type,
that belongs to him who gathers material which some time some master shall
arise to use. Now every student should aim to be a master, to use the material
which he has so laboriously collected; and though at the beginning of his
career, and indeed throughout his life, the gathering of material is a most
important part of his work, he should never compile solely for the sake of
compilation, unless he be content to serve simply as a clerk of archæology.
An archæologist must be a historian. He must conjure up the past; he
must play the Witch of Endor. His lists and indices, his catalogues and note-
books, must be but the spells which he uses to invoke the dead. The spells
have no potency until they are pronounced: the lists of Kings of Egypt have
no more than an accidental value until they call before the curtain of the
mind those monarchs themselves. It is the business of the archæologist to
wake the dreaming dead: not to send the living to sleep. It is his business to
make the stones tell their tale: not to petrify the listener. It is his business to
put motion and commotion into the past that the present may see and hear:
not to pin it down, spatchcocked, like a dead thing. In a word, the
archæologist must be in command of that faculty which is known as the
historic imagination, without which Dean Stanley was of opinion that the
story of the past could not be told. “Trust Nature,” said Dryden. “Do not
labour to be dull!”
But how can that imagination be at once exerted and controlled as it
needs must be, unless the archæologist be so well acquainted with the
conditions of the country about which he writes that his pictures of it can be
said to be accurate? The student must allow himself to be saturated by the
very waters of the Nile before he can permit himself to write of Egypt. He
must know the modern Egyptians before he can construct his model of
Pharaoh and his court.
When the mummy of Akhnaton was discovered and was proved to be that
of a man of only thirty years of age, many persons doubted the identification
on the grounds that the king was known to have been married at the time
when he came to the throne, seventeen years before his death, and it was
freely stated that a marriage at the age of eleven or twelve was impossible
and out of the question. Thus it actually remained for the present writer to
point out that the fact of the king’s death occurring seventeen years after his
marriage practically fixed his age at his decease at not much above twenty-
nine years, so unlikely was it that his marriage would have been delayed
beyond his twelfth year. Those who doubted the identification on such
grounds were showing all too clearly that the manners and customs of the
Egyptians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so many of which have
come down intact from olden times, were unknown to them.
Here we come to the root of the trouble. The Egyptologist who has not
resided for some time in Egypt, is inclined to allow his ideas regarding the
ancient customs of the land to be influenced by his unconsciously-acquired
knowledge of the habits of the west. But is he blind that he sees not the great
gulf fixed between the ways of the east and those of his accustomed west? It
is of no value to science to record the life of Thutmosis III with Napoleon as
our model for it, nor to describe the daily life of the Pharaoh with the person
of an English king before our mind’s eye. Our western experience will not
give us material for the imagination to work upon in dealing with Egypt. The
setting for our Pharaonic pictures must be derived from Egypt alone; and no
Egyptologist’s work that is more than a simple compilation is of value unless
the sunlight and the sandy glare of Egypt have burnt into his eyes, and have
been reflected on to the pages under his pen.
The archæologist must possess the historic imagination, but it must be
confined to its proper channels. It is impossible to exert this imagination
without, as a consequence, a figure rising up before the mind partially
furnished with the details of a personality and fully endowed with the broad
character of an individual. The first lesson, thus, which we must learn is that
of allowing no incongruity to appear in our figures. In ancient history there
can seldom be sufficient data at the Egyptologist’s disposal with which to
build up a complete figure; and his puppets must come upon the stage sadly
deficient, as it were, in arms, legs, and apparel suitable to them, unless he
know from an experience of modern Egyptians how to restore them and to
clothe them in good taste. The substance upon which the imagination works
must be no less than a collective knowledge of the people of the nation in
question. Rameses must be constructed from an acquaintance with many a
Pasha of modern Egypt, and his Chief Butler must reflect the known
characteristics of a hundred Beys and Effendis. Without such “padding” the
figures will remain but names, and with names Egyptology is already over-
stocked.
It is remarkable to notice how little is known regarding the great
personalities in history. Taking three characters at random: we know
extremely little that is authentic regarding King Arthur; our knowledge of
