The photographs center on historical and cultural representations, focusing on subjects key to orientalist visual traditions. The images explore staged scenes with elaborate costumes and settings, evoking themes of exoticism and performance in 19th-century photography.
Pasha and Bayadère offers 122 pages of Roger Fenton’s work, presenting a concise yet detailed visual study published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1996. Fenton’s photographs reveal an early engagement with theatrical poses and constructed narratives that reveal contemporary Western attitudes toward the East.
