Title: Bardo, Tribunal Chamber, Tunis, Tunisia

Description

This photochrome print of the tribunal chamber in the Bardo Palace in Tunis is part of “Views of Architecture and People in Tunisia” from the catalog of the Detroit Photographic Company. Baedeker’s The Mediterranean: Handbook for Travellers (1911) informed its readers that the Bardo, located in the fertile plain to the west of Tunis, was a 13th- century palace that was “the former winter-residence of the beys.” It once “formed a little town by itself” and housed “a treasury, a mosque, baths, barracks, and a prison.” This photo shows the richly decorated tribunal chamber, which Baedeker called the “dwelling of the court officials.” The Detroit Photographic Company was launched as a photographic publishing firm in the late 1890s by Detroit businessman and publisher William A. Livingstone, Jr., and photographer and photo-publisher Edwin H. Husher. They obtained exclusive rights to use the Swiss "Photochrom" process to convert black-and-white photographs into color images and to print them by means of photolithography. This process originated the mass production of color postcards, prints, and albums for sale to the American market.