PERSPECTIVES ON PHOTOGRAPHY

Essays on the Wark of

Du Camp, Dancer, Robinson,

Stieglit;:;, Strand, & Smithers

at the Humanities Research Center

Edited by

Dave Oliphant & Thomas Ziga1

Humanities Research Center • The University of Texas at Austin

Copyright © i982 by the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Cover illustration: H enry Peach Robinson's study of young woman, in country cos­tume, before modeling screen, ca . 1860 . 2 1 x 1 7 cm . Silver print, with pencil and watercolor. HRC Photography Collection.

Maxime Du Camp, ca. i857. Photograph by Nadar.

The Photographic Adventure of Maxime Du Camp

BY ELIZABETH ANNE McCAULEY

Si jamais tu fais le voyage d'Orient, cher vieux, je le ferai avec toi, et alors tous deux, unis comme nous le sommes, voyant avec Jes memes yeux, nous isolant parfaitement au milieu de taus, nous pourrons faire d'admirables excur­sions.I

At ten o'clock on the morning of 15 November 1849, on arnvmg at the outer reaches of the Nile delta, two aspiring young French writers, Max­ime Du Camp. and Gustave Flaubert, began an exploration of the myste­rious Middle East which would prove that not only were they not seeing with "les memes yeux" but that their methods of accumulating, processing, and using information were disparate enough to destroy their friendship. Du Camp, the experienced traveler, published author on the Middle East,2 and amateur Egyptologi.st, came equipped with a novel apparatus, the camera, and proceeded to supplement his copious notes with over two hundred paper negatives. After his return to Paris in the spring of 1851, Du Camp commissioned the newly founded photographic printing estab­lishment of Blanquart-Evrard to produce salt paper positives to be issued in five-print installments and ultimately bound into two volumes with an introductory text by Du Camp. Copies of the resulting Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, containing 125 plates and published by Gide and Baudry in 1852, found their way into the hands of admiring archeologists and amateurs, and with the pmchase of the Gernsheim Collection in 1964, a complete set reached the Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

l"If you ever take a trip to the Orient, old friend, I will go with you, and then the two of us-close as we are, seeing with the same eyes, perfectly alone even in the midst of things-will be able to make wonderful journeys." Letter from Maxime Du Camp in Constantinople to Gustave Flaubert, 14 July 1844. Lettres inedites a Gustave Flaubert (Messina, Italy: EDAS, 1978 ), p. 42.

2After his visit to Constantinople in 1844-45, Du Camp published Souvenirs et paysages d'Orient ( Paris: A. Bertrand, i 848).

The story of Du Camp's fascination with oriental travel, his prepar<i­tions for a long Egyptian and Persian trip and his recruitment of his friend Flaubert, is well known to literary historians. In his Souvenirs lit­teraires, Du Camp described how he read Hugo's Orientales in high school, was introduced to oriental poetry by Amedee Joubert, bought

Gustave Flaubert, n.d. Photograph by Nadar. HRC Photography Collection.

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d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque orientale ( 1697 ) prior to 1842, and undertook his first major excursion to Constantinople in 1844.3 As his memoirs and notes reveal, Du Camp's study of the Middle East prior to his 1849 depar­ture to Egypt was thorough, though dependent on the biased stereotypes perpetuated within Orientalist research during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 He pored over texts including the Comte de Volney's Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte ( 1787) , Gibbon's Histoire de la decadence et de la chute de l'empire romain ( 1776) , Anville's L'Empire turc con­sidere dans son et ab lissement et dans ses accroissements successif s ( 1772), Olivier's Voyage dans l'empire ottoman (1801- 07), Olfert Dopper's De­scription de l'Afrique ( 1686 ), Komelius de Bruyn's Voyage au Levant (1700), and the works of Champollion le Jeune.5 He knew the accounts of Lamartine and Chateaubriand and talked with friends and fellow travel­ers such as Gerard de Nerval and Theophile Gautier.6 While he relied largely on classical travel literature and the results of the Napoleonic ex­cavations, Du Camp also had access to more recent publications discussed in the Revue de l'Orient, the periodical of the Societe orientale, which he joined in 1844.7

4 For a study of such stereotypes see E dward Said, Orientalism (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1978).

5Since Du Camp's uncle Amedee married the daughter of Champollion le Jeune in 1848, there were family connections with the archeologist. (Andre Finot, Maxime Du Camp [Paris : H. Gaignault & fil s, 1949 ], p. 13. )

GThe periods in which Du Camp read various books on the Orient are difficult to es tablish. In a letter of August 1848 to Flaubert, Du Camp said that he was reading the Pantheon Indien, the Pantheon Egyptien, and a book by Abbe Dubois on Indian customs. In September 1848 he was reading Gibbon and <l'Herbelot, although in his Souvenirs litteraires he maintained that he had read d'Herbelot in 1842. On 9 October 1848 he reported he was reading Volney ; in March 1849 he had finished taking notes on An ville and Champollion ( Du Camp, Lettres, pp. 137- 50) . In his Souvenirs de l'annee i848 ( Paris : Hachette, 1876 ), Du Camp claimed that while his contempo­raries were discussing electoral reform , he was reading "Olivier, Dapper, Kornelius de Bruyn, Ritter, Champollion le Jeune, and d'Herbelot" ( p. 3 ) . Furthermore, in his manuscript notes preserved at the Bibliotheque de l'Institut, there are transcriptions from Strabo, Pliny, d'Herbelot, Chardin, Volney, Plutarch, Ritter, Chateaubriand, d'Anville, Champollion le Jeune, Alfred Maury, the Revue archeologique ( 15 January 1849 ) , Abd-Alla tif, Bon jean fils , Balbi, and others. Since Du Camp often recopied his notes, it is difficult to prove that these sources were consulted before his trip. After his return to Paris in 1851, he continued research in preparation for the intro­duction to Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie and for Le N il . For a complete transcrip­tion of Du Camp's notes in the Bibliotheque de l'Institut, see Giovanni Bonaccorso, ed., Maxime Du Camp-Vo yage en Orient (1849-1 851 }--Notes ( Messina, Italy: Peloritana, 1972).