the actual history of Boadicea is extremely meagre; and the precise historian
would have to dismiss Pontius Pilate in a few paragraphs. But let the
archæologist know so well the manners and customs of the period with
which he is dealing that he will not, like the author of the stories of the Holy
Grail, dress Arthur in the armour of the thirteenth century, nor fill the mind
of Pilate with the thoughts of a modern Colonial Governor; let him be so
well trained in scientific cautiousness that he will not give unquestioned
credence to the legends of the past; let him have sufficient knowledge of the
nation to which his hero or heroine belonged to be able to fill up the lacunæ
with a kind of collective appreciation and estimate of the national
characteristics—and I do not doubt that his interpretations will hold good till
the end of all history.
The Egyptologist to whom Egypt is not a living reality is handicapped in
his labours more unfairly than is realised by him. Avoid Egypt, and though
your brains be of vast capacity, though your eyes be never raised from your
books, you will yet remain in many ways an ignoramus, liable to be
corrected by the merest tourist in the Nile valley. But come with me to a
Theban garden that I know, where, on some still evening, the dark palms are
reflected in the placid Nile, and the acacias are mellowed by the last light of
the sunset; where, in leafy bowers, the grapes cluster overhead, and the fig-
tree is burdened with fruit. Beyond the broad sheet of the river rise those
unchanging hills which encompass the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings;
and at their foot, dimly seen in the evening haze, sit the twin colossi, as they
have sat since the days of Amenophis the Magnificent. The stars begin to be
seen through the leaves now that the daylight dies, and presently the Milky
Way becomes apparent, stretching across the vault of the night, as when it
was believed to be the Nile of the Heavens.
The owls hoot to one another through the garden; and at the edge of the
alabaster tank wherein the dusk is mirrored, a frog croaks unseen amidst the
lilies. Even so croaked he on this very ground in those days when, typifying
eternity, he seemed to utter the endless refrain, “I am the resurrection, I am
the resurrection,” into the ears of men and maidens beneath these self-same
stars.
And now a boat floats past, on its way to Karnak, silhouetted against the
last-left light of the sky. There is music and song on board. The sound of the
pipes is carried over the water and pulses to the ears, inflaming the
imagination with the sorcery of its cadences and stirring the blood by its
bold rhythm. The gentle breeze brings the scent of many flowers to the
nostrils, and with these come drifting thoughts and undefined fancies, so that
presently the busy considerations of the day are lulled and forgotten. The
twilight seems to cloak the extent of the years, and in the gathering darkness
the procession of the centuries is hidden. Yesterday and to-day are mingled
together, and there is nothing to distinguish to the eye the one age from the
other. An immortal, brought suddenly to the garden at this hour, could not
say from direct observation whether he had descended from the clouds into
the twentieth century before or the twentieth century after Christ; and the
sound of the festal pipes in the passing boat would but serve to confuse him
the more.
In such a garden as this the student will learn more Egyptology than he
could assimilate in many an hour’s study at home; for here his five senses
play the student and Egypt herself is his teacher. While he may read in his
books how this Pharaoh or that feasted o’ nights in his palace beside the
river, here, not in fallible imagination but in actual fact, he may see Nilus
and the Lybian desert to which the royal eyes were turned, may smell the
very perfume of the palace garden, and may hearken to the self-same sounds
that lulled a king to sleep in Hundred-gated Thebes.
Not in the west, but only by the waters of the Nile will he learn how best
to be an historian of ancient Egypt, and in what manner to make his studies
of interest, as well as of technical value, to his readers, for he will here
discover the great secret of his profession. Suddenly the veil will be lifted
from his understanding, and he will become aware that Past and Present are
so indissoluble as to be incapable of separate interpretation or single study.
He will learn that there is no such thing as a distinct Past or a defined
Present. “Yesterday this day’s madness did prepare,” and the affairs of
bygone times must be interpreted in the light of recent events. The Past is
alive to-day and all the deeds of man in all the ages are living at this hour in
offspring. There is no real death. The earthly grave will not hide, nor the
mountain tomb imprison, the actions of the men of old Egypt, so consequent
and fruitful are all human affairs. This is the knowledge which will make the
Egyptologist’s work of lasting value; and nowhere else save in Egypt can he
acquire it. This, indeed, for him is the secret of the Sphinx; and only at the
lips of the Sphinx itself can he learn it.
 CHAPTER II

