Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey
Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey is photobook published by Conveyor Editions in 2017 and held in the library collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center for Photography and the San Francisco Museum of Art among others.
Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey is predicated on the discovery of lost archives from an archeological expedition authored by a colonial entity operating in the Southern Levant in the early twentieth century. Ryder chronicles the story of this collective endeavor through carefully constructed black and white images, original text, and calculated slippages that challenge the authority of colonial values, the historical archive, and photography itself. Alongside these impossible landscapes and utopic structures are incisive captions, illustrations of fabricated ephemera, and an original essay by Cornell University art history professor Benjamin Anderson.
-Conveyor Editions
Images courtesy Conveyor Studio
THE ROAD TO MEDAHA’AL - JPS staff are greeted by a family member en route to the shrine
Image courtesy Conveyor Studio
JPS Photographer (left) and assistant (center) in Petra preparing for a shoot from a rocky promontory, Ma’an Governate
An excerpt from Advice to the Field Photographer (1924)
by
Benjamin Anderson
Spirits
There will always be people in your photographs. If a site is deserted when you arrive, your presence is bound to attract the curious, who will come bearing food and drink, and stories of their families and of the past. Even if no one else appears, the sun will conspire to cast your shadow into the shot.
If a scholar who wishes to use your image for an article or a book should object to the presence of gures, they can be removed easily enough, but such interventions have consequences and should not be undertaken lightly. When Shaftesbury called Palestine “a land without a people,” his mind was filled with the illustrations of archaeologists’ books. So many people looked at those pictures of ruins in empty deserts, and saw themselves in them.
Yet even if you were to remove all of the bodily figures and their shadows, still your photographs would remain inhabited for those who are willing to see. After all, it was people who once built these monuments, and people who shaped these landscapes by sowing their fields, setting their flocks out to graze, digging wells and carving channels for water and for waste. In this sense, our work is not so different from that of the spirit photographers, but in their pictures the deceased are rendered crudely visible. In ours, by contrast, the spirits keep to themselves, hovering diffusely about the horizon or biding their time in hidden seams.