7Diploma from the Societe orientale da ted 4 March 1844. Bibliotheque de l'Institut <le France, M.S . 3719.

3Maxime Du Camp , Souvenirs litteraires, vol. 1 ( Paris: Hachette, 1882-83 ), pp. 130, 172, and 210.

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Du Camp's method of studying the Middle East is important to estab­lish because it is consistent with and contributory to his photographic production. As in his later works on the war for Italian unification, the Commune, and Parisian public hospitals, Du Camp emerges as a docu­mentarian, a man who went to the Bibliotheque nationale to research the history of his topic and then traveled into the field to record its current status. Although he read Nerval's tales of harem girls and the back streets of Cairo,8 Du Camp complained that Nerval failed to give him "serious indications" about Egypt and knew nothing of its ruins.9 Du Camp was primarily interested in historical facts and accepted neither hearsay nor embellished descriptions.

In turning to the camera, Du Camp pursued a similar goal of scientific objectivity which was closer, however, to popular opinions of photography than to the realities of the calotype process. His story of his introduction to the medium emphasizes its mechanical, rather than esthetic, possibili­ties:

In my prior travels, I had noticed that I lost precious time in drawing the monuments or views that I wanted to remember; I drew slowly and in an incorrect manner; furthermore, the notes I took to describe an edifice or landscape seemed confused to me when I reread them later, and I understood that I needed a pre­cision instrument to bring back images that would allow me to make exact reconstructions .... I wanted to be in a position to gather as many documents as possible. Therefore, I entered into an apprenticeship with a photographer and started manipulating chemicals.10

Although addressing an i88os readership and reminding it that photog­raphy in the late i84os required "great manual dexterity and more than forty minutes to bring a negative to completion," Du Camp cavalierly claimed that "Learning photography isn't a big deal, but transporting equipment by muleback, camelback, or the back of a human is a difficult problem."11 For Du Camp, photography became a tool, like the meter stick, that he used during his i84g-51 trip and abandoned for the rest of his career.

BNerval had begun publishing his travel accounts in Revue des Deux-Mondes in i846, and his Voyage en Orient appeared in i85i.

9Du Camp, Souvenirs litteraires, vol. i, pp. 421-22. lOJbid., pp . 422-23. lllbid., p. 424.

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The assistance of this new companion, clever, prompt, and al­ways scrupulously faithful, can give a pa1ticular character and great importance to the results of M. Du Camp's trip . . . . The particular character of photography, its uncontestable exactitude and its minute fidelity, down to the most unseen accessories, gives value to all that it produces. . . . The operation is so fast that we'd say that he should copy everything ... either general views and details of a monument, an entire legend, or a complete hiero­glyphic tablet. The scattered sketching, the all-too-common habit of travelers of jumping from one monument to another without having exhausted the study and attention that each one de­manded, should be avoided. One obtains no serious results in this way. It is also not a question of charming our eyes by the seductive effects that light causes in the camera, but of faithfully and sequentially copying the texts claimed for science.13

In its vision of fine, detailed images, the committee was undoubtedly thinking of the daguerreotype process rather than the grainier paper negatives that Du Camp would employ. The committee's rhapsodies over photography's speed and ease of production resulted from comparisons with the much slower and more painstaking process of drawing a site or inscription.

Using the Academie's enthusiastic support for his project, Du Camp wrote on 8 October i849 to the Ministry of Public Instruction to obtain from the French government an honorific, official "mission" which would help cut through red tape and provide letters of introduction to Middle Eastern potentates. In addition to stressing that the mission would be unde1taken at no public cost, Du Camp cited his i844-45 trip to Turkey, Greece, and Asia Minor, his i848 publication of Souvenirs et paysages d'Orient, his participation in the i5 May i848 invasion of the National Assembly, and his wound received in June i848 as proof of his intellectual seriousness and allegiance to the Republican government.14 He also en­closed a printed copy of his itinerary, which shows that the Egyptian trip up the Nile to the second cataract was only a small part of a grand tour that would extend to Palestine, Syria, Baghdad, and Teheran. The fact that the itinerary was printed and included specific references to archeo­logical questions Du Camp hoped to answer, and a list of sculptures he

13lbid., M.S . 3720. HArchives nationales, F17 29571, dossier Du Camp. Du Camp was also a friend of

Franc;ois Genin, director of the Division of Science and Letters, who undoubtedly facilitated Du Camp's contact with the Ministry.

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intended to study, further transformed his trip from a tourist's idle mean­derings into an organized scientific expedition.

On 15 October 1849 Du Camp wrote Flaubert that efforts to obtain a mission were proceeding slowly but that his appeal to the Ministry of Agriculture to obtain a similar mission for Flaubert had been more suc­cessful. By 30 October, however, Du Camp had received authorization from the French government to undertake a "mission scientifique en Egypte, en Palestine, en Syrie." The officially stated goals of this mission were "to explore the antiquities, collect the traditions, transcribe inscrip­tions and sculptures, and study history in the monuments."15 After attend­ing to the packing of his trunks, taking care of the problems created by the death of his grandmother, and sending his Italian valet ahead to Marseille, Du Camp, accompanied by a somewhat reluctant Flaubert, left Paris at the end of October.

