Maxime Du Camp

Learning Photography Before the Journey

Du Camp was already a writer and journalist when, shortly before his 1849 journey, he learned the paper-negative process from Gustave Le Gray. The Met explains that he began with little photographic experience but had developed a clear method based on frontal views and midday light by the time he reached Abu Simbel.^*3 According to the BnF, he produced more than two hundred calotypes in less than a year, and his principal work as a photographer is concentrated almost entirely in this journey and the book that followed.^*1 The concentration of his photographic activity around the trip shows that the need to record many monuments in a consistent way during long-distance travel was a direct reason for learning the medium so quickly.

A State Archaeological Mission and Flaubert

During the journey of 1849–51, Du Camp received an archaeological photographic mission from the French Ministry of Public Instruction and documented monuments alongside his private travels. The BnF places his concentration on sites along the Nile and in Palestine within the broader European interest in ancient Egypt and the Holy Land.^*20 Flaubert, who traveled with him, left diaries and letters that recorded the same places as lived and literary experience. The Met contrasts Du Camp’s systematic use of the camera to collect monuments with Flaubert’s very different experience of the journey.^*3 Read together, their records show Flaubert writing about emotion, fatigue, and discomfort while Du Camp accumulated labeled views of archaeological sites in a repeatable visual format.

By the 1840s, there was already growing interest in using photography to document exploration and archaeology. A history of photography from the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures places Du Camp’s mission for the French Ministry of Public Instruction among the early institutional applications of the medium.^*24 His frontal compositions and serial method therefore belong to more than personal taste. They also answered a scholarly demand to bring information gathered on an expedition back in a form that researchers could inspect after the travelers returned.

Frontal Views, Midday Light, and Scale

Du Camp’s characteristic method placed buildings and sculptures frontally, or at angles that made their structure easy to read, under strong daylight that minimized complicated shadows. In Westernmost Colossus of the Temple of Re, Abu Simbel, the base of the statue was excavated and an assistant climbed onto the crown so that the monument’s enormous scale could be compared with a human body.^*3 A photograph of the Pyramid of Chephren from the southeast similarly organizes terrain and monument so that each helps establish the dimensions of the other.^*6 Profile of the Great Sphinx isolates the contour of the head and gives priority to the monument’s form over the surrounding life of the site.^*5 By including the First Cataract in the same sequence as archaeological photographs, the book also allowed readers to follow part of the route south along the Nile through the order of images.^*4 A view of the Second Cataract was issued at the same format, making geographically separate sites directly comparable on the page.^*10

Why Paper Negatives?

Paper negatives were softer in resolution than daguerreotypes, but a single negative could produce multiple positives. Because Du Camp intended to bring material from distant sites home and publish it, that reproducibility was essential. A private portfolio in The Met contains 174 photographs whose surviving prints retain warm tones and a luminous surface.^*2 In the published edition produced by Blanquart-Evrard’s establishment, photographs were standardized to the book format and could be viewed consecutively. The exhibition Proof uses differences in tone between private and published prints to show how substantially a photograph could change during the printing process after exposure.^*21

Ruins at the Center of the Frame and Orientalism

Photographic clarity was not neutral. In an image of arms and utensils from Cairo, objects used in everyday life are laid out flat and isolated as though they were specimens for classification.^*7 A photograph of a fountain and school in the city likewise brings contemporary society into the image as part of an architectural description organized from the traveler’s point of view.^*11 The Princeton University Art Museum notes that Du Camp’s images present Egypt as an “exotic and timeless” place and connects them to nineteenth-century Orientalism.^*17 His photographs can therefore be read as precise archaeological documents and as evidence of what disappears from view when ancient monuments are made the dominant subject and contemporary people and daily life become secondary.

Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, 1852

Published in 1852, Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie contained 125 photographs printed at Blanquart-Evrard’s establishment.^*2 The BnF likewise emphasizes how closely Du Camp’s photographic career is concentrated around this journey and the 1852 publication.^*1 Each image was identified by place and monument, and the 125 plates appeared within the same publication, allowing European readers to compare sites in sequence and relate them to maps or archaeological descriptions without traveling there. The structure of the book itself became a means of sharing material gathered in the field. Works such as Princeton’s Palace of Menephta, Gourna isolate individual sites as separate photographs, turning places encountered during the journey into plates that could be consulted independently.^*18

Abu Simbel and the Human Figure as Scale

The colossal figures at Abu Simbel show Du Camp’s method with particular clarity. In MoMA’s print, the sculpture fills most of the frame while a human figure acts as a small unit of measurement.^*13 In the Musée d’Orsay’s Haute Egypte. Bois de dattiers et de palmiers doums, the museum identifies Du Camp as the maker of the negative and Blanquart-Evrard as the printer, confirming that exposure and printing were distinct professional stages.^*15 The National Gallery of Art’s view of the Temple of Isis at Philae likewise favors architectural frontality and legibility over exaggerated perspective.^*14 Figures in these views establish scale by their proportional relation to sculpture and architecture.

From Ruins to Publication

The Princeton University Art Museum records Du Camp as photographer and Blanquart-Evrard as printer for Second Pylon, Temple of Isis, Philae, making the two-stage production of the published photograph explicit.^*16 Princeton’s holdings also show how material from one journey is now dispersed across institutions and studied both through the original sequence of the book and as individual photographs.^*18 In Japan, Sendai Mediatheque presented an exhibition on Du Camp in 2001 and produced a catalog introducing all 125 photographs from the published book.^*19 Du Camp’s significance lies in the way negatives made on an expedition were organized by place and title, printed in quantity, and distributed as a 125-image book. Photography did not end at exposure; the order of viewing and bibliographic information were part of how archaeological photographs reached readers.

Documentary Precision and the Colonial Gaze

Du Camp’s photographs clearly demonstrate the nineteenth-century process by which photography acquired authority as an “accurate record.” A colonnade at Medinet Habu organizes architectural elements perspectivally so that their structure can be compared.^*8 A view of Philae from the east gathers the island and its remains into a single geographical object.^*9 The same visual order also reduces a living place to an ancient site available for study. A present-day assessment therefore has to ask whose system of knowledge that precision served as well as how accurately the photograph described the monument.

A Photographic Career Concentrated in 1849–50

After returning to France, Du Camp devoted more of his career to literature, journalism, and social observation and did not sustain photographic work on the scale of this journey. The BnF’s biography effectively presents him as a photographer of one journey and one book.^*20 The series consequently concentrates the technical, travel, archaeological, and publishing conditions of 1849–51 with unusual intensity. The Musée d’Orsay’s artist record likewise describes a writer and traveler whose photographic production centers on the journey of 1849–51.^*22 Repeatedly photographing sites such as the propylon at Dendur and the Sphinx in the same format gives the series its coherence through accumulation rather than through the status of any single masterpiece.^*12

The 1852 Photographic Book and Later Travel Photography

Francis Frith and other photographers later photographed Egypt and the Holy Land on a larger commercial scale, but Du Camp had already established an earlier model: paper negatives made during an expedition could be printed in quantity after the photographer returned, identified by location, assembled in a volume, and sold. The Met’s exhibition treats the 1852 publication as an important early French photographically illustrated book while also showing differences between private and published prints.^*21 Comparison of the two sets demonstrates that the same negative could yield different tones and impressions. The documentary character of travel photography was shaped by a sequence of decisions extending from location, light, and the placement of figures to printing, captions, and page order.

From Illustrated Surveys to Later Archaeological Evidence

Du Camp’s frontal views and his progression from general views to details also had a pre-photographic precedent in illustrated surveys of Egypt. The University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures notes that the Description de l’Égypte, produced after Napoleon’s expedition, presented sites through maps, panoramas, and detailed views of architectural parts, an organizational sequence later repeated in photographic albums.^*25 Photographic publications inherited the same method of moving from an overview of a site to its parts, but the images on the page were now made from negatives exposed on location rather than from drawn surveys and engravings. Frederick N. Bohrer’s study of photography and archaeology argues that photography served as a record of sites while camera position, publication, and framing also shaped how those sites were seen.^*26 ISAC has also used Du Camp’s 1850 photograph of Luxor Temple in comparison with photographs from the later 1850s to identify changes caused by excavation and clearance.^*23 Images made for a French archaeological mission in 1850 can therefore serve today as evidence for how the archaeological sites themselves were subsequently altered.