THE NECESSITY OF ARCHÆOLOGY TO THE GAIETY OF THE WORLD

When a great man puts a period to his existence upon earth by dying, he is
carefully buried in a tomb and a monument is set up to his glory in the
neighbouring church. He may then be said to begin his second life, his life in
the memory of the chronicler and historian. After the lapse of an æon or two
the works of the historian, and perhaps the tomb itself, are rediscovered; and
the great man begins his third life, now as a subject of discussion and
controversy amongst archæologists in the pages of a scientific journal. It
may be supposed that the spirit of the great man, not a little pleased with his
second life, has an extreme distaste for his third. There is a dead atmosphere
about it which sets him yawning as only his grave yawned before. The
charm has been taken from his deeds; there is no longer any spring in them.
He must feel towards the archæologist much as a young man feels towards
his cold-blooded parent by whom his love affair has just been found out. The
public, too, if by chance it comes upon this archæological journal, finds the
discussion nothing more than a mental gymnastic, which, as the reader drops
off to sleep, gives him the impression that the writer is a man of profound
brain capacity, but, like the remains of the great man of olden times, as dry
as dust.
There is one thing, however, which has been overlooked. This scientific
journal does not contain the ultimate results of the archæologist’s researches.
It contains the researches themselves. The public, so to speak, has been
listening to the pianist playing his morning scales, has been watching the
artist mixing his colours, has been examining the unshaped block of marble
and the chisels in the sculptor’s studio. It must be confessed, of course, that
the archæologist has so enjoyed his researches that often the ultimate result
has been overlooked by him. In the case of Egyptian archæology, for
example, there are only two or three Egyptologists who have ever set
themselves to write a readable history, whereas the number of books which
record the facts of the science is legion.
The archæologist not infrequently lives, for a large part of his time, in a
museum. However clean it may be, he is surrounded by rotting tapestries,
decaying bones, crumbling stones, and rusted or corroded metal objects. His
indoor work has paled his cheek, and his muscles are not like iron bands. He
stands, often, in the contiguity to an ancient broadsword most fitted to
demonstrate the fact that he could never use it. He would probably be
dismissed his curatorship were he to tell of any dreams which might run in
his head—dreams of the time when those tapestries hung upon the walls of
barons’ banquet-halls, or when those stones rose high above the streets of
Camelot.
Moreover, those who make researches independently must needs
contribute their results to scientific journals, written in the jargon of the
learned. I came across a now forgotten journal, a short time ago, in which an
English gentleman, believing that he had made a discovery in the province
of Egyptian hieroglyphs, announced it in ancient Greek. There would be no
supply of such pedantic swagger were there not a demand for it.
Small wonder, then, that the archæologist is often represented as
partaking somewhat of the quality of the dust amidst which he works. It is
not necessary here to discuss whether this estimate is just or not: I only wish
to point out its paradoxical nature.
More than any other science, archæology might be expected to supply its
exponents with stuff that, like old wine, would fire the blood and stimulate
the senses. The stirring events of the Past must often be reconstructed by the
archæologist with such precision that his prejudices are aroused, and his
sympathies are so enlisted as to set him fighting with a will under this banner
or under that. The noise of the hardy strife of young nations is not yet
silenced for him, nor have the flags and the pennants faded from sight. He
has knowledge of the state secrets of kings, and, all along the line, is an
intimate spectator of the crowded pageant of history. The caravan-masters of
the past, the admirals of the “great green sea,” the captains of archers, have
related their adventures to him; and he might repeat to you their stories.
Indeed, he has such a tale to tell that, looking at it in this light, one might
expect his listeners all to be good sturdy men and noble women. It might be
supposed that the archæologist would gather round him only men who have
pleasure in the road that leads over the hills, and women who have known
the delight of the open. One has heard so often of the “brave days of old”
that the archæologist might well be expected to have his head stuffed with
brave tales and little else.
His range, however, may be wider than this. To him, perhaps, it has been
given to listen to the voice of the ancient poet, heard as a far-off whisper; to
breathe in forgotten gardens the perfume of long dead flowers; to
contemplate the love of women whose beauty is perished in the dust; to
hearken to the sound of the harp and the sistra; to be the possessor of the
riches of historical romance. Dim armies have battled around him for the
love of Helen; shadowy captains of sea-going ships have sung to him
through the storm the song of the sweethearts left behind them; he has
feasted with sultans, and kings’ goblets have been held to his lips; he has
watched Uriah the Hittite sent to the forefront of the battle.
