Gili Merin’s photographic project and new book disengage from the battles over the ‘real’ city, instead examining the spatial phenomena of the displacement of sanctity.
This essay is excerpted from the book Analogous Jerusalem (Humboldt Books, 2025) by Gili Merin.
"Jerusalem is not just a city; it’s an idea, an orientation and a fantasy."
Jerusalem is not just a city; it’s an idea, an orientation and a fantasy. For millennia, it has been frequented by visitors of all religious denominations and social classes seeking to interact with its sanctity. In particular, it has attracted pilgrims from the three ‘religions of the book’: Islam, Christianity and Judaism, whose sacred scriptures allude to historical sites in and around the Holy City. However, the enduring myths attached to Jerusalem have attracted not only people of faith but also bodies of power wishing to exploit its spiritual charisma for political and economic gain. Therefore, Jerusalem — despite being a hilltop settlement with few natural resources to extract or trading routes to control — has stood at the centre of repeating cycles of violent battles for control not only over the sacred spaces themselves but the narratives they represent. These recurring conflicts often result in the exclusion of certain populations from their sacred sites, catalysing a need to relocate the ‘idea’ of Jerusalem to places far removed from the city’s physical boundaries.
"The enduring myths attached to Jerusalem have attracted not only people of faith but also bodies of power wishing to exploit its spiritual charisma for political and economic gain."
This displacement has taken many forms: Jerusalem’s name is evoked in poetry; its soil covers the floors of chapels; stone slabs collected from its ground are used as the foundations for entire towns; and relics of those who lived and died there are enshrined in many of the world’s most visited sites. Despite these numerous examples, this book strays away from such symbolic toponymy or literal displacement of fragments, instead focusing on the spatial translation of Jerusalem’s sanctity into new shrines, cities and landscapes: a phenomenon I call ‘Analogous Jerusalem’.
‘Analogy’ (from the Latin analogia, or ‘proportion’) is a similarity shared between two objects or a group of objects that are not otherwise alike.1 The concept of analogy can be used to show how two essentially dissimilar things — such as the city of Jerusalem and a small shrine in rural Europe — may bear an ‘analogical’ similarity that ties them together.2 Through this lens, I have studied how sacred Christian sites initially founded in Jerusalem travelled and multiplied to become proxy Jerusalems across Europe — sites that became every bit as sacred to worshippers as their progenitors, if not more so. By studying this phenomenon, this book seeks to expand the notion of sacred architecture and challenge the accepted belief in the pre-eminence of ‘original’ structures in ‘authentic’ sites. It argues that analogical architecture may detach the idea of Jerusalem from its geographical coordinates, untangle the ritual of pilgrimage from its ties to institutions of power, resist the spaces delineated by religious and national authorities, and thus decouple the sacred from the political. Analogous sites — of Jerusalem or elsewhere — allow for the proliferation of subjective truths that relieve the need for enclosure and exclusion. Considering how many violent wars continue to be waged over sacred spaces, the value of alternative sanctuaries not bound by territorial specificity — yet still able to provide a means of deep spiritual connection — cannot be overstated.
"Analogous sites — of Jerusalem or elsewhere — allow for the proliferation of subjective truths that relieve the need for enclosure and exclusion."
Perhaps more than any of the other religions invested in the Holy Land, Christianity incorporated and relied heavily on visual and architectural representations of Jerusalem in its teachings. The pictorial orientation can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when the Holy Land — the source of Christianity’s historical origin — was harder to reach due to wars and conquests, and the Latin Church began to rely on theological art to visualise and ritualise places in the East. As art historian Alexander Nagel explains:
“Roughly ninety percent of Western art produced during the post-Roman period right through the fifteenth century points in one way or another to the Holy Land — all those Crucifixions, all those altars standing in for the tomb of Christ, all those reliquaries, all those churches in the shape of a cross, their apses oriented eastward, all those eastern marbles used for construction and minerals used for pigments. It was a culture continuously engaged in the process of translation and translocation, continuously measuring and closing the distance between here and there, between us and them, between now and then.”3
For this reason, while there are many ‘Jerusalems’ replicated across religions, this book focuses on Christian analogues and rituals — and highlights a particular praxis that has mobilised the aura of the Holy City for Christians for millennia: pilgrimage. In Christianity, unlike Judaism or Islam, worshippers are not mandated to pilgrimage by theological law, but inspired to do so for their own personal, moral and spiritual benefit.4 Indeed, since the psychological motivations of Christians have always been central to their experiences of pilgrimage, this book studies a number of pilgrims’ ‘travelogues’ (a portmanteau of ‘travel’ and ‘monologue’, this form of travel writing, somewhere between a survey and a diary, has been popular from as early as the fourth century).5 Travelogues not only expose the condition of a place in a moment of time, but also reveal their creators’ own interpretations and biases vis-a-vis the sites they encounter.