The existing evidence documenting the two men's travels during the next eighteen months allows us not only to reconstruct their daily itinerary but also to compare the various types of material acquired by the two observers. Du Camp's manuscript travel notes and letters received during the trip are preserved in the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France in Paris, as are his 214 original numbered and dated negatives and the albumen prints produced from those negatives at a period after the Blanquart­Evrard prints . Fmthermore, the trip is described by Du Camp in the introduction of Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, in Le Nil ( 1854), in Souvenirs litteraires, and to a lesser extent in Memoires d'un suicide (1855). Flaubert's reflections on the same events can be found in his pub­lished correspondence, travel notes, and the edited version of those notes known as Voyage en Orient, all of which were unpublished during Du Camp's lifetime.

A comparison of the various written records of Du Camp and Flaubert's trip reveals vast discrepancies in the selection of facts and anecdotes and the style in which they were presented. Du Camp's introduction to Egypt, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie is purged of "local color" and heavily dependent on quotations from Champollion le Jeune and the Berlin archeologist Richard Lepsius, whereas his travel notes combine archeological measure­ments and descriptions with anecdotes of trips to brothels, circumcision rites, and other cultural phenomena. In Le Nil, produced soon after his return to Paris, Du Camp embellished the notes' abbreviated phrases, and in the later Souvenirs litteraires he allowed his personal opinions and evaluations to dominate, while pointedly excluding most of the material already published in Le Nil. Flaubert's written records of the trip show

l~Ibid. Letter dated 30 October i849 from the Ministry of Public Instruction.

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more internal consistency and repetition of unusual stories. His lively interest in people and human behavior countered a growing ennui with Egyptian ruins, which prompted him to speculate on graffiti and bird droppings as much as on the monuments they defaced.16

In contrast with Du Camp's other records and with Flaubert's accounts , the photographs produced during the trip appear as silent, almost unfeel­ing studies analogous to the text that accompanies them in the Gide and Baudry publication. Looking at the prints, one would have no idea that these two Frenchmen spent their evenings in the arms of dancing girls, were plagued by fleas and venereal disease, and amused themselves by shooting birds, crocodiles, and even dogs. Although the slowness of the medium made genre scenes or lively portraits impossible, the presence of various figures to give a sense of scale proves that it was possible to obtain clear images of individuals who were instructed not to move.17

What, then, influenced Du Camp in his choice and composition of sub­jects, and what were the goals determining his "photographic esthetic"?

Even though most of the reference works Du Camp is known to have consulted before his trip were either unillustrated or accompanied by engravings representing hieroglyphic panels, he was familiar with both topographical lithographs of the Middle East and orientalist paintings by his good friend Gleyre and by Delacroix, Decamps, Marilhat, and Fro­mentin, whom he had noticed in the i847 Salon.18 Whereas the paintings perpetuated the romantics' image of the Middle East as a land of palm trees, camels, dark-eyed dancing girls, fighting pachas, and fanatical Mus­lims, lithographic series like Hector Horeau's Panorama d'Egypte et de Nubie ( i841) came closer to the methodical, geographically organized study of architectural monuments envisioned by Du Camp. Du Camp's choice of sites, with intensive activity at Thebes (forty-three known prints), Cairo (twenty-eight prints), Philae (nineteen prints), and Isam-

16Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres completes, vol. 13 (Pru-is: Club de l'honnete homme, 1971-) , p . 42.

l 7Flaubert, the servant Sassetti, the sailor Hadji-Ismael, and other figures appear in Du Camp's photographs. Flaubert has been identified by Madeleine Cottin as the fig­ure in plate 3 of Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (Madeleine Cottin, "Une image meconnu: la photographie de Flaubert prise en 1850 au Caire par son ami Maxime Du Camp," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, October 1965). According to Flaubert's notes, on 9 December 1849 he also posed for Du Camp "on top of the pyramid that is at a SE angle from the large one" (Oeuvres completes, vol. lo, p. 464). In fact, in plate 34 at the Bibliotheque de l'lnstitut, the tiny, black, unrecognizable figure on the top of that pyramid must be Flaubert. Flaubert also reports posing on 11 April 1850 on the top of the mosque of "Keleil-Rasoun-Saba" at Bab (Oeuvres completes, vol. 10,

p. 514), but no view of this site with a figure has been located. lSDu Camp, Souvenirs litteraires, vol. 1, p. 350.

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-·-~ ._\.\.\.\.\.\.\. \..

" \

Fig. l Maxirne Du Camp, "4. Le Barrage, Maison de Mouget-Bey, 31 decembre i849, c.n. 28," albumen print from waxed paper negative. From the Collection of the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, Paris.

..

-Fig. 2 Maxime Du Camp, " 163. Chadouf a Abou-hor ( Tropique du Cancer), 14 mars 1850, c.n. 46," albumen print from waxed paper negative. From the Collection of the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, Paris.

boul (ten prints) , is consistent with Horeau' s selection, and almost every monument in Horeau's series was photographed by Du Camp.rn However, Horeau, who in one instance even relied on a daguerreotype by Joly de Lotbiniere, graces his monuments with views of working natives, tents, palms, and camels in the corners of the foreground. If Du Camp is more ruthless than the architect Horeau in his concentration on the monument itself, the photographer has almost no esthetic affiliations with litho­graphic series such as James Augustus John's Costumes and Modes of Life in the Valley of the Nile ( i848), which was illustrated after drawings by E. Prisse d 'Avennes and makes contemporary life, rather than the ruins, the subject of the publication.20

In spite of the fact that Du Camp began gathering material on his Egyptian trip for an intended study of Muslim customs and rituals, his photographic rejection of contemporary Middle Eastern life is undeniable. In his selection of architectural monuments, he favored pre-Muslim or sacred post-Muslim buildings and rarely included views such as those of the house of Mouget-Bey (fig. i) or the palace of Mohammed Ali at Esna. The unique image of natives at work, one of the few photographs taken during Du Camp's ascent of the Nile, was so experimental that Flaubert made specific note of its production (fig 2) .21 This kind of human-interest shot, common in lithography and obviously possible in photography, was normally excluded by Du Camp not because of the problems involved in posing the natives but because at heart he was not concerned about their economic and social condition.

