Why pose outside when you can pose inside and pretend to be outside?<\/p>\n
Here’s a great illustration of Orientalism:\u00a0 a European model imagined as an Arab.\u00a0 Exotic oasis with odalisque.\u00a0 Orientalist photography and painting were born from European colonisation of Middle and Far Eastern countries.\u00a0 Artists and photographers at the end of the 19th century and up to the Second World War years produced paintings and postcards depicting exaggeratedly different and exotic females both in and out of the studio.\u00a0 Outside the studio, photographers captured images of women who were mostly covered.\u00a0 In the staged setting of a studio, women were mostly uncovered, and it’s these photographs that express a Western male\u2019s fantasies of penetrating the harem, in a scene which could be created with actual North African women or, as here, with a European model posing as an odalisque (a female slave or concubine).\u00a0 The images say more about the colonial perspective than about Arabs:\u00a0 the men were seen as enviable sheikhs with many wives and concubines and the women were often painted as belly dancers whose sole occupation was to entertain and satisfy men.\u00a0 We, the Western viewers of these images, both men and women, were convinced, by the contrast, that we were civilised.\u00a0 Except, this is an image my father obtained in colonised Egypt while fighting in a six-year-long war between civilised countries.<\/p>\n Why pose outside when you can pose inside and pretend to be outside? Here’s a great illustration of Orientalism:\u00a0 a European model imagined as an Arab.\u00a0 Exotic oasis with odalisque.\u00a0 Orientalist photography and painting were born from European colonisation of Middle and Far Eastern countries.\u00a0 Artists and photographers at the end of the 19th century … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/worth.id.au\/wish\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/european_harem_girl_resized.jpg\")
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