Pasha And Bayadere

It would be lovely to think, particularly if you were a dance historian, that Roger Fenton’s 1958 photograph Pasha And Bayadere – currently newsworthy because the rare image is subject to a temporary export ban in the hope that the money can be raised to keep it in the UK – was a record of a Turkish dancing girl, costumed in the apparel of a dancer and using moves similar to those in modern bellydance.
Instead, Fenton’s image, which was inspired by his travels to the Crimea, is entirely staged, though who is to say that it might not have been his attempt to recreate a memorable scene from his expedition? The picture was taken in Fenton’s London studio. Fenton himself is the Pasha; the musician and the dancer are hired models. Perhaps most interestingly of all, because of the length of time required to take a photograph in the pioneering days of the art, the model’s arms are held up in the air with string in order for her to hold her pose.
The photograph is important in the history of orientalist art, and it is important to know that the characters in it are dressed up as other than what they actually are. When Pasha And Bayadere was first exhibited, its Victorian audience widely believed it to be an authentic record of the East, when it is actually an authentic record of the dreams, visions and representations of the orient - exotic, alluring and very strange - as seen through foreign eyes at a time when very few people ever left the country they were born in.
Orientalism has had, in post-colonial history, much to answer for in terms of generating reductive clichés of complex countries and people. And yet it would be fair to argue that, at least in terms of the history of art and photography, orientalist images are less exotic stereotypes, more the response of an Alice to an alluring Wonderland where everything was different, strange and – apparently – fantastic. It is not the fault of the 19th century orientalists that their work became seem in terms of stereotypes of veiled women and unbelievable luxury: they conjured what was to them a dream. If they failed to see everything around them, it is because their works, no matter how sumptuous, were the equivalent of holiday snaps: far from the big picture, but a memory of something unbelievable to be treasured, and kept.