Du Camp's attitude toward modem Egypt was neither more enlight­ened nor more prejudiced than that of his French and English peers: "In Egypt, there has always been a need for a master ... yesterday the Arab, today the Turk, tomorrow the English."22 Impe1ialist expansion was an unchallenged law of human progress. For Du Camp, the efforts of Mohammed Ali to bring industrialization to his country, often by pulver-

19The notable exceptions are Pompey's Column, Cleopatra's Needle, and Cleopatra's Bath in Alexandria, which Du Camp visited on 17 November 1849 but did not photo­graph-and Edfou, which he discussed in the introduction to Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie. These were all popular lithographic subjects during the 1840s and '50s.

20Prisse d'Avennes is an important link between Du Camp's publication and its lithographic prototypes. In Du Camp's published volumes Prisse D 'Avennes did the maps of Karnak, Medinet-Habou, and Philae, and "advised in the editing of the short legends included with each photograph" (Du Camp, Egypte, Nubie, p. 55).

210n 14 March 1850 Flaubert writes: "Maxime tries to make a proof of a chadouf -ugliness of a large negro who poses on the right" (Oeuvres completes, vol. 10, p. 495).

22Du Camp, Souvenirs litteraires, vol. 1, p. 444.

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izing the temples for lime, were unsuccessful because "one doesn't modify, one can't modify the generation of ideas, the way of being of a crossbred race of Africans and Semites whose instincts are naturally in opposition with those of the Aryan race. Races are not the same; what's possible at one latitude isn't possible at another, and the gift of speech does not bring equality or similarity of faculties."n Du Camp's differences with Middle Eastern beliefs are elaborated in Le Nil, where he assures Theophile Gau­tier (to whom the book is addressed) that he will not try "to impose by force on the Libyan bedouins the beliefs in eternal and universal life, in the equality of women, in the incessant progress of humanity, in the per­petual ascension of the spirit towards divine intelligence, in love, in work, which I am proud to feel vibrate in me."2•1

In contrast to Flaubert's curiosity about contemporary Egypt, Du Camp remained more en trenched in his European values and felt more sharply the loss of the grandeur that belonged to ancient Egypt. "Egypt is a dy­ing country whose sight is slowly dimming," Du Camp wrote in the open­ing lines of Le Nil.2" Among the mass of quotations that constitute the introduction to Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie are descriptions that repeat how the sphinx is now snubnosed, corroded, and unrecognizable, and how "all has disappeared" at Memphis, Lycopolis, Elephantine Is­land, and other sites. Even though the self-defined task in his travels was to describe the "actual state of the ancient monuments,"2n he tinged his writings with nostalgia for a civilization he imagined as "terrible, full of cruel refinements and bloody voluptuousness," with people ioo cubits tall. 27 While Flaubert amused himself by finding scenes of brothels and orgiastic dinners among the relief sculptures at Thebes, which brought the ancients closer to contemporary life,28 Du Camp admired the supermen of the past and had at best a detached curiosity or amused disdain for the porters, prostitutes, and government officials he encountered.

Working within the limits established by his own concept of what were important and appropriate subjects for his mission, Du Camp attacked the business of recording a site in a systematic fashion. To some extent, his general itinerary determined the way in which he became acquainted

23Ibid., P· 445. 24Maxime Du Camp, Le Nil, 2nd ed. (Paris : A. Bourdilliat, 1860), p . 232. Wibid., p. 14. 2GBibliotheque de l'Institut, M.S. 372i. Title for an uncompleted report to the

Ministry of Public Instruction. 27Du Camp, Le Nil, p. 229. 28Flaubert, Oeuvres completes, vol. 13, p. 42. Letter to Louis Bouilhet dated 2

June 1850.

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with a particular ruin. After ten days spent in Alexandria, interrupted by a nonphotographic excursion to Rosetta, Du Camp and Flaubert took a boat to Cairo, where they stayed from 26 November i849 until 5 February i850, taking trips to the pyramids, Matarieh, and Heliopolis.29 From 5 February until 24 March, the two men lived in their boat while ascending the Nile as far as the second cataract. During this rather rapid upstream trip, Du Camp stopped briefly at major sites, visiting temples and taking notes but photographing only at Beni-Souef (one negative), the first cata­ract (two negatives), Abou-hor (four negatives), and the second cataract (four negatives). It was only during the prolonged, three-month descent of the Nile back to Cairo that Du Camp's more thorough photographic work began.

A closer examination of Du Camp's activities at a single site can serve as a model for his procedures throughout the trip. The first place that Du Camp's boat stopped on its return down the Nile was Isamboul (Abu Simbel), where he arrived on 27 March i850 and stayed until 30 March. He normally spent the first day or evening after his arrival hiking about without meter stick or camera. Docking at Isamboul at nine A.M., he pro­ceeded to visit the two temples while directing his workers to "clear off the head of the fourth colossus of the great temple of Phre."30 He toured the interior chambers of the temples and concluded his day by writing detailed notes about their wall paintings and sculptural reliefs. As was often the case, no photographs were taken on the days in which lengthy journal entries were made.

