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Between 1924 and 1930 Rudolph Lehnert, the actual photographer in the team Lehnert & Landrock, made a number of trips to Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Some 250 glass plates remain as witness to those trips; most are of Palestine. Nearly half of the 250 plates are stored in the Musée de L'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, which has played a major role in the revival of interest in their work. In 1991, following the publication in Lausanne a few years earlier of Philippe Cardinal's important collection Lehnert & Landrock, l'Orient d'un Photographe, Lehnert's photographs were exhibited at the Musée de L'Elysée.

As we explained in our more extensive essay "An Introduction to the Orient of Lehnert & Landrock," which appears in the Sony Gallery catalogue for the show L'Orient: The Photographs of Lehnert & Landrock (October 4-28, 1999), despite the fact that all of the L&L photographs were taken solely by Lehnert, we have chosen to credit the work (as they themselves did) to both Lehnert and Landrock. Cardinal, who also credited the photos to both men observed in his own introduction, that if it was Lehnert who took all the pictures, it was Landrock, the businessman of German birth and Swiss adoption, who made them possible. He ran the shop they founded first in Tunis and later, after World War I, in Cairo; he managed the laboratory, organized Lehnert's caravans to the desert and distant oases, and marketed their jointly branded product. And it was Landrock who remained behind in Cairo when Lehnert, homesick for Tunisia, sold out his share of the business in June 1930 and returned to Tunis, where he retired from professional work nine years later.

Of the plates that have been preserved of the pictures taken in Palestine, more than three quarters were taken in Jerusalem, which is reasonable given the great architecture as well as spiritual distinction of the Holy City. However, Lehnert also visited and photographed in Bethlehem and along the Jordan river and the Dead Sea.

The work here is more than competent but only on occasion is it brilliant. At least one image which we have chosen to grace the invitation as well as the catalogue for this show is very much a classic among collectors of Holy Land and Holy City photographs. What was already apparent from the joint exhibition at the Sony Gallery and Ewart Gallery in October 1999-L'Orient: The Photographs of Lehnert & Landrock-becomes irrefutable with this exhibition. Away from his beloved North Africa and the particularly inspiring opportunities of scenery and village life in the lush oases, the super-aestheticism of the desert and its perfect dunes, and above all the women-the Ouled Nail in the Algerian countryside, the ordinary village women and his young models in Tunis-Lehnert's work frequently lacks the passion that drove the earlier work. But the latter work invariably possesses important documentary value that certainly justifies this show, as did the focus on his similar work in Egypt that dominated the Ewart Gallery portion of the 1999 AUC joint exhibition.

In the end Lehnert's aestheticism cannot be separated from a spiritual sensibility-even his portrait of the bold young Ouled Nail staring directly into the camera. That unique portrait haunted our first exhibit, as it has haunted so many of the collections of his work, for the young woman's image is as insistently a reflection of what is True or Real as her image is a reflection of the Beautiful, and both Haq and Jamil are divine attributes. It is at just such a junction, beyond worldly appearances, that the apparent dichotomy between the sacred and the profane can be resolved.

So it is not a surprise that Lehnert's most inspired picture among the Palestinian photographs--The Dome of the Rock--is of that very rock platform that the Jebusites revered; from where the Prophet ascended in his Journey to the Heavens; where the Tabernacle of the Temple was secured and where, according to some traditions, Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son and to where the Messiah shall repair when he returns.