A New Art in an Ancient Land: Palestine through the lens of early European photographers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A New Art in an Ancient Land: Palestine through the lens of early European photographers giving birth to Jesus -almost a "curse," as twain puts it.Many of the early Western travellers to Palestine did not hesitate to trust their first impressions of the land, which were recorded in their diaries and journals.at the same time, as Rosovsky points out, visual artists followed a very different approach: Just like painters, photographers selected and "edited" the scenes they captured.the brush and lens portrayed things differently from the pen because writers could describe both the good and the bad in one book, while painters and photographers had but one shot at a scene, and depictions of dirt, poverty, or misery did not sell.2 thus, a discrepancy emerges between the narrative and the visual accounts of the same subject: while literature might be expected to have a natural bent for imaginative departures from reality, in this context it turned out to be very focused on the present day and interested in the current conditions of the natural and social environment.on the other hand, while photography was acclaimed as an extraordinary tool for depicting reality as accurately as ever thanks to the precision of science and technology, in Palestine it often turned away from contemporary subjects in order to search for evidence of a timeless past of biblical memory.in the nineteenth century Palestine was indeed a neglected province of the ottoman Empire, but since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and his subsequent campaign along the Palestinian cities of the coast -Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa and acre -the Holy land attracted more and more interest in the West.Because of its paramount significance for Christianity, but also for its crucial position on the route to Syria and india, Palestine became the target of several ventures, mainly led by French and British explorers.inspired by a wave of enthusiasm for the exotic and the sacred -both abundant in the Holy land -many pioneer photographers crossed the Mediterranean Sea to capture images that the European public was eager to see.the first photographers heading eastwards to Palestine were Frenchmen Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, Horace Vernet, Girault de Parangey and Swiss-born Canadian Pierre Joly de lotbinière.the year 1839, writes Howe, saw "Goupil-Fesquet anxiously peering at the silvered plate in his mercury vapor development chamber, hoping to see a miniature of Jerusalem appear.Goupil-Fesquet photographed Jerusalem between 11 and 14 December 1839, a scant three months after Daguerre's process was demonstrated in Paris." 3 From a technical point of view, daguerreotypes presented two main limitations: even if quite sharp and detailed, the positive image on the silver plates could not be reproduced; moreover, the process required an exposure time of several minutes, which ruled out any chance of taking spontaneous pictures of people.this constraint may help to explain why the production of the first photographers was almost entirely dedicated to landscapes and architecture.Many of these early works were included in the album Excursions Daguerriennes: vues et monuments les plus remarquables
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".