Thus, were he to offer a story, one might now suppose that there would
gather around him, not the men of muscle, but a throng of sallow listeners,
as improperly expectant as were those who hearkened under the moon to the
narrations of Boccaccio, or, in old Baghdad, gave ear to the tales of the
thousand and one nights. One might suppose that his audience would be
drawn from those classes most fondly addicted to pleasure, or most nearly
representative, in their land and in their time, of the light-hearted and not
unwanton races of whom he had to tell.
Who could better arrest the attention of the coxcomb than the
archæologist who has knowledge of silks and scents now lost to the living
world? To the gourmet who could more appeal than the archæologist who
has made abundant acquaintance with the forgotten dishes of the East? Who
could more surely thrill the senses of the courtesan than the archæologist
who can relate that which was whispered by Antony in the ear of Cleopatra?
To the gambler who could be more enticing than the archæologist who has
seen kings play at dice for their kingdoms? The imaginative, truly, might
well collect the most highly disreputable audience to listen to the tales of the
archæologist.
But no, these are not the people who are anxious to catch the pearls which
drop from his mouth. Do statesmen and diplomatists, then, listen to him who
can unravel for them the policies of the Past? Do business men hasten from
Threadneedle Street and Wall Street to sit at his feet, that they may have
instilled into them a little of the romance of ancient money? I fear not.
Come with me to some provincial town, where this day Professor Blank
is to deliver one of his archæological lectures at the Town Hall. We are met
at the door by the secretary of the local archæological society: a melancholy
lady in green plush, who suffers from St. Vitus’s dance. Gloomily we enter
the hall and silently accept the seats which are indicated to us by an
unfortunate gentleman with a club-foot. In front of us an elderly female with
short hair is chatting to a very plain young woman draped like a lay figure.
On the right an emaciated man with a very bad cough shuffles on his chair;
on the left two old grey-beards grumble to one another about the weather, a
subject which leads up to the familiar “Mine catches me in the small of the
back”; while behind us the inevitable curate, of whose appearance it would
be trite to speak, describes to an astonished old lady the recent discovery of
the pelvis of a mastodon.
The professor and the aged chairman step on to the platform; and, amidst
the profoundest gloom, the latter rises to pronounce the prefatory rigmarole.
“Archæology,” he says, in a voice of brass, “is a science which bars its doors
to all but the most erudite; for, to the layman who has not been vouchsafed
the opportunity of studying the dusty volumes of the learned, the bones of
the dead will not reveal their secrets, nor will the crumbling pediments of
naos and cenotaph, the obliterated tombstones, or the worm-eaten
parchments, tell us their story. To-night, however, we are privileged! for
Professor Blank will open the doors for us that we may gaze for a moment
upon that solemn charnel-house of the Past in which he has sat for so many
long hours of inductive meditation.”
And the professor by his side, whose head, perhaps, was filled with the
martial music of the long-lost hosts of the Lord, or before whose eyes there
swayed the entrancing forms of the dancing-girls of Babylon, stares horrified
from chairman to audience. He sees crabbed old men and barren old women
before him, afflicted youths and fatuous maidens; and he realises at once that
the golden keys which he possesses to the gates of the treasury of the
jewelled Past will not open the doors of that charnel-house which they desire
to be shown. The scent of the king’s roses fades from his nostrils, the
Egyptian music which throbbed in his ears is hushed, the glorious
illumination of the Palace of a Thousand Columns is extinguished; and in the
gathering gloom we leave him fumbling with a rusty key at the mildewed
door of the Place of Bones.
Why is it, one asks, that archæology is a thing so misunderstood? Can it
be that both lecturer and audience have crushed down that which was in
reality uppermost in their minds: that a shy search for romance has led these
people to the Town Hall? Or perchance archæology has become to them
something not unlike a vice, and to listen to an archæological lecture is their
remaining chance of being naughty. It may be that, having one foot in the
grave, they take pleasure in kicking the moss from the surrounding
tombstones with the other; or that, being denied, for one reason or another,
the jovial society of the living, like Robert Southey’s “Scholar” their hopes
are with the dead.
Be the explanation what it may, the fact is indisputable that archæology is
patronised by those who know not its real meaning. A man has no more right
to think of the people of old as dust and dead bones than he has to think of
his contemporaries as lumps of meat. The true archæologist does not take
pleasure in skeletons as skeletons, for his whole effort is to cover them
decently with flesh and skin once more and to put some thoughts back into
the empty skulls. Nor does he delight in ruined buildings: rather he deplores
that they are ruined. Coleridge wrote like the true archaeologist when he
composed that most magical poem “Khubla Khan”——

