Taking a New Look at Victorian-Era Fantasies

We live in a culture that successfully fakes just about everything. We make brass buttons out of plastic for designer blazers, and if you think your body’s too old and fat for the coat, we can fix that with plastic surgery. We haven’t quite managed the absolute illusionism of virtual reality, but we’re close, with computers and special effects techniques that lend photographic reality to the most elaborate imaginings.

Coming from a world like this into an exhibition like the Getty’s latest photography display is bound to have an effect. Titled “Roger Fenton: The Orientalist Suite,” it concerns a Victorian-era British painter-turned-photographer who was into taking pictures of his fantasies in his London studio.

His dreams were not exactly original. They belonged to a sub-category of the 19th century Romantic movement that involved artists as great as Delacroix and as salon-slick as Jean-Leon Gerome. The general idea was that any place strange and far away was more interesting than anything close and familiar. The specific cultural focus of artists like Fenton was the Ottoman Empire, then spread around the eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia.

There--according to the evidence of their work--these artists imagined that women were relaxed, sensual and available by the harem-full and that men got to wear really outrageous duds and act despotic.

Given the kind of licentious imagery such a scenario might suggest today, Fenton’s pictures are amazingly mild. Most depict men who are clearly European tarted up in fez, burnoose and turban lolling about smoking hookahs, swilling Turkish coffee or playing exotic one-string instruments. The most daring, “The Flame Bearer,” shows one of these chaps ogling a nubile slave girl who has a bare breast visible. Tellingly, the depicted flame was photographically faked and the breast so overexposed it’s unreadable.

Yet when eight of these albumen prints were exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of London in 1859, visitors found them “startling.” A contemporary critic chided them for not depicting people whose appearance was true to ethnic stereotype. To us, the images look quaint. Their transparent staginess seems innocent. It becomes clear these actors didn’t want to seek out models with the proper look because they wanted to play the exotic roles themselves. All this tells, by implication, how incredibly starchy Victorian culture really was. It’s touching.

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Exhibition curator Gordon Baldwin of the museum’s Department of Photography elaborates in his amused and sympathetic Getty monograph of Fenton. He analyzes the book’s title piece, “Pasha and Bayadere,” imagining himself as a Victorian visitor. England’s long love of narrative art taught viewers to read pictures in minute detail. Thus, for example, one immediately understands that the depicted dancer must be “common” because no lady would ever be seen with her elbows above her shoulders. Smoking was entirely out of the question.

The pictures reveal the culture that shaped and squeezed the fun out them. They also show us the artist. Fenton made his professional reputation photographing the Crimean War. The studio tableaux, done three years later, probably reflect a longing for his exciting days in the field. In one self-portrait, he’s costumed as a dashing Zouave trooper with cigarette, booze bottle and rifle.

There’s another level of longing here too. Most Orientalist artists were painters. Fenton started as a painter and wanted to bring its qualities to photography, thinking he’d improve on painting by making it more “real.” Paintings on view, like John Frederick Lewis’ “The Hhareem,” prove he was wrong. They have the erotic charge that Fenton missed. Sometimes the medium carries the message; sometimes it hides it.

* The J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Oct. 6. Closed Mondays, advance parking reservations required. (310) 458-2003.