By the mid-nineteenth century, photography had become a regular feature of research expeditions to northern Africa. Most of the photographers who worked in Egypt and the Middle East in the 1840s and early 1850s were French, partly because of interest prompted by Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian expedition. One of the most notable of these Frenchmen was the journalist Maxime Du Camp (1822–1894), who, with no experience in photography, quickly learned the craft from Gustave Le Gray before leaving on a government-supported archaeological expedition to Egypt and the Near East between 1849 and 1851. His close friend, novelist Gustave Flaubert, became his traveling companion, and the writer’s journals and letters vividly recount their journey through Nubia, Syria, and Palestine, as they made a photographic survey of great mountains and ancient sites.
Du Camp faced many difficulties working in the harsh desert environment—chemicals boiled in the sweltering heat, blowing sand found its way into everything, and spooked camels came close to destroying all of the equipment. Du Camp represents a new kind of archaeological photographer, one whose journey falls between an artistic voyage and a scientific expedition. Working under the auspices of the Ministry of Public Education, his purposes were scientific and scholarly, yet his photographs vividly reference the powerful fascination that Egyptian antiquities held for the nineteenth-century imagination. His salted paper prints from Egypt convey the sensory impressions of awe in the enormity of ancient Egyptian civilization. Of the Sphinx, one of the many massive monuments Du Camp photographed, Flaubert effuses, “It fixes us with a terrifying stare; Max is quite pale; I am afraid of becoming giddy, and try to control my emotion.” Du Camp recalls, “I cannot remember ever having been moved so deeply.”1
After their initial visit to Cairo in March 1850, Du Camp and Flaubert descended the Nile by boat, exploring the archaeological sites along its banks. Du Camp made more than 200 calotypes of what they saw, as he was “equipped with an apparatus (photographic) for the purpose of securing along his way, and with the aid of this marvelous means of reproduction, views of monuments and copies of inscriptions.”2 His camera was described as a “modern traveling companion, efficient, rapid, and always scrupulously exact.”3
One of the most notable photographs he made records the great temple at Abu Simbel, located on the border between Nubia and Upper Egypt.
Together Du Camp and Flaubert explored the colossal rock-cut temples built by Ramses II, who ruled from 1279–1213 BC. The principal facade of the temple features four seated figures of the monarch. By this time, Du Camp was thoroughly at ease with the medium of photography, and with his characteristic documentary clarity, he chose a profile view and midday light for this photograph of one of the gigantic monuments of Ramses II. In order to make the colossal head more visible, the artist had his boat crew clear away layers of sand and had his Egyptian servant, Hajj Ishmael sit atop it.
Upon his return to France, Du Camp’s album Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, in which this image appeared, was published in 1852 in an edition of two hundred copies. Containing 125 images, it is among the first books illustrated with photographs and brought its author instant fame. Although the intended audience was primarily scholars, there was a much wider community of travelers who also wanted to see the extraordinary new pictures from Egypt.
Du Camp’s negatives were printed and published by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, a cloth merchant from Lille who had learned the calotype process from its English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s. Blanquart-Evrard became the first person to publish the procedure for the calotype negative/positive paper process in France. He sent examples of his experiments with negative/positive paper processes to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, attaching a note to one of his frames explaining: “These prints were obtained by a new process which makes it possible to produce two or three hundred prints from the same negative the same day in rainy weather.”4
Calotype negatives, if consisting of only silver chloride, which they often were, are only sensitive to ultraviolet and blue light. As a result, a correct exposure for foreground information would produce a negative with an overexposed sky (where there is an overabundance of ultraviolet and blue light) producing only a paper base tone devoid of detail in the final print. To correct for this, one negative was made solely to produce properly exposed sky areas that could then be printed in combination with other negatives that had properly exposed foregrounds, thus the final print was the product of two separate negatives.
Blanquart-Evrard’s most significant contribution was his introduction in 1850 of the albumen paper print process, which became the primary printing medium until gelatin papers superseded it in the late 1800s. In 1851 in Lille, he started the Imprimerie Photographique, which was the first large-scale printing company to employ a large staff of workers, and mass-produced prints by other photographers. Many publishers hired Blanquart-Evrard to print the negatives they wished to publish. Such was the case with Gide & Baudry, the publishing company for Du Camp’s Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie.
Outgoing and adventurous, Maxime Du Camp was a pioneer in photography and went on to publish works in virtually every literary genre. Yet the photographs Du Camp made during his expedition with Flaubert remain to this day some of the most well-known images of Egypt.
Brittany Corrales
Maxime Du Camp, Nubie. Ibsamboul. 1852, salt print, 44 x 30.5 cm, SOLARI 94.035.002L