“In Xanadu did Khubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”

And those who would have the pleasure-domes of the gorgeous Past
reconstructed for them must turn to the archæologist; those who would see
the damsel with the dulcimer in the gardens of Xanadu must ask of him the
secret, and of none other. It is true that, before he can refashion the dome or
the damsel, he will have to grub his way through old refuse heaps till he
shall lay bare the ruins of the walls and expose the bones of the lady. But this
is the “dirty work”; and the mistake which is made lies here: that this
preliminary dirty work is confused with the final clean result. An artist will
sometimes build up his picture of Venus from a skeleton bought from an old
Jew round the corner; and the smooth white paper which he uses will have
been made from putrid rags and bones. Amongst painters themselves these
facts are not hidden, but by the public they are most carefully obscured. In
the case of archæology, however, the tedious details of construction are so
placed in the foreground that the final picture is hardly noticed at all. As well
might one go to an aerodrome to see men fly, and be shown nothing else but
screws and nuts, steel rods and woodwork. Originally the fault, perhaps, lay
with the archæologist; now it lies both with him and with the public. The
public has learnt to ask to be shown the works, and the archæologist is often
so proud of them that he forgets to mention the purpose of the machine.
 A Roman statue of bronze, let us suppose, is discovered in the Thames
valley. It is so corroded and eaten away that only an expert could recognise
that it represents a reclining goddess. In this condition it is placed in the
museum, and a photograph of it is published in the daily paper. Those who
come to look at it in its glass case think it is a bunch of grapes, or possibly a
monkey; those who see its photograph say that it is more probably an
irregular catapult-stone or a fish in convulsions.
The archæologist alone holds its secret, and only he can see it as it was.
He alone can know the mind of the artist who made it, or interpret the full
meaning of the conception. It might have been expected, then, that the public
would demand, and the archæologist delightedly furnish, a model of the
figure as near to the original as possible; or, failing that, a restoration in
drawing, or even a worded description of its original beauty. But no: the
public, if it wants anything, wants to see the shapeless object in all its
corrosion; and the archæologist forgets that it is blind to aught else but that
corrosion. One of the main duties of the archæologist is thus lost sight of: his
duty as Interpreter and Remembrancer of the Past.
All the riches of olden times, all the majesty, all the power, are the
inheritance of the present day; and the archæologist is the recorder of this
fortune. He must deal in dead bones only so far as the keeper of a financial
fortune must deal in dry documents. Behind those documents glitters the
gold, and behind those bones shines the wonder of the things that were. And
when an object once beautiful has by age become unsightly one might
suppose that he would wish to show it to none save his colleagues or the
reasonably curious layman. When a man makes a statement that his
grandmother, now in her ninety-ninth year, was once a beautiful woman, he
does not go and find her to prove his words and bring her tottering into the
room: he shows a picture of her as she was; or, if he cannot find one, he
describes what good evidence tells him was her probable appearance. In
allowing his controlled and sober imagination thus to perform its natural
functions, though it would never do to tell his grandmother so, he becomes
an archæologist, a Remembrancer of the Past.
In the case of archæology, however, the public does not permit itself to be
convinced. In the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford excellent facsimile
electrotypes of early Greek weapons are exhibited; and these have far more
value in bringing the Past before us than the actual weapons of that period,
corroded and broken, would have. But the visitor says “These are shams,”
and passes on.
It will be seen, then, that the business of archæology is often
misunderstood both by archæologists and by the public; and that there is
really no reason to believe, with Thomas Earle, that the real antiquarian
loves a thing the better for that it is rotten and stinketh. That the impression
has gone about is his own fault, for he has exposed too much to view the
mechanism of his work; but it is also the fault of the public for not asking of
him a picture of things as they were.
Man is by nature a creature of the present. It is only by an effort that he
can consider the future, and it is often quite impossible for him to give any
heed at all to the past. The days of old are so blurred and remote that it
seems right to him that any relic from them should, by the maltreatment of
Time, be unrecognisable. The finding of an old sword, half-eaten by rust,
will only please him in so far as it shows him once more by its sad condition
the great gap between those days and these, and convinces him again of the
sole importance of the present. The archæologist, he will tell you, is a fool if
he expects him to be interested in a wretched old bit of scrapiron. He is right.
