September 11—December 30, 2001
Monday, September 10, 10 a.m.—noon
The Howard Gilman Gallery
Sphinx and crocodile, magnificent colossi, and delicate hieroglyphs are but a few of the treasures to be found in Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt, an exhibition of 43 exquisitely preserved 19th-century photographs of one of the world's oldest and most mysterious civilizations. On view from September 11 through December 30 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Howard Gilman Gallery, these early camera images of Egypt's landscapes, inhabitants, and dramatically imposing monuments—from Cairo to sand-swept Nubia—are drawn from the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection as well as from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
In the 1840s and 1850s, during the first half-century of its "opening" to the West, a handful of daring Europeans and Americans set out for Egypt with their cameras. Their ambitions ranged from updating written accounts of the faraway land to documenting its magnificent architecture. These artist-pioneers photographed the pyramids of Giza and the temples of Karnak, Luxor, and Abu Simbel, at a moment of pristine and almost tragic beauty, portraying the material of a legendary culture—for centuries interred—as it emerged from the sand.
Western audiences would later create a demand for typical "tourist" images, but in the first decades of photography, Maxime Du Camp, Félix Teynard, John Beasley Greene, Louis De Clercq, Francis Frith, and others, created a stunning record of this remote, seemingly unreachable, and exotic place. Their impressionistic, decidedly eccentric, and highly personal accounts of a fallen civilization would ignite the collective imagination of a society craving a more direct experience with the past.
Among other highlights, the exhibition will feature a group of rare salted paper prints from a unique photographic album. Drawn from the collection of a legendary French architect, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the photographs were made by Maxime Du Camp, a Parisian journalist who, in 1849-51, traveled to Egypt with a notable companion: the novelist Gustave Flaubert. The two Frenchmen, both uninhibited writers searching for new experiences, spent months along the Nile recording their impressions in words and pictures. One dramatic photograph, titled Westernmost Colossus of the Temple of Re, Abu Simbel, shows just the head of a sixty-five foot statue of Ramesses II rising from the desert. Atop the king's crown, like a bird on its roost, sits the photographer's assistant.
In 1851, the year Du Camp and Flaubert returned to France, an ambitious civil engineer from Grenoble set out for Egypt. Félix Teynard's express purpose was to update the standard architectural reference of the day, Description de l'Égypte, a lavish publication of oversized engravings that was issued by Napoleon between 1809 and 1828. Teynard understood the engineering skills of ancient architects and builders, and his approach to capturing the sheer physicality of the structures they created was graphically innovative and startlingly modern. A striking example is Rock-cut Architecture, Tomb of Amenemhat, Beni Hasan. Teynard left a signature within this bold composition of light and dark by placing a European bentwood cane against a column. Like a surveyor's measure, the cane indicates scale.
The only American known to have worked in Egypt in the early years of photography was J. B. Greene, a Paris-based archaeologist. From 1852 to 1855, Greene concentrated his studies on the excavations at Deir el-Bahri and Thebes, chiefly involved in the cleaning and analysis of inscriptions. In the photograph titled Dakka, however, Greene abandoned his scientific duties and made a poetic study of a jagged shadow swallowing up the surface decoration on a temple wall. In a sun-blazed land, the cool shadows must have been an oasis for the eye.
Until the 1992 discovery of 143 photographs by Ernest Benecke, only a handful of images were attributed to this obscure textile merchant from Lille, France. Unlike Du Camp and Teynard, who focused on architecture, Benecke made intimate portraits of the contemporary Egyptians he met on his 1852 journey up the Nile. The exhibition will feature, among other sensitive studies by Benecke, Children from the Village of Kalabsha and Autopsy of a Crocodile, Upper Egypt.
The most well-known of all the early photographers of Egypt is Francis Frith, an enterprising businessman from Liverpool. Like many Victorians, Frith fell under the Nile's spell and made three journeys to Egypt, beginning in 1855. By then, photographers had found a way to dramatically increase the sharpness and transparency of their images by replacing paper negatives with glass. The crystalline clarity and classic probity of The Ramesseum of El-Kurneh, Thebes—First View is expressive of the period's romantic fascination with the exotic, and also reveals the era's enthusiasm for fact-gathering and documentation. Frith's work heralds the maturation of the photography profession and also signals the first successful commercialization of the many wonders that were to be found along the Nile.
A variety of programs will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition. These will include a public lecture, gallery tours, films, a teacher workshop, a series of off-site events, and a special event for Latino families.
Along the Nile is organized by Pierre Apraxine, Curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection and Consultative Curator in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan, and by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Assistant Curator in the Metropolitan's Department of Photographs.
Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt complements The Pharaoh's Photographer: Harry Burton, Tutankhamun, and the Metropolitan's Egyptian Expedition, organized by the Museum's Departments of Egyptian Art and Photographs, on view concurrently in the Egyptian Special Exhibition Gallery.
September 5, 2001
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