The following day, Du Camp's servants hauled out his apparatuses and he began photographing. If the numbers and dates on the prints in the Bibliotheque de l'lnstitut accurately reflect the sequence in which the photographs were taken, he successfully completed three views of the fa9ade of the small temple of Hathor (taken from an equal distance below and in front of the temple) before turning to the Grand Temple, where he measured parts of the head and torso of the left colossus.31 As Flaubert's notes confirm, the process of clearing sand from the head of the right colossus continued until the chin was uncovered.32 This effort to expose the lower part of the colossus may have been inspired in part by the

29During his stay in Alexandria, Du Camp took three negatives that have been preserved in the Bibliotheque de l'Institut. In Cairo and during the three days spent at the pyramids, he produced thirty-five negatives.

30Bibliotheque de l'Institut, M.S. 3766. 31Ibid., M.S. 372i. 32Flaubert, Oeuvres completes, vol. 10, p. 504. Entry for 28 March 1850.

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Academie's instructions for Isamboul, which stated that there were many copies of the Phoenician inscriptions on the legs of the colossus with the broken head, but it would be beneficial "to clear away the legs of the five other colossi to verify if they had similar inscriptions."33

On 29 March, while the removal of sand continued, Du Camp produced his series of five views of the Grand Temple of Phre, in addition to an image of the entire complex from the other side of the Nile. He made a vertical, frontal view of the left colossus and then moved to the middle figure, but was obviously struck most by the right head, which he had uncovered from the sand. Writing later, he stated that it was the only intact face and that he could "still imagine those big, hard eyes, that straight nose slightly curved at the end, and those large lips that seemed to smile."~4 The photograph that he produced has an unusual intensity and a whimsical quality that can be explained by the requisite close placement of the camera on the sand directly in front of the face and by Du Camp's attraction to the features and expression (fig. 3). Having com­pleted his photographic activities with profile images of the left colossus, the sculptural reliefs surrounding the doorway, and the distant view, Du Camp left Isamboul on the following morning.

Du Camp's modus operandi continued to be initial exploration, note taking, and then intense photographic activity within one area during concentrated periods of time. At Karnak on 5 May 1850 he reached his peak daily production of fourteen negatives, excluding the failed ones that presumably were discarded. On some occasions, such as 13 and 14 April on the Island of Philae, Du Camp "operated all day," as he jotted in his notes. It is therefore not surprising that Flaubert was somewhat over­whelmed by his friend's "photographic frenzy." In Cairo he had already written to his mother that "photography absorbs and consumes Max's days. He succeeds but gets upset every time he ruins a proof or a plate is badly wiped."3" During the three months down the Nile, Flaubert grew so impatient that at Isamboul on 29 March he wrote, "Egyptian temples profoundly get on my nerves ."36 At Philae he added, "I never leave the island and I'm bored,"37 and commented in a letter to his mother, "I don't know how Max doesn't kill himself with the photographic mania he has."38

33Bibliotheque de l'Institut, M.S. 3720. 34Du Camp, Le Nil, p. 140. 35FJaubert, Oeuvres completes, vol. 12, p. 666. Letter to his mother dated 5 January

1850. 3GJbid. , vol. 10, p. 504. Entry for 29 March 1850. 37Jbid., p . 514. Entry for 12 April 1850. 38Jbid. , vol. 13, p . 32. Letter to his mother dated 15 April 1850.

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Fig. 3 Maxime Du Camp, "107. Isamboul-Colosse occidental du Speas de Phre," Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (Paris, i852), salt paper print from waxed paper negative. The figure is probably Sassetti, Du Camp's valet. HRC Photography Collec­tion .

Fig. 4 Felix Teynard, "7i. Esneh-Architrave, flits et chapiteaux," Egypte et Niibie ( Paris, i858), salt paper print from paper negative. From the Collection of the Bib­liotheque nationale, Paris .

Du Camp's enthusiastic and comprehensive treatment of a site reflects the Academie's admonition to take panoramas, close studies of specific buildings, and details of inscriptions and reliefs. The distant view and the midground shot of a single edifice by far dominate the series in the Bib­liotheque de l'Institut. Details occur under identifiable circumstances: although Du Camp sometimes tilted the camera upward to focus on a "modern" minaret or doorway, he more often moved closer to a planar wall or relief sculpture on an antique monument. For his two images of the demotic inscriptions on the Temple of Isis at Philae, he was fai thful to the instructions of the Academie. That photographs of an undeciphered script would have no interest to the layperson obviously did not bother either Du Camp or Gide and Baudry, who included the works in their final publication. On no occasion, however, did Du Camp focus on the kind of architectural fragment that occurs in the calotypes of Felix Tey­nard, which were taken in i851-52 and published in i858 (fig. 4).

Du Camp's compositions, whether of structures in the foreground, mid­ground, or background, were based on the standard principle of placing the entirety of the defined subject in the center of the ground glass, with the horizon well above or below the median . In some instances, as in his well-known, published view of the sphinx, there is an effort to shift the subject to one side and balance it with other elements receding diagonally into the background (fig. 5). Such a successful solution was not always the case, as a comparison with Du Camp's unpublished second view of the sphinx reveals (fig. 6). In order to give some idea of the monument's three-dimensional configuration, Du Camp made a profile view that cap­tures an unrecognizable, faceless sphinx in an undifferentiated, barren landscape.

Felix Teynard also constructed a diagonal progression from the sphinx to the pyramids, but he allowed one corner of a pyramid to creep into the image on the right ( fig. 7). This haphazard triangle interrupts the eye's movement from the engaging face of the sphinx to the large pyramid and disturbs the balance of the two-dimensional composition. Such accidental forms caught on the edges of the frame were avoided by Du Camp, who single-mindedly focused on the monument under consideration. At the same time, Du Camp did occasionally cramp his subject by forcing its boundaries to the edges of the frame.