As the author of this book, my own perspective similarly colours my interpretations of these sites. Indeed, Analogous Jerusalem is not merely a historical study, but also a photographic travelogue of my own journey documenting these sites; thus, the book itself becomes a part of the phenomenon it sets out to explore.
The Photographic Project
Methodologically, the decision to include not only the photographic documentation but also the historical and theoretical research was largely inspired by the photographer and theoretician Allan Sekula (1951– 2013). Sekula argued that photographs cannot remain as purely aesthetic, autonomous units, but should be situated within an ‘extended narrative structure’ that might anchor them in meaning.6 From his first project in the early 1970s to his posthumously published Fish Stories, Sekula attempted to make his works more contextual by alternating stills with text-frames: each project was like “a disassembled movie.”7 In ‘The Invention of Photographic Meaning’, he writes:
“The photograph is an ‘incomplete’ utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. That is, the meaning of any photographic message is necessarily context determined. We might formulate this position as follows: a photograph communicates by means of its association with some hidden, or implicit text; it is this text, or system of hidden linguistic propositions, that carries the photograph into the domain of readability.”8
Many of Sekula’s documentary photography projects experiment with the issue of image ‘readability’, drawing on various formats of image and text to argue that an image cannot be an end unto itself. This notion reverberates throughout Analogous Jerusalem in method and theme: while the topics of this book are dissimilar from those raised by Sekula — namely class inequality, global geopolitics or the ecological and social effects of maritime trade — it nevertheless raises key questions around the responsibility of the author in creating a photography book that is part research, part documentary and part travelogue.
In particular, any photographic project of Jerusalem must wrestle with the fact that, for centuries, photography has been inextricably bound up with — and indeed has perpetuated — cultural bias and colonial violence. During the second half of the nineteenth century, visitors to the Holy Land morphed from spiritual wanderers into mission-driven military men. Steeped in religious curiosity and equipped with modern tools, these surveyors did not perform religious rituals per se, but were occupied with authenticating the Scriptures by studying the sacred topography of the Holy Land and marking its contours for purposes of future appropriation.9 A clear example of photography’s ties to colonialism can be seen in the work of the French photographer Auguste Salzmann, who was sent to Jerusalem in 1854 on behalf of the French Ministry of Public Instruction.10
"In particular, any photographic project of Jerusalem must wrestle with the fact that, for centuries, photography has been inextricably bound up with — and indeed has perpetuated — cultural bias and colonial violence."
Expecting to find a celestial city, akin to Western representations of biblical cities, landscapes and people, Salzmann encountered a disenchanting reality: an Ottoman city with few Christian monuments. Despite his mission to ‘objectively document’ the holy sites, his photographs were tainted with subjectivity: they were enigmatic, distorted and dark, lacking any reference to context, scale or the horizon.11 Back in France, these images corroborated a colonial narrative that saw the Holy City as an abandoned sprawl of ruins, a decaying landscape in desperate need of Western ‘salvation’. His images thus transformed these lands into what Edward Said refers to as “imagined geographies,” i.e. territories where groups project their own readings of patrimony before acting upon them with physical force.12 Indeed, Salzmann’s photographic reading enabled — and even justified — the ‘Soft Crusade’ of Western nations entering the region toward the end of the nineteenth century, a period which included violent projects of appropriation and ‘restoration.’13
It is for these reasons that my photographic project was carried out with a ‘topographic’ approach. Literally meaning ‘place description’, topography is understood throughout this book as the three-dimensional formation of the terrain as perpetually defined by those who traverse it.14 This includes not only the movements of locals and travellers, but also their perceptions, consisting of projections, imaginations and representations that construct a place’s surface and define its contours. While Salzmann and his fellow explorers often used head-on, single-perspective compositions — emblematic of the singular, outsider’s gaze — the photographs in Analogous Jerusalem approach the subjects laterally, incorporating the elements of the landscape as equally valuable in the path of a traveller. By including the paths, signage and markers on the ground that lead pilgrims along their stational journeys, the images attempt to break through Jerusalem’s spiritual aura by obfuscating the inherent monumentality of these places of worship. Thus, the images capture a continuous landscape of pilgrimage as a topography that unifies elements belonging to mutually exclusive categories: the sacred and the profane.