It would be as rash to suppose that he would find interest in an ancient sword
in its rusted condition as it would be to expect the spectator at the aerodrome
to find fascination in the nuts and screws. The true archæologist would hide
that corroded weapon in his work-shop, where his fellow-workers alone
could see it. For he recognises that it is only the sword which is as good as
new that impresses the public; it is only the Present that counts. That is the
real reason why he is an archæologist. He has turned to the Past because he
is in love with the Present. He, more than any man, worships at the altar of
the goddess of To-day; and he is so desirous of extending her dominion that
he has adventured, like a crusader, into the lands of the Past, in order to
subject them to her. Adoring the Now, he would resent the publicity of
anything which so obviously suggested the Then as a rust-eaten old blade.
His whole business is to hide the gap between Yesterday and To-day; and,
unless a man be initiate, he would have him either see the perfect sword as it
was when it sought the foeman’s bowels, or see nothing. The Present is too
small for him; and it is therefore that he calls so insistently to the Past to
come forth from the darkness to augment it. The ordinary man lives in the
Present, and he will tell one that the archæologist lives in the Past. This is
not so. The layman, in the manner of the little Nationalist, lives in a small
and confined Present; but the archæologist, like a true Imperialist, ranges
through all time, and calls it not the Past but the Greater Present.
The archæologist is not, or ought not to be, lacking in vivacity. One might
say that he is so sensible to the charms of society that, finding his
companions too few in number, he has drawn the olden times to him to
search them for jovial men and agreeable women. It might be added that he
has so laughed at jest and joke that, fearing lest the funds of humour run dry,
he has gathered the laughter of all the years to his enrichment. Certainly he
has so delighted in noble adventure and stirring action that he finds his
newspaper insufficient to his needs, and fetches to his aid the tales of old
heroes. In fact, the archæologist is so enamoured of life that he would raise
all the dead from their graves. He will not have it that the men of old are
dust: he would bring them forth to share with him the sunlight which he
finds so precious. He is so much an enemy of Death and Decay that he
would rob them of their harvest; and, for every life that the foe has claimed,
he would raise up, if he could, a memory that would continue to live.
The meaning of the heading which has been given to this chapter is now
becoming clear, and the direction of the argument is already apparent. So far
it has been my purpose to show that the archæologist is not a rag-and-bone
man, though the public generally thinks he is, and he often thinks he is
himself. The attempt has been made to suggest that archæology ought not to
consist in sitting in a charnel-house amongst the dead, but rather in ignoring
that place and taking the bones into the light of day, decently clad in flesh
and finery. It has now to be shown in what manner this parading of the Past
is needful to the gaiety of the Present.
Amongst cultured people whose social position makes it difficult for
them to dance in circles on the grass in order to express or to stimulate their
gaiety, and whose school of deportment will not permit them to sing a merry
song of sixpence as they trip down the streets, there is some danger of the
fire of merriment dying for want of fuel. Vivacity in printed books, therefore,
has been encouraged, so that the mind at least, if not the body, may skip
about and clap its hands. A portly gentleman with a solemn face, reading his
“Punch” or his “Life” in the club, is, after all, giving play to precisely those
same humours which in ancient days might have led him, like Georgy Porgy,
to kiss the girls or to perform any other merry joke. It is necessary, therefore,
ever to enlarge the stock of things humorous, vivacious, or rousing, if the
thoughts are to be kept young and eyes bright in this age of restraint. What
would Yuletide be without the olden times to bolster it up? What would the
Christmas numbers do without the pictures of our great-grand-parents’
coaches snowbound, of huntsmen of the eighteenth century, of jesters at the
courts of the barons? What should we do without the “Vicar of Wakefield,”
the “Compleat Angler,” “Pepys’ Diary,” and all the rest of the ancient
books? And, going back a few centuries, what an amount we should miss
had we not “Æsop’s Fables,” the “Odyssey,” the tales of the Trojan War, and
so on. It is from the archæologist that one must expect the augmentation of
this supply; and just in that degree in which the existing supply is really a
necessary part of our equipment, so archæology, which looks for more, is
necessary to our gaiety.
In order to keep his intellect undulled by the routine of his dreary work,
Matthew Arnold was wont to write a few lines of poetry each day. Poetry,
like music and song, is an effective dispeller of care; and those who find
Omar Khayyam or “In Memoriam” incapable of removing the burden of
their woes, will no doubt appreciate the “Owl and the Pussy-cat,” or the Bab
Ballads. In some form or other verse and song are closely linked with
happiness; and a ditty from any age has its interest and its charm.

