Author: Ken Jacobson
Publisher: Bernard Quaritch
Binding: Hardcover, 308 pgs.
There is only one photograph from India in this exemplary photographic history of the Middle East from Algeria to Syria in the 19th and early 20 centuries.

The author, Ken Jacobson, is a well-established dealer who brings to his material the nose and experience of a scholar deeply engaged with his material. Odalisques and Arabesques is full of new information on the major Middle-Eastern studios from the inception of photography. This includes French Orientalist masters who settled in Cairo and Algiers, to local photographers who took up the art like Abdullah Freres of Constantinople. The amount of fact and its organization and delivery in crisp sentences is riveting.

The closing chapters give Jacobson the chance to enumerate his own approach. He rightly points out that the reductionist categorizations based on Edward Said's Orientalism miss so much about the art and density that early Middle-Eastern photographs can contain. Nonetheless, he is a bit too quick to criticize Said when his framework applies to so many of the photographs not contained in this book.

When will such a comprehensive and thoughtful book be written about Indian photography? Besides John Falconer, it seems that Ken Jacobson, who knows Indian and Sri Lanka photography so well, could write that one too.