This interpretation of topography originated from a photography exhibition that took place in upstate New York in 1975. Titled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, the exhibition featured the works of ten photographers who redefined the term ‘landscape’ as the generic, man-made environment that sprawled along the highways of post-World War II America.15 Aspiring toward an objective representation of the world through their work, the photographers of New Topographics preferred the banal over the heroic, portraying the world in its own clumsy existence. Their visual style was purposefully unsentimental: deadpan, mid-tone and non-hierarchical in terms of focus and composition.16 Lewis Baltz, for example, presented a series of head-on shots of anonymous warehouse façades surrounded by scaleless parking lots and corporate landscaping. Robert Adams presented twenty photographs of the suburban development of the plains of Colorado, unifying both landscapes — the God-made and the man-altered — under the same Southwestern light. Stephen Shore, the only colour photographer in the exhibition, depicted street spaces of everyday America: parked cars, floating shop signs and dangling wires, which represented his search for “the quintessential Main Street.”17 Their aestheticisation of modesty and anonymity may be traced back to the influence of Walker Evans, one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. From the end of the 1920s, Evans travelled across America to document the ordinary landscapes that sprawled across and around small suburban towns during the Great Depression. Intrigued by decay and austerity, Evans photographed commonplace subjects with frontal views, sharp details and steady compositions, echoing the functional aesthetics of hard economic times in a manner that he named ‘Documentary Style.’18 In 1938, Evans published American Photographs: a photo book that visualised his commentary on America, travel and the role of photography within it. Comprising eighty-seven photographs of the streets, homes and citizens of America, this travelogue was organised not chronologically or geographically but by nuanced associations, subtle connotations and structural analogies.19
The journeys undertaken by Evans and Shore resurrect a form of Christian pilgrimage that is now long gone: the wandering foreigner who opts out of society in favour of voluntary exile.20 The contemporary Italian photographer Guido Guidi, who captures residual infrastructure and the material traces of rural and industrial spaces, conscientiously adopts this mindset when shooting; he aims to cross landscapes “as a pilgrim.” Distinct from that of a tourist, who merely goes forth, “The pilgrim, in his way, undertakes a pious act.”21 Observing the sensitivity of his frames, his attention to the overlooked and the equal emphasis he gives to the margins and the centre, we understand why he saw the photographic journey as nothing short of “a Via Crucis […] a burden, so to speak. To carry the cross on my shoulders.”22 In his open-ended form of peripatetic devotion, all stations along the journey are equally worthy, thus removing any sacro-geographic hierarchy imposed by institutions. Evans’s photo book, as well as Shore’s and Guidi’s, which were inspired by it,23 are the models for the photographic project presented in this book, in which the movement between stations has as much significance as the stops themselves. Moreover, rather than revealing a progression of emotion or topographic escalation, the photographs relay a steady journey ‘without’ a single destination. Indeed, pilgrimage (be it religious or secular) cannot be understood merely as the intermittent fulfilment of stations, but rather as the continuous sense of topography between them.
"Pilgrimage (be it religious or secular) cannot be understood merely as the intermittent fulfilment of stations, but rather as the continuous sense of topography between them."
