Chapter 21 “Here – right here – where we stood”: Photographic Revelations in P. P. Waldenström’s 1896 Pilgrim Travelogue Till Österland

The invention of photography was presented to the world in 1839. One of the first cities to be extensively documented by the new medium was Jerusalem; all due to its religious importance. Visualizing the Holy City in photographs turned out to be a complex project, where the divinity of the place collided with the brute realism of the medium. Photography, however, also opened up new possibilities for animating the divine presence of the place to a wide audience. In this chapter, we follow minister Paul Peter Waldenström on his journey to the Holy land, as described in his 800-page, photographically illustrated travelogue Till Österland [To the East] (1896). In Waldenström ’ s literary pilgrimage, the mechanical medium is used as a means of bringing readers closer to the actual sites, playing upon the alleged transparency of the medium — in the end, staging a kind of photographic revelation before the reader ’ s eyes.