ABSTRACT
The photographer Pascal Sébah photographed the ancient and medieval sites of Athens in the early 1870s, recording the monuments most visited by Europeans while on their grand tours of the southern continent, the Mediterranean and the Near East. Produced by a prolific commercial photographer for sale both at his Istanbul studio and by subscription, Sébah’s pictures of Athens, like his photographs of sites in Istanbul, were intended both as souvenirs for well-educated, upper-class European travellers and as didactic tools for Greek and Ottoman elites and their supporters. Several of his photographs of Athens illustrate sites and scenes associated throughout the nineteenth century in contemporary western European thought with a romanticised notion of a bygone classical Greece. Dozens of Athenian scenes are found in Sébah’s oeuvre, many of which correspond to the places guidebooks of the day stipulated could not be missed by the serious traveller looking to rediscover ancient Greek culture. Similarly titled images are found amongst the works of many of the photographers of the later nineteenth-century Mediterranean, such as James Robertson, the Bonfils ‘family’ or Petros Moraites, to name but a few. However, unlike his predecessors and competitors, Sébah frequently framed historical monuments with an eye to their contemporary surroundings, making seamless visual linkages between ancient or medieval buildings and their modern urban context. These photographs suggest that Sébah rejected the predominant visual strategies of his day in favour of images of a modernising Mediterranean in which the contemporary was given equal footing with the past. Sébah thus satisfied the touristic demand for views of the sites of ancient Greece, while also artfully providing his Greek customers and philhellenes with images that played to their notions of burgeoning modernisation and European statehood.