Lastly, the photographs featured do not only seek to resist the valorisation of Jerusalem aesthetically. Perhaps most importantly, this book attempts to become itself an Analogous Jerusalem: an image-based project that attempts to transmit the spatial experience of a pilgrimage without appropriating the land itself. This possibility, for the reader to experience pilgrimage vicariously, negates some of the problematic practices associated with spiritual travel, which does not only include the commodification of holy places or the economic exploitation of travellers, but also the violence and exclusion that accompanies territory- based rituals. By distancing visitors from the places of interest, where narratives overlap and compete for authority, virtual travel allows a multiplicity of faiths to exist simultaneously. Although virtual travel may seem to be a modern substitute for the ‘real thing,’ this practice actually has a long history, extending far before the invention of photography, back into the Middle Ages, and its spiritual merits will be discussed in greater length in the final part of this book. It is for this reason that the book concludes with an invitation for the reader to embark on such an imaginary, analogous journey towards a Jerusalem that never fully arrives — but which nevertheless provides an orientation to life itself.
Bio
Gili Merin (PhD) is an architect and photographer based in Vienna. She taught design and theory at the Royal College of Arts and the Architectural Association in London, and is currently an assistant professor at the Vienna University of Technology. Her work uses photography to explore the politics of sacred space and the interrelations between natural and artificial landscapes.
Notes
1‘Analogy and Analogical Reasoning’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (25 June 2013; revised 25 January 2019).
2Michael A. Martin, ‘The Use of Analogies and Heuristics in Teaching Introductory Statistical Methods’, in Journal of Statistics Education, 11, no. 2, 2003.
3Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time, Thames Hudson, London 2012, p. 32.
4Pilgrimage in Judaism was mandatory, as the Hebrew Bible states: “Offer a sacrifice to Me three times each year […] every male among you must appear before God the Lord” (Exodus 23: 14–17). The ritual included three annual visits to Jerusalem, each marking both a historical event of the Jewish faith and a new agricultural season. Pilgrimage in Islam is similar in that respect. The Hajj (literally, to embark upon a journey) is a mandatory rite that includes a single visit to Mecca by every adult Muslim at least once in their lifetime. The Quran speaks of an ‘ancient house’ that is the destination of Muslim pilgrims: “Announce to the people of the pilgrimage. They will come to you on foot and on every camel, coming from every deep and distant highway, so they may obtain the benefits in store for them, and pronounce the Name of Allah on appointed days […] then let them complete their rituals and perform their vows and circumambulate the ancient house” (Quran 22–30).
5 Early Christian pilgrims recorded their personal experiences in writing for the benefit of future travellers. The earliest record of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land was written by an anonymous traveller from Bordeaux in 333, who visited Jerusalem only two decades after the legalisation of Christianity; he was probably the last traveller to describe it before the dedication of Constantine’s churches and the transformation of the city into a Christian spiritual centre. Acknowledging that he might be the first of many travellers to the Holy Land, he wrote the Itinerarium Burdigalense, a detailed roadmap for the benefit of future Christian pilgrims. Fifty years later, the Spanish nun Egeria arrived in Jerusalem, spending three years there (381–384), and recording her experiences in a series of enthusiastic letters addressed to her ‘sisters’, a community of Christian believers back home in Galicia. Cf. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, Oxford Books, Oxford 1999; Jaś Elsner, ‘The Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine’s Empire’, in The Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 90, 2000, p. 195; Blake Leyerle, ‘Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrimage Narratives’, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 64, no. 1, Spring, 1996, p. 125.
6 Allan Sekula, ‘Dismantling Modernism: Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)’, in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983, Mack, London 2016, p. 60.
7 Aerospace Folktales (1973) follows the life of a middle-class family in Southern California after the father had been laid off from his job as an aerospace engineer. Sekula likens the home to a factory, an entity that participates in capitalist production and stands at the frontline of social transformation. Sekula’s first installation of Aerospace Folktales was a sequence of 142 photographs and text cards hung on the wall; intervals between images and text cards varied so as to construct a temporal and thematic rhythm. He described his process as “cutting up spare contact sheets and arranging the frames into broken shot sequences.” Through the careful construction of image and text cards, Sekula succeeds in raising a constellation of themes — such as domesticity, labour, class, industrialisation and gender — and invoking issues of representation, visual semiology and the role of the artist within society. Cf. Allan Sekula, Carles Guerra, ‘Found Paintings, Disassembled Movies, World Images’, in Grey Room, no. 55, Spring 2014, Special issue: Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs, The MIT Press, Chicago 2014, pp. 130–141. For further reading on Sekula’s critical approach to image and text, as well as a broad bibliography, see Gili Merin, ‘The Image and the Caption: Photographic Production and Consumption under Advanced Capitalism’, in Plat Journal, Rice University, Houston 2021, pp. 52–66.