Another characteristic of Du Camp's vision is his preference for absolute frontality, often with the sacrificing of a clear, three-dimensional reading. This "will for order," symmetry, and placement of the subject parallel to the ground glass is particularly obvious in two unpublished photographs of a woman in Bethlehem taken on 1$ August i850. The first work, iden­tified as negative 3a, is a unique effort at a costume study in which the veiled woman appears slightly off center before a Turkish carpet draped

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Fig. 5 Maxime Du Camp, "11. Le Sphinx, vu de face," Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, salt paper print from waxed paper negative. HRC Photography Collection.

on a diagonally receding wall (fig. 8) .30 The second work, labeled as negative 4a and inferior in contrast and clarity, shows that Du Camp has organized the composition, moved his camera parallel to the stone wall, centered the woman who now faces the camera, and pulled the rug to­ward the right and to the ground to form a uniform, dark pattern behind the headdress, which was his stated subject (fig. g).

The spatial ambiguity that sometimes results from Du Camp's frontal approach can be demonstrated by a comparison between his view of the propylaeum of the Thoutmoseum at Medinet-Habou (fig. 10) and Tey­nard's equivalent image (fig. 11). By centering the doorway before the camera, Du Camp creates an overlapping of free-standing columns with the wall, though Teynard's photograph clearly indicates they are separate. Because of the grainy nature of the paper negative and the characteristics of Du Camp's lens, the degree of resolution of detail of the columns, ma­sonry, and rubble behind the portal is virtually identical, which results in the erroneous interpretation that the columns are attached to the wall behind them. The resultant denial of deep space and the illusory confu­sion of planes create an archeological inaccuracy that Du Camp either failed to notice or let stand in order to preserve a two-dimensionally bal­anced composition .

From Du Camp's choice and framing of monuments, it is apparent that he wanted his photographs to be as clear and scientific as possible yet at the same time that he was accustomed to following the Paris Salons and could not allow his images to be unbalanced and "unattractive." The inclusion of a figure in many of his views is further evidence of his con­cern for accuracy, as well as for compositional variety. Although neither Teynard nor the British traveler-photographer John Bulkley Greene, whose Le Nil was published in i854, thought to place one of his assistants by a monument to indicate its size, Du Camp's idea was by no means orig­inal. Topographical lithographers regularly introduced costumed charac­ters to enliven and, more often, monumentalize their architectural views. The custom was so ingrained that even Lerebours' Excursions daguerri­ennes ( i842), the first etched and lithographed series made after daguer­reotypes, contained hand-drawn imaginary crowds of appropriately dressed citizens that the daguerreotype had been unable to capture.

39Du Camp began renumbering his negatives after he left Egypt, which indicates that to him th ere was a signifi cant break, geographically and perhaps technically, be­hveen the segments of his trip.

Abooe: Fig. 8 Maxime Du Camp, "199. Jerusalem. Coiffure des femmes de Beeth­leem, 15 aout 1850, c.n . 3a," albumen print from waxed paper negative. From the Collection of the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, Paris. Below: Fig. 9 Maxime Du Camp, "zoo. Jerusalem. Coiffure des femmes de Beethleem, 15 aout 1850, c.n. 4a," albumen print from waxed paper negative. From the Collection of the Bibliotheque de l'lnstitut de France, Paris.

Fig. i o Maxime Du Camp, "47. Medinet-Habou-propylees du Thoutmoseum," Egypte, Nubie, Pale~tin e et Syrie, salt paper print from waxed paper negative. HRC Photogra phy Collection .

Fig. 12 Maxime Du Camp, "2J. Karnak-Propylone du Temple de Khons," Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, salt paper print from waxed paper negative. HRC Photog­raphy Collection.

pointedly excluded undisguised Westerners from his photographs and carefully draped or undressed the various individuals he did include.40

Du Camp's intuitive sensitivity to the importance of a human referent in his otherwise stark architectural views did not mean that he was willing to stray further toward producing what the Academie scornfully termed "seductive effects that light causes in the camera." His attitude toward sunlight, the stuff from which his works were made and which abounded in Egypt, was pragmatic rather than creative. He waited until the sun struck a face or raked across the relief sculptures he wanted to record, placed his camera as often as possible in the shadow to avoid glare, and never attempted dramatic early morning or sunset shots. The play of light and shadow which Greene captured at Medinet-Habou is excluded from Du Camp's work, as are Greene's highly abstract studies of palms sil­houetted along the Nile. While Greene's photographs can be classified as "poetic" in their acceptance of cast shadows and spots of sunlight, in their fascination with the two-dimensional textures and patterns of the ruin­filled landscape, and in their exploitation of the paper negative's grain, Du Camp's photographs strive more toward the accuracy and comprehen­siveness of photographic explorations during the collodion era.

Although the compositional formulae established during Du Camp's seven months in Egypt continued to apply to the works that he produced in the three months that remained of his photographic career, his interest in and success with the medium significantly declined. He made i8g num­bered negatives in Egypt but apparently began having problems with his chemical baths and exposures in Beirut and produced only twenty-seven negatives during the remainder of the journey. While the negatives taken in Alexandria at the beginning of his trip were grainy and lacking in con­trast, he was able to produce sharp, crisp images by the time he left Cairo. The post-Egyptian negatives are surprisingly out-of-focus, pale, and uneven. As a consequence of this regression in the quality of the negatives and an increasing impatience with transporting his massive photographic equipment,41 at the end of September in Beirut Du Camp traded his camera to a "frenetic amateur" who gave him ten feet of gold-

40The almost naked Nubian figure in Du Camp's Thebes, Denderah, and Philae photographs must be Hadji-lsmael, whom he describes as a beautiful but simple sailor who would hold a pose because Du Camp told him that his lens was a cannon that would shoot him if he moved (Du Camp, Le Nil, p. 290). The figure's atypical lack of dress, like his donning of various hats and drapes in these photographs, was probably encouraged by the operator.

