Or to give it its full title: Picturesque North Africa: Tripoli Tunis Algeria Morocco: Architecture, Landscape, the Life of the People. It’s a photography book published in 1925 by Jarrolds, with an introduction by art historian Ernst Kühnel and photos by Lehnert & Landrock (along with some by Photo-Flandrin, Casablanca (presumably Marcelin Flandrin) and Max Nenntwich, who I can’t find anything out about).

Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock were from Bohemia (now Czech Republic) and Germany respectively who met in Switzerland in 1904 and swiftly became business partners. Rudolf was a photographer who had just returned from photographing in Tunisia, and Ernst became the business and marketing side of the partnership, launching the photo studio Lehnert & Landrock (amazingly still going as a bookshop and museum in Cairo). They opened a studio in Tunis, Tunisia and Ruldolf would photograph North Africa whilst Ernst maintained the studio and produced postcards and books. The business proved a success.

Their main subject matter was capturing the mysterious and romantic orient – mainly for western eyes. Their often hand-tinted images depicted street and desert scenes, oases, bazaars, mosques and, most controversially, young female nudes – obviously problematic nowadays in several ways (not least as it’s so rare, almost shocking, to see any female Muslim nude; apparently most of the models were prostitutes), but not so much in Victorian times, where it was acceptable for, say, Lewis Carroll to take obsessive photos of a young Alice Liddell.

Anyway, the book Picturesque North Africa only contains one or two nudes. It came into Oxfam recently and I was stunned by the beauty of the photos – and amazed that I recognised some of the locations in Morocco and Tunisia. The images are composed like paintings, obviously set up, but that only adds to their beauty and timelessness. This is the orient of the imagination, pre-industrial, of camel caravans and palm tree groves, Roman ruins, mysterious figures in djellabas, streaks of sunlight entering the dark souks, casbahs and medinas, exquisite tiles and children playing in doorways. There are no cars, roads or mobile phones. The black and white images have a silver sheen to them.

The copy that was donated to Oxfam had no dust jacket, and wasn’t in the best condition. It’s worth quite a lot but can be seen for free on the Internet Archive, where they have various scanned versions to download.

Previously on Barnflakes
Verve magazine, 1937-1960
Flickagrams #9
Tuna Tunis