Contextualist Approaches to Photography/The Photograph as Cultural Construction (Deconstructive Discourse)
“…One of the defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence.”
In her essay “The Imaginary Orient,” Linda Nochlin certainly discusses the omnipresent absence of Westerners in the works of two painters in particular, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Nochlin seems to focus on how Delacroix, the unapologetic romantic, and Gérôme, known as a “realist” painter, created a vision of “the Orient” (actually the near Middle East) that elevated the omniscient Western observer to superior connoisseur while relegating Turks and Arabs to the roles of sexual and social degenerates dwelling in decrepitude who can only benefit from colonial oversight. However the feminist art scholar who asked “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” eventually reveals her true interest in Orientalism, that of revealing these French painters as renderers of women as possessions and completely powerless victims.
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