41Flaubert reports that when they stayed at the Maison de France in Thebes, they had a small room for Du Camp's photographic equipment (Oeuvres completes, vol. 10, p. 526. Entry for 2 May 1850).

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embroidered fabric, which Flaubert hoped would make a "sofa fit for kings."42

After traveling through Turkey, Greece, and Italy, Du Camp returned to Paris in May 1851 and wasted no time making the results of his trip known to the public. On 25 May he wrote Flaubert, who was still in Italy: "As to my negatives, they're creating a furor and revolution- the Societe heliographique has named a commission to examine them, they ask for me at the Ministry, etc., etc.-that might turn out well. In ten days I'll start my report for the Ministry-Saulcy promised me strong sup­poit."43 In the report for the meeting of 16 May, the Societe heliogra­phique confirmed that in fact Du Camp had submitted a notice announc­ing that he had just returned from a trip in Syria and had gathered a number of photographs, which he invited members of the Societe to study.H At the Societe's 30 May meeting, admiration for Du Camp's works was expressed and he was encouraged to donate some epreuves to the Societe's album.45

Although the term epreuves suggests positive prints rather than nega­tives, additional documentation reveals that Du Camp's first proofs were not made until the end of June. In a 24 June letter to Flaubert, Du Camp indicated that he was recopying his notes, having his photographs printed, and planning to publish a lithographically illustrated study of the tomb at Gournah.4G Similarly, at the 28 June meeting of the Societe, it was re­ported that Du Camp had 216 negatives which were in the process of being printed.47 On 23 July, he informed Flaubert that the collection was finished and that the following day he would have them "cut, glued, and mounted: there are 186 good prints and truly curious, all pride of the author aside."48

Exactly who printed this initial series and where the photographs are presently located is open to question. Du Camp's manner of referring to "the collection" and the short time span required for its printing confirm that it predates any thought of a larger, Blanquart-Evrard edition. The

42lbid., vol. 13, p . 87. Letter to his mother dated 7 October 1850. 43Du Camp, Lettres, p . 163. 44"Societe Mliographique-Seance du 16 mai 1851," La Lumiere ( 25 May 1851):

63. 45"Societe Mliographique-Seance du vendredi 30 mai 1851," La Lumiere ( 15

June 1851): 73. 4GDu Camp, Lettres, p. 171. 47"Societe heliographique-Seance du vendredi 28 juin 1851," La Lumiere ( 6 July

1851) : 86. 48Du Camp, Lettres, p . 173·

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mounted prints in the Bibliotheque de l'Institut, which bear ink captions in Du Camp's hand, would be the logical candidate except that the qual­ity of the albumen paper, the richness of many of the prints, and the pres­ence of Gide and Baudry plate numbers on the negatives of some of the prints establish their production as later than 18$I.4n

Another detail of Du Camp's treatment of the negatives suggests that this missing series was made before the pen-and-ink retouches and block­ing out of the sky areas apparent in both the Institut prints and the Blanquart-Evrard edition. On 30 September 1851 and again on 10 Octo­ber, Du Camp wrote Flaubert in London and asked if he could purchase twelve bottles of "H.embrandt ink" and a paste "that takes off oil spots on watercolors and allows one to paint on fatty substances : All this is for the photographs.""0 This indicates that not only was Du Camp personally intending to paint out areas of the negatives, but that he was doing so in the fall long after the proof set had been printed.

The origins and nature of Du Camp's relationship with Blanquart­Evrard are also obscure. Francis Wey's long, laudatory a1ticle on Du Camp published in the 1$ September 1851 La Lumiere was inspired by the demonstration album and makes no mention of a larger publication in progress."1 However, in a short notice on Blanquart-Evrard's Album photographique in the 21 September issue, Wey linked Du Camp with the photographer who was in the process of opening a Lille printing es­tablishment."~ Blan quart-Evrard's formal announcement of the opening of his "Imprimerie," accompanied by an advertisement describing the costs and available tonalities of his salt paper prints, appeared in the 28 September La Lurniere.:;:~ Considering Du Camp's retouching activity in

4nfo the upper left corner of Bibliotheque de l'Institut plate 57 appears the number "19," which corresponds to the Gide and Baudry plate number. On plate 58, the number "20" appears on the upper left, and on plate 61, the number "22" on the lower right, both numbers coinciding with the Gide and Baudry sequence. Other prints not figuring in the 125 published Gide and Baudry plates are in various collec­tions. The Societe franc;:aise de la photographie in Paris has two albumen prints sim­il ar to those in the Bibliothegue de l'Institut but mounted on smaller pieces of bristol board. According to the catalogue for the exhibition, En Egypte au temps de Flau­bert, 1837-1860 (Paris: Musees nationales de France, 1976), Andre Jammes owns several loose prints from nega tives excluded from the Gide and Baudry edition. The Gilman Coll ection in New York also contains a series of prints not part of the Blanquart-Evrard edition.

00Du Camp, Lettres, pp. 185 and 189. 51Francis Wey, "Voyages h eliographiques . Album d'Egypte de M. Maxime Du

Camp," La Lumiere ( 15 September i851): 126- 27. 52Francis Wey, "Album photographique de M. Blanquart-Evrard," La Lumiere (21

September 1851): i3i. r,a"Correspondance," La Lumiere ( 28 September i851 ): 135-36.

Fig. 14 Maxime Du Camp, "3 i. Le Kaire-Annes et ustensiles, 17 janvier 1850, c.n. 38," albumen print from waxed paper negative. From the Collection of the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, Paris.

