VIENNA.- This exhibition organised by the
Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection presents around sixty original prints that offer insights into the early years of photography, 1849−1875.
The exhibition “From Alexandria to Abu Simbel” presents masterpieces from a time when the art of photography was still in its infancy. Travelling photographers frequently visited Egypt as well as the Holy Land, Syria and Lebanon. In Egypt they travelled on boats up the Nile as far south as Abu Simbel and even beyond to Nubia and the Sudan. Most of them were artists who were attracted to this new medium and they published their works and showed them at various exhibitions.
Today their journeys may not strike us as spectacular, and the resulting photographic oeuvre may seem somewhat marginal, but when we remember the conditions under which these pioneers travelled and the limited technical means at their disposal the results are truly impressive.
The photographs on show here were taken between 1849 and 1875; they were developed from either paper or glass negatives. Among the photographers represented by original prints are Maxime Du Camp (France, 1822−1894), Louis de Clercq (France, 1836−1901), John Beasley Greene (USA, 1832−1856) and Francis Frith (England, 1822−1898) whose works are also in the collections of, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Getty Centre in Los Angeles.
NAPOLEON’S EGYPTIAN CAMPAIGN, EGYPTOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY
From the beginning photography and Egypt were inextricably linked. In 1839 the French physicist and politician François Arago presented the new invention of Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce to the public. Daguerre was instrumental in developing detailed photography on a polished silver-plated copperplate, which was known as daguerreotype. In July 1839 Arago had given a speech in the National Assembly on the importance of this invention. When he finished an overwhelming majority of Deputies (237 against 3) voted for the French State to acquire the patent. On August 19, 1839 the invention was announced and presented to the world as a free gift of the French State.
In his speech of July 1839 Arago repeatedly referred to Egypt, especially Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1789−1801). In addition to around 35.000 soldiers this expedition comprised numerous scientists and scholars collectively known as the savants. The enterprise was both a military campaign and a scientific expedition and resulted in a systematic study of Egypt’s ancient civilisation and the modern country’s geology, geography and culture. This was the birth of Egyptology – the scientific study of the millennia-old Ancient Egyptian civilisation. The expedition also included numerous draughtsmen who depicted Egypt’s countryside and artworks. The results were published in the multivolume Description de L’Égypte. Arago believed that a single man using one of Daguerre’s apparatuses could complete singlehandedly the work that had required “a legion of draughtsmen”, with the verisimilitude of daguerreotypes far surpassing that of drawings.
By this time the collection of the texts and images to which the Egyptian Expedition had given rise had been published for several years. However, soon after the invention and presentation of photography in 1839 the first artists set off for Egypt. They soon realized, however, that the method developed concurrently by William Fox Talbot was much more suited to their needs than daguerreotype. Unlike daguerreotype, Talbot’s process created a negative that could be used to print multiple positive copies. His invention formed the basis for photography until the development of digital photography.
