Getty recently purchased a photograph album of 45 albumen prints depicting what appear to be locales somewhere in the Levant.
Leafing through it, one encounters a skyline punctuated by minarets and domes as well as studio portraits of Ottoman military officers, clerics, and people in Bedouin and other regional garb.
These types of photographs were common in the latter half of the 19th century, when hordes of European travelers, wanting to memorialize their journeys through the Holy Land, purchased images from large stocks available at local studios. But the photographs in this particular album didn’t depict the usual must-see destinations like Jerusalem and Bethlehem. And unfortunately for the Getty Research Institute (GRI) curators, there was nothing written in the album to help identify where the pictures were from.
But one monument stood out: the iconic Citadel of Aleppo, a 12th-century structure that still rises above the Syrian city today. And that’s where Hans Pech, a research assistant at the GRI, came in.
With the help of a Baedeker travel guide from 1906 and Google Maps, Pech was able to identify other landmarks in the photos. He traced those sites not just to Aleppo but also to Diyarbakir, Turkey.
Once he discovered where the photographs had been taken, Pech realized how valuable the album would be to researchers. “There aren’t a lot of early photographs of Aleppo that are digitally available,” he explains. “Europeans didn’t visit it as much because it was so far from the port of Beirut, where most people started their journey.”
But that didn’t stop some from making the trek. And while Pech doesn’t know who exactly compiled the Aleppo/Diyarbakir album or why, he believes that some of the photos contain clues that could point to espionage.
In the 1870s, French and British officials traveled throughout the Middle East to document “sites of interest” for their colonial empires, using photography to collect data for intelligence purposes. The album contains many panoramic shots of Aleppo’s urban layout, possibly taken for surveillance. And whoever assembled it may have had privileged access to military police, given the images of officers carrying out various activities in a central courtyard. “It’s not something you would sell commercially,” says Pech. “Potentially the photographer was a military officer or someone traveling in a military-related capacity.”
Fortunately for researchers today, these views of Aleppo provide important architectural reference points. Many of the buildings are no longer standing, having been destroyed by time, the Syrian civil war, or a recent earthquake that leveled a tower of the Aleppo Citadel. This loss of cultural heritage brings home the value of historical photographs, says Pech. “This album is really important for potential restoration efforts.”
The album, which the GRI will eventually digitize, joins a rich repository of 19th-century Middle Eastern photography—including the Pierre de Gigord collection of over 6,000 photographs from the Ottoman Empire and the MENA collection of 4,500 photographs of the Middle East and North Africa. The GRI archives will help researchers make cross-references and connections across different collections.
As for the true story behind the album, Pech hopes that more information will come to light as scholars conduct their own investigations. “It’s forensic work in the end.”
