Beautiful and unusually large souvenir album with 75 photographs of Syria, Palestine, Constantinople and Athens, in a luxurious binding. The photographs were made by the renowned studios of Félix Bonfils (1831-1885) and Pascal Sébah (1823-1886), who were already widely celebrated in their own time for their pioneering work in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East. Their images could be bought separately or as customised albums, but collections as large as the present one are uncommon, as few sets exceed fifty images.
The majority of the photographs in the album are signed by Bonfils. He opened his first studio in Beirut in 1867 and produced thousands of photographs of the region. The present album contains one of the photographs he is most known for, namely the group of Jews in front of the Wailing Wall. Bonfils personally considered this haunting image to be one of his best works. Other photographs include views of Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem, the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Ascension, Jericho, Jaffa, Ramallah, the Jordan river, the temple of Jupiter in Baalbek, and the Umayyad mosque. The remaining photographs in the album are either signed by Sébah or unsigned and include beautiful portraits of locals, views of Istanbul (the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Galata bridge and the Bosphorus river) and Athens (the Theseion, the temple of Olympian Zeus, the Parthenon, and the caryatids of Erechtheion).
With a black bookseller's label mounted at the foot of the front pastedown (Philip, Son & Nephew, Liverpool), some of the photographs are captioned in ink underneath. The leaves are somewhat browned and the albumen prints are slightly yellowed. Otherwise in very good condition. Cf. El-Hage, B. Damascus, a photographic journey, 1840-1918, pp. 57-58; Hannavy, Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography, pp. 173-175.