Photography and Egypt: Made for Each Other

NEW YORK, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Egypt and the world's fascination with its ancient treasures played an important role in the development of photography ranging from the pristine prints of mid-19th century lensman to the dramatic documentary shots of the opening of King Tut's tomb by Harry Burton in the 1920s.

Two photographic exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum make this important connection for the first time, bringing to light the work of pioneering but almost forgotten amateur photographers along with iconic images recorded by Burton in the Valley of the Kings.

All of the 80 photographs on view are rare and rarely displayed, making these shows a must for admirers and collectors of camera art. Both exhibitions will run through Dec. 30.

The early shots of Egypt, its antiquities and people in the show titled "Along the Nile" have been selected from the Gilman Paper Company collection, and the Burton photographs in the show titled "The Pharaoh's Photographer" are from the archives of the Met's Department of Egyptian Art.

Burton was the official still and movie photographer for the museum's excavation teams in Egypt for two decades.

Egypt and the Middle East became magnets for adventurous travelers in the 18th century when the weakened Ottoman Empire was more romanticized than feared. The documentation of Egypt's exotic past by the scientists, archaeologists, and artists who accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign did much to make that country a tourist destination, especially for the French.

The earliest photo on display is a daguerreotype of ruins of the Luxor temple made by Frederic Goupil-Fesquet in 1839, the year Louis-Jacques Daguerre demonstrated to the French Academy of Sciences the first practical photographic process -- images fixed to a silver-coated copper plate.

Unfortunately, the daguerreotype was not reproducible, and it was the calotype print made from paper negatives by an Englishman, William Henry Fox Talbot, that made photographs available to a broad public.

The salted paper prints made from paper negatives by Maxime Du Camp, a French writer who visited Egypt with novelist Gustave Flaubert in 1849-50, provide the exhibition with a generous sampling of the earliest photographic documentation of the Egyptian scene including the pyramids and the Sphinx, the Ramesseum at Thebes, the Colossi of Memnon, and the temple at Kalabsha. Du Camp was commissioned by the French Ministry of Education to compile a photographic record of Egyptian monuments.

Notable is Du Camp's cropped view of the head from one of the four monumental seated statues of Ramses II at Abu Simbel with Du Camp's seemingly tiny Nubian boatman, Hadji Ismael, sitting atop Ramses' crown to give a sense of scale. The photographer had told the boatmen the camera was a cannon that he would fire at him if he even thought of moving during the several minutes it took to take the picture.

These early photographs have a purity about them whether focused on ancient monuments or on everyday life, such as Franco-German wool trader-photographer Ernest Benecke's 1852 picture of near-nude Nubian children playing at Kalabsha. The men who took them were obviously feeling out the boundaries of the medium in a world still waiting to be seen through a camera's lens.

But the grainy softness of paper negatives, no matter how attractive the velvety pictures made from them, actually prevented the factual crispness that these early photographers were seeking and finally found in the new wet-collodion process which substituted glass plates for paper negatives. One of the first practitioners of this new process was Francis Frith, a British photographer who visited Egypt 1856-59.

Like Du Camp, who became famous when he published a portfolio of his Egyptian photographs, Frith published a highly successful book of his photographs but they were completely different from Du Camp's in style, thanks to the prints made on egg-white-coated paper from glass negatives. His pictures of the Philae temple, the Ramesseum, and the pyramids are totally theatrical, dramatizing every hieroglyph-etched column in brilliant detail.

Other outstanding photographers represented, most of them French amateurs, are Felix Teynard, a civil engineer whose temple views convey an acute sense of mystery, Theodule Deveria, the master of slanting light effects, Gustave Le Gray who gave Du Camp the few lessons in photography he ever had, Felix Bonfils, Louis de Clercq, and Pierre Tremaux.

The only American represented is John Beasley Greene, who was reared in France and visited Egypt in the 1854. His work ranges from a placid, luminous view of the Nile to the harsh depiction of the temple of Dakkeh in Nubia, raked into deep shadows by the clawing rays of an unrelenting sun. Greene died in Algeria in 1856, ending a promising amateur career.

Du Camp and Teynard quit photography after leaving Egypt, for reasons never made clear. Maybe the difficulties of travel in Egypt in those days with heavy equipment that took several porters to carry contributed to their early burnout as cameramen.

Such difficulties were barely known to Harry Burton, a well-financed English professional who even went to Hollywood to learn how to send sunlight light via strategically placed mirrors into the lightless depths of newly opened tombs, notably that of the boy-king Tutankhamen's opened by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.

Burton's photographs were dramatically posed with an eye to reproduction on the front pages of the world's illustrated newspapers that reported the new finds in Tut's tomb daily. The photographer usually worked quickly, taking pictures of each new find within a half hour after they were discovered, but he also recorded the various tedious steps in the long process of unwrapping the pharaoh's mummy.

Perhaps the most touching of the many thousands of gelatin silver prints made by Burton for the Metropolitan is one of the golden effigy head on the outer coffin of Tutankhamen, cropped just below the nose so that the realistic eyes peer hypnotically into those of the viewer.

Wrapped around the snake and bird-headed gods centering the brow band of Tut's royal crown are an ornament of fresh flowers placed there at the last moment before the tomb was closed. Carter removed the flowers to preserve them as soon as the photograph was taken, but their petals disintegrated into dust.