3-011-501 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives - from a photograph by Mr. F. Bedford, who accompanied the Prince of Wales in his tour in the east, 1862. 'Mr. Bedford was selected as in every way fitted for the post of Royal photographer...The morning which [he] had selected for his view of the city from that commanding position turned out very hazy - a gleaming, shimmering light playing in the air, and especially over the city, which he thought would be fatal to photographic operations; but he was agreeably surprised to find that, even in the first negative taken, the actual character of soft, Oriental haze was reproduced in the photograph in a most accurate manner, and yet the outline of every edifice in the city was as distinctly defined as if traced out with a sharp knife...It is the naked, unadorned reality that we seek in a representation of a site made for ever sacred as the centre around which all the events in the life of the Saviour were enacted. Photography alone would give us that absolute reflex of the scene in which nothing is added and nothing taken away; and this aspect of truthfulness, which we feel confident must of necessity exist in the photograph, has, we believe, been most conscientiously preserved by our engraver'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.