When the plates were finally issued for public sale in late April i852, Du Camp was not the only one who was delighted.56 The Societe helio­graphique reported that every plate was extremely interesting and that Blanquart-Evrard's prints were uniform in their color and contrast and possessed "a perfect harmony."57 Demonstrating Blanquart-Evrard's ad­vertised "lead pencil effect" rather than his Chinese ink or sepia tonalities, the photographs were praised by Gaudin in i853 for their "vaporous gray."r;s However, another author criticized them for this same gray, which "made them appear too much like lithographs."59 The variations of color in the existing Blanquart-Evrard prints seen by this writer, which extend from a rich blue-black with cream lights to a paler sepia with peach unexposed areas, must be attributed to Blanquart-Evrard's chem­ical baths, which caused subtle differences in tone that have become more apparent with time.

The positive publicity that Du Camp had already received from his friend Francis Wey continued in a well-timed La Lumiere article by Louis de Cormenin, to whom Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie was dedi­cated. The Cormenin and Wey articles, as well as Gide and Baudry's prospectus for the series, reveal a surprising distortion that began to occur in the evaluation of Du Camp as a photographer. In their effort to direct the album to more than a handful of archeologists, Gide and Baudry ad­vertised it as having "the double interest of a daguerrian and archeolog­ical publication, picturesque and knowledgeable."60 Despite their exclu­sion of Du Camp's human-interest photographs, the publishers claimed that they had tried to break the monotony of a continuous series of monu­ments by showing "some landscapes, some interesting, characteristic and curious sites, wanting to mix nature with the monuments and tie the present to the past."

This suggestion that the album possessed artistic as well as scholarly value was made more explicit by Cormenin. He attributed Du Camp's success to the fact that he wasn't a photographer but had "the instincts of an artist."61 The album itself, dubbed a "work of art," was said to contain

56Du Camp wrote to Flaubert on i6 April i852: "I spent all of the past month more or less getting together my big photo 'boutique' whose first sample installment will, I think, appear next week. It's going to be really beautiful; I'll send you your copy in installments as they appear on the market." (Du Camp, Lettres, p. 2oi.)

'-iLerebours, "Plaque, pa pier ou verre?" La Lumiere ( l May i852) : 75. 58M.A. Gaudin, "lmprimerie photographique," La Lumiere ( 22 January i 853): i3. W'Exposition d' epreuves photographiques a la Societe des Arts," La Lumiere ( 22

Januarv i853) : i5. 60Prospectus bound with the copy of Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie in the re­

serve collection of printed books in the Bibliotheque nationale. 61 Louis de Cormen in, "Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie," La Lumiere ( 12 June

i852): 99.

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an encyclopedia of information-"monuments, landscapes, animals, plants, bird's-eye views are found there, in their aspect, in their attitude, with the energy of truth and the power of three dimensions."6~ The double appeal of art and truth was used by Cormenin to widen the popularity of the album and thereby increase the fame of his old friend Du Camp.

Such a hard-sell and skillful use of the media raises the question of why Du Camp bothered to publish the photographs in the first place. As a man presumably of independent means, it would seem that money was not a motivation. Yet on 4 August i851, after Du Camp's return to Paris and before his negotiations with Blanquart-Evrard, Cormenin wrote to Du Camp and, within his discussion of the abyssmal economic and polit­ical situation in France, suggested that "if you commission Le Gray to go show the Egyptian photographs in London, that will be better, a very good deal."63 According to his letters, Du Camp was some i5,ooo francs overdrawn after the Egyptian trip and not only wanted to make a name for himself in Paris, but had to do so while waiting for the settlement of legal entanglements surrounding an inheritance from his grandmother. 64

Du Camp's brief flirtation with photography garnered him several hon­ors, including invitations to show his works to the Due de Morny and the Prince President, and the receipt of the Legion d'honneur in i853, but resulted in a final rift in his friendship with Flaubert. Although Flaubert received copies of the Gide and Baudry installments, he was never men­tioned in that work and shared none of Du Camp's glory. Flaubert bit­terly noted the "brilliant society" that Du Camp was frequenting and was outraged by the Legion of Honor award:

How that must please him! When he compares himself to me and considers the path he's taken since he left me, it's certain that he'll find me far behind him and that he's taken the high road . . . . Everything is mixed up in his head, women, the cross [of the Legion], art, boots, all that whirls around at the same level, and the only thing that's important is that he advances. An ad­mirable epoque, as father Michelet would say, when one deco­rates photographers and exiles poets.63

G2Louis de Cormenin, "Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie- II," La Lumiere ( 26 June 1852): 105.

63Bibliotheque de l'Institut, M.S. 3763. G4Du Camp's inheritance was being contested by his uncle Amedee Achard. See

Du Camp, Lettres, pp. 162-63 and 169 for references to this affair. 65Flaubert, Oeuvres completes, vol. 13, p . 284. Letter to Louise Colet dated 15

January 1853.

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In spite of Flaubert's dissatisfaction with his own slowness in publishing and his resentment of Du Camp's success, his picture of Du Camp as a man of short-lived, intense enthusiasms and boundless ambition is borne out by the circumstances surrounding the production of Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie. Du Camp could don the cap of archeologist when he needed letters of recommendation and access to monuments, he could plunge into a ten-month photographic frenzy, and he could accept the title of artist if it furthered his reputation. His photographs, like many of his friendships, were means to ends which, when no longer needed, were cast aside. That he succeeded in mastering the photographic process and produced a landmark body of work cannot be denied. But a reevaluation of Du Camp's photographs as documents rather than as esthetic objects is at once truer to their creation and truer to the man who conceived them.

I would like to thank the following people for having assisted in the preparation of this article: Mme. Frarn;oise Dumas and M. Bruno Jammes of the Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, M. Bernard Marbot of the Bibliotheque nationale, and M. Dom­inique Pascal.

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