Orient in a Mirror represents a dialogue between art and life, between past and present, reality and fiction. It contrasts two modes of expression — the pictorial communication of early Oriental miniaturists and the creative vision of two contemporary photographers with a passion for the Orient.
Roland and Sabrina Michaud are French photographers specializing in Central, Southeast and East Asia. They have been traveling through and photographing the Middle East and Asia since 1958 and have published numerous books on the regions including Caravans to Tartary, India of 1001 Nights, India in a Mirror, The Great Wall of China and Afghanistan: The Land That Was.
Orient in a Mirror, widely acclaimed on first publication over twenty years ago but long out of print, has now been republished in a revised and expanded form, with twice as many images. The result is a visual treat. Throughout the images and despite cultural and technical differences, an overwhelming sense of communication, of convergence and identity emerges.
Photography by definition has two constants: time and space. In Orient in a Mirror, although the photographs chronicle a voyage of almost half a century and the miniatures accompanying them cover 800 years of history, the images connecting the past to our modern era relate very powerfully to one another and convey, through their reflection, the continuity and permanence of a great civilization.
Likewise geographically, the photographs range across the entire Islamic world, from its heart in Arabia to Morocco in the west and China in the east. Boundaries are blurred since the same scenes and gestures occur everywhere, in the east as in the west, and the emotions are universally comprehensible.
Accompanied by extracts from the Qur'an and Thousand and One Nights, the book is a spiritual quest through which the photographers seek to convey the spirit of places and the stories each one tells.
The photographs show scenes of people and landscapes: children, women, worshippers, carpet weavers, horsemen, knights, warriors, flautists, kebab sellers, mosques, souks and bazaars.
The book is laid out in double pages, with each Islamic miniature facing a modern photograph representing a similar scene. This mirror technique, from which the book takes its title, endowing everyday scenes with a mythic dimension.
The mirror being the symbol of richness and of infinite possibilities, in the introduction of the book, Roland Michaud writes: " I have been fascinated for many years by the theme of mirrors. While playing truant from school with my brother in Persia in 1955, I was amazed to discover that the Palace of Forty Columns in Isfahan has in fact only twenty columns; the number is doubled because each is reflected in the water. Years later, on a visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra, for me the most moving monument in the world, I learned that the buildings facing one another symmetrically on opposite sides of the mausoleum are each called a djawab, meaning "response".
The photographer points out that "we only see what we are capable of seeing, and the majority of us are blind. The caliph Harun Al-Rashid in Baghdad, hearing of the great love of Majnun for the celebrated beauty Leila, decided that he would like to see for himself the lady in question. He ordered Leila to come to his palace, but found nothing extraordinary about her beauty.
He then summoned Majnun and said to him, 'This Leila whose beauty has so unsettled you is really not so very beautiful.' Majnun replied, 'Leila's beauty is faultless; it is your eyes that are at fault. To see how beautiful she really is, you need to have Majnun's eye.'"
The Orient in a Mirror
By Roland and Sabrina Michaud.
Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Pp 258, $27.
