ABSTRACT

This chapter explores travel photographer Elias Burton Holmes's attraction to and interactions with Fez and probes how its visibility and legibility allowed him to imagine the capital as object for consumption in the United States. Holmes focused on what John Urry and Jonas Larsen call his tourist gaze with his camera, taking photographs to illustrate his escape from everyday life. The Fez travelogue echoed representations found in World's Fair; it also offered mirror of American values even as it overtly presented the illusion of travel to authentic, Islamic city. Holmes's audiences would interpret Fez not only as exotic foreign land, but also view it in distinction from American modernity. The temporal ambiguity, in part, allowed the travelogue to attract attention for decades. Holmes visited Fez as it was opening up to European influence and capitalist enterprises, but before the formalization of French imperialism. He upheld stereotypes of Islamic city, a city with spaces and peoples off-limits to the young American.