8 Allan Sekula, ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’, in Artforum, 13:5, January 1975, pp. 36–45. Reprinted in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography, Macmillan, London 1982, pp. 452–453.
9 For an exploration of this period in the history of Jerusalem, as well as a broad bibliography, see chapter four of the author’s doctoral dissertation: ‘The Innocents Abroad: Valorising Monuments, Commodifying Pilgrimage’, in Towards Jerusalem: the Architecture of Pilgrimage, Architectural Association, London 2021.
10 Yehoshua Nir, ‘Cultural Predispositions in Early Photography: The Case of the Holy Land’, in Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Moshe Davis (eds.), Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World, 1800-1948: With Eyes Toward Zion, Praeger, Westport (CT) 1997, p. 199; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘A Photographer in Jerusalem’, in October, vol. 18, Autumn 1981, p. 96.
11 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, A Photographer in Jerusalem, op. cit., p. 101.
12 Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York 1978; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London 1993; for further analysis of this transformation, see Gary Fields, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror, University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2017.
13 In 1865, the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was launched in Victorian England. Its founder claimed that the Holy Land was “crying out for accurate investigation,” and that they would carry out surveys of its archaeology, topography, geology and natural sciences in an attempt to make the Bible more tangible, and thus strengthen Christian faith. However, they had colonial ambitions in mind: their 1878 ‘Survey of Western Palestine’, which aimed to substantiate Britain’s claim to the Suez Canal, highlighted locations associated with a Christian narrative and excluded existing Muslim traditions. Over the following decades, similar organisations joined England’s colonial-religious mission, including the American Palestine Exploration Society (1870), the German Society for the Exploration of Palestine (1878), and the American School of Oriental Research (1900), although the PEF remained the wealthiest and most prolific of these institutions. Cf. Vivian David Lipman, ‘The Origins of the Palestine Exploration Fund’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 120, no. 1, 1988, pp. 45–54; George Grove, founder of the PEF, in a letter to The Times, 3 January 1865; I. W. J. Hopkins, ‘Nineteenth-Century Maps of Palestine: Dual-Purpose Historical Evidence’, in Imago Mundi, no. 22, 1968, pp. 30–36.
14 Elissa Rosenberg defines topography as “fundamental to the experience of landscape […] expresses the reciprocity of the cultural and the natural, the ideal and circumstantial, vernacular practice and aesthetic theory. […] Topography both reflects and engenders certain ways of seeing and knowing the world; it structures our vantage point and organises the way we move through and experience space. The design of the ground plane engages both the eye and the body — the view and the sense of movement.” Cf. Elissa Rosenberg, ‘The Topographic Imagination’, in Les Carnets du Paysage, 2002.
15 The photographers were Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel.
16 For a further analysis of the works presented in the New Topographics exhibition and a critical reading of the relationship between photography and the built environment in the 1960s and ’70s, see Britt Salvesen (ed.), New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, Steidl publishing, Göttingen 2003; Mark Campbell, Paradise Lost, AA Publications, London 2016.
17 Oral history interview with Robert Adams, 20 July 2010, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Stephen Shore to Hilla Becher, ‘A Conversation with Stephen Shore’, in Susanne Lange, Stephen Shore, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Festschrift: Erasmuspreis, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich 2002.
18 Vicki Goldberg, Robert Silberman and Garrett White, American Photography: A Century of Images, Chronicle Books, San Francisco (CA) 1999, pp. 98–99; James C. Curtis and Sheila Grannen, ‘Let Us Now Appraise Famous Photographs: Walker Evans and Documentary Photography’, in Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 15, no. 1, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1980, p. 4.
19 David Campany, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, Aperture, New York 2014, p. 13.
20 Jonathan Sumption, The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God, Paulist Press, Mahwah (NJ) 2003, p. 130.
21 Conversation between Guido Guidi, Stefano Graziani and Bas Princen, filmed by Jonas Spriestersbach in July 2022 at Guidi’s studio in Cesena, Italy. Presented at the exhibition Lives of Documents: Photography as a Project at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).
22 Ibid.
23 Examples include Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999); Guido Guidi’s In Between Cities (2003), In Veneto (2011) and In Sardegna (2019).
