At the Middlebury College Museum of Art, “The Light of the Levant: Early Photography and the Late Ottoman Empire” depicts a game-changing convergence of time, place and technology.

A reverse deconstruction of the exhibition title points toward this cultural crossroads. The late period of the six-century-long Ottoman Empire was roughly 1789 to 1918. Photography began to emerge in the 1840s. The Levant is a geographical term that broadly encompassed the eastern Mediterranean region and its islands. As for the light — well, what is photography without light? Lands with abundant sunshine attracted pioneers of the craft.

Simultaneously, as the Ottoman Empire splintered into sovereign nations, colonial campaigns appeared from the West. So did their attendant exploratory and documentary missions and, later, tourists.

A microsite for the exhibition acknowledges this codependency from the first sentence: “Early photography developed during an era of colonization. Many of the earliest photographers traveled to the Levant region accompanying writers, scientists, and archaeologists on missions sponsored by European governments.”

For instance, in 1842, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) embarked on a three-year expedition to present-day Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt in order to produce a comparative study of Western and Eastern architecture. He returned to France with more than a thousand daguerreotypes.

For ordinary citizens who could not readily journey to see Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples or the ancient walls of Jerusalem, photographs supplanted personal experience. The exhibition includes images of “biblical archaeology” taken by French photographer Auguste Salzmann (1824-1872) and explains the commercial aspect of his venture. He sold copies of his pictures individually and compiled into albums — precursors of coffee-table books. Salzmann’s 1856 Jerusalem: A Study and Photographic Reproduction of the Monuments of the Holy City was published in two volumes and included citations from scholars.

Meantime, Greek photographer Petros Moraites (1825-1905) pursued picture making with nationalistic pride. He opened, in 1859, one of the earliest photography studios in Athens, producing portraits of the royal family and monuments alike. “After gaining independence from Ottoman rule in 1830,” reads exhibition text, “the young kingdom of Greece relied on photography to burnish its new image in the context of a classical past.”

Along with a history of the photographic medium, the exhibit observes how the art form served various purposes. The subject matter of the yellowed but exquisite photos informs viewers about the architecture, monuments, landscapes and people of the region. In 1888, the invention of the Brownie camera began to democratize image making. By the beginning of the 20th century, the creation and sales of postcards further entrenched the photograph as a testament to travel.

These narratives are expertly articulated by the exhibit’s cocurators: Sarah Rogers, assistant professor in the history of art and architecture and specialist in the history of photography, and Pieter Broucke, professor and architectural historian in the same department, as well as associate curator at the museum.

To their credit, the curators veer from Eurocentrism to highlight photographers in the Levant. “That sets it apart from other exhibits,” Broucke said in a phone call. The exhibition concludes with “Lady-Photographer” Karimeh Abbud, who opened her own commercial studio in Nazareth in 1930. As Rogers put it, “We start with the French parachuting in and end with the [Palestinian] woman.”

Broucke marveled that his small Vermont college owns a modest cache of Levant images. “Some of those photos are the very first taken ever,” he said. “We put up the online exhibit so they can live forever and reach a wider audience.”