“She gazes at the stars above:

I would I were the skies,
That I might gaze upon my love
With such a thousand eyes!”

That is from the Greek of a writer who is not much read by the public at
large, and whose works are the legitimate property of the antiquarian. It
suffices to show that it is not only to the moderns that we have to look for
dainty verse that is conducive to a light heart. The following lines are from
the ancient Egyptian:—

“While in my room I lie all day

In pain that will not pass away,
The neighbours come and go.
Ah, if with them my darling came
The doctors would be put to shame:
She understands my woe.”

Such examples might be multiplied indefinitely; and the reader will admit
that there is as much of a lilt about those which are here quoted as there is
about the majority of the ditties which he has hummed to himself in his hour
of contentment. Here is Philodemus’ description of his mistress’s charms:—

“My lady-love is small and brown;

My lady’s skin is soft as down;
Her hair like parsley twists and turns;
Her voice with magic passion burns....”

And here is an ancient Egyptian’s description of not very dissimilar

phenomena:—

“A damsel sweet unto the sight,

A maid of whom no like there is;
Black are her tresses as the night,
And blacker than the blackberries.”

Does not the archæologist perform a service to his contemporaries by

searching out such rhymes and delving for more? They bring with them,
moreover, so subtle a suggestion of bygone romance, they are backed by so
fair a scene of Athenian luxury or Theban splendour, that they possess a
charm not often felt in modern verse. If it is argued that there is no need to
increase the present supply of such ditties, since they are really quite
unessential to our gaiety, the answer may be given that no nation and no
period has ever found them unessential; and a light heart has been expressed
in this manner since man came down from the trees.
Let us turn now to another consideration. For a man to be light of heart he
must have confidence in humanity. He cannot greet the morn with a smiling
countenance if he believe that he and his fellows are slipping down the broad
path which leads to destruction. The archæologist never despairs of
mankind; for he has seen nations rise and fall till he is almost giddy, but he
knows that there has never been a general deterioration. He realises that
though a great nation may suffer defeat and annihilation, it is possible for it
to go down in such a thunder that the talk of it stimulates other nations for all
time. He sees, if any man can, that all things work together for happiness. He
has observed the cycle of events, the good years and the bad; and in an evil
time he is comforted by the knowledge that the good will presently roll
round again. Thus the lesson which he can teach is a very real necessity to
that contentment of mind which lies at the root of all gaiety.
 Again, a man cannot be permanently happy unless he has a just sense of
proportion. He who is too big for his boots must needs limp; and he who has
a swollen head is in perpetual discomfort. The history of the lives of men,
the history of the nations, gives one a fairer sense of proportion than does
almost any other study. In the great company of the men of old he cannot fail
to assess his true value: if he has any conceit there is a greater than he to
snub him; if he has a poor opinion of his powers there is many a fool with
whom to contrast himself favourably. If he would risk his fortune on the
spinning of a coin, being aware of the prevalence of his good-luck,
archæology will tell him that the best luck will change; or if, when in sore
straits, he ask whether ever a man was so unlucky, archæology will answer
him that many millions of men have been more unfavoured than he.
Archæology provides a precedent for almost every event or occurrence
where modern inventions are not involved; and, in this manner, one may
reckon their value and determine their trend. Thus many of the small worries
which cause so leaden a weight to lie upon the heart and mind are by the
archæologist ignored; and many of the larger calamities by him are met with
serenity.
But not only does the archæologist learn to estimate himself and his
actions; he learns also to see the relationship in which his life stands to the
course of Time. Without archæology a man may be disturbed lest the world
be about to come to an end: after a study of history he knows that it has only
just begun; and that gaiety which is said to have obtained “when the world
was young” is to him, therefore, a present condition. By studying the ages
the archæologist learns to reckon in units of a thousand years; and it is only
then that that little unit of threescore-and-ten falls into its proper proportion.
“A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone,” says the hymn, but
it is only the archæologist who knows the meaning of the words; and it is
only he who can explain that great discrepancy in the Christian faith between
the statement “Behold, I come quickly” and the actual fact. A man who
knows where he is in regard to his fellows, and realises where he stands in
regard to Time, has learnt a lesson of archæology which is as necessary to
his peace of mind as his peace of mind is necessary to his gaiety.
It is not needful, however, to continue to point out the many ways in
which archæology may be shown to be necessary to happiness. The reader
will have comprehended the trend of the argument, and, if he be in sympathy
with it, he will not be unwilling to develop the theme for himself. Only one