ABSTRACT
A single hooded figure looks over the cityscape of Fez, Morocco (Figure 11.1). Nelson Luddington Barnes took this photograph of his travel companion, travel photographer Elias Burton Holmes (1870-1958), on the last evening of their ten-day visit to the North African capital in 1894. The image records Holmes wearing traditional Moroccan dress, and this type of Orientalist selfexoticization makes him as much a subject of the photograph as the built environment dotted with minarets. The photographer and entertainer from Chicago, known professionally as Burton Holmes or E. Burton Holmes, made a successful career presenting illustrated travelogues: travel lectures accompanied by slide projection to live audiences. Experiences from and photographs taken during a trip in February-March 1894 helped to produce lectures performed between 1894 and 1908 and were published in the first volume of his Burton Holmes Travelogues. Produced at the very beginning of Holmes’s career, the entertaining personal account of the Moroccan capital also articulates American beliefs regarding racial and cultural difference in an Islamic city,1
and supports European colonization and the pursuit of economic imperialism at the turn of the American century. The late 1890s were years of great opportunity but economic insecurity in
the United States. Holmes was born in Chicago in 1870, the son of a banker and the grandson of a wealthy builder and importer. Although Holmes was born into a socially prominent family, the Panic of 1893 altered his financial prospects; he turned to the camera to craft a livelihood, but after failing to make a living as a camera salesman, he attempted to launch a career as a travel lecturer for paying audiences. Buoyed by initial success in the 1893 travel lecture series based on an 1892 trip to Japan, the trip to Morocco was the first voyage intended to produce travelogues for the entertainer’s second lecture season. Using borrowed funds and accompanied by Barnes, he departed for a forty-day excursion into Morocco, including the ten-day sojourn in Fez. Over the next six decades, Holmes would perform over eight thousand illustrated travelogues on travels across the globe, but nothing was certain in 1894; there was no assurance of succeeding as a self-made man, only the performer’s drive and self-confidence.2 As such, the Fez travelogue was highly speculativeHolmes wanted to visit Morocco and its capital, Fez, record its spaces with
photography and relay his travels to a paying public, but he did not know what to photograph or what American audiences desired in a travel lecture. This chapter explores 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. Brian T. Edwards has noted Americans were invested in the “encounter with worldliness itself”.3 Holmes traveled to Morocco at the beginning of a long career in photography and entertainment seeking such encounters. Given the tenuous position of his career, he went beyond capturing expected sites; rather, Holmes produced a heterogeneous compilation of actors in Fez via image and text. The resulting lectures and publication on Fez were conservative and often superficial interpretations of an Islamic city that appealed widely to American viewers. Holmes’s works reflect a distinctly American representation of Fez with the United States a frequent character in the narrative. His narratives aligned with prevailing American conceptions of a city conditioned and, at times, hindered by its Muslim majority, an urban environment noted for the religious space of the
Figure 11.1 Burton Holmes. “Sacred Hour of the Moghreb”, 1894. (Courtesy of the Department of Art History, University of California Los Angeles).
