Unlike the Déscription de L’Egypte—the engraved and textual squawk-box published between 1809 and 1828—the early photographs of Egypt, from a generation later, speak in whispers. Their stark imagery confronts the viewer with a sphinx’s indifference. Maxime du Camp at Abu Simbel (1850), Félix Teynard at the Island of Philae (1851–52), John Beasley Greene on the Nile (1853–54), Francis Frith at the Pyramids of El-Geezeh (1858): these are the scenes of a midcentury desert mystery.
The period of photography selected for “Along the Nile,” roughly 1840 to 1870, presents a ranging view of half-light, half-knowing, and half-truths. The images land somewhere between romance and reality. Giza to Luxor, Dakka to the Valley of the Kings, the ancient monuments in these photographs are crisp, but the contemporary figures blur. With long exposure, one might say the very emotions get fuzzy. The photographs look deserted, even for the desert. Cropped and other-worldly, what we see is more like a lunar landscape for the nineteenth century, orientalism passed through a pinhole, a spectral light, a desert vacuumed clean. Whether these prints communicate an aspect of the sentimental, or unsentimental, or mixed emotions of their European buying public is anyone’s guess. The picture is not altogether clear. Perhaps this is the point.
Culled from the collection of the Gilman Paper Company, the forty-five prints assembled here are arranged by date. Included are the big names—Du Camp (French), Greene (American, active in France), Teynard (French), Frith (British). There are also a number of lesser-knowns: the German Ernest Benecke (active in France), Gustave Le Gray (French), Félix Bonfils (French), Louis de Clercq (French), Wilhelm Hammerschmidt (German). But even the internationalism of the show presents an enigma. Just when you see the semblance of national painting styles, the system falls flat. Teynard’s archaeological gaze, Greene’s sublime landscapes, Benecke’s ethnography: there is more here than meets the eye.
Co-curated by the Gilman collection’s Pierre Apraxine, the show regrettably has been destined for the Howard Gilman Gallery, a dim warren. The gallery is hard to find, and the show is easily confused with a simultaneous exhibition called “The Pharaoh’s Photographer” in the first-floor Lila Acheson Wallace Galleries of Egyptian Art. Small and intimate, the Gilman Gallery is also poorly positioned to take on anything of large scale and wide scope, which “Along the Nile” demands.
In fact, the Metropolitan has given over little to this exhibition. There is no catalogue, only a small brochure. The show’s wall texts alternate between lean and timid, overly concerned with the development of photographic chemistry (salted paper prints and paper negatives in the 1840s and 1850s, glass-plate technology in the 1860s). As for historic or artistic context, little gets said. This is a story that does not tell itself.
Most likely, the inquisitive viewer will turn to Flaubert’s 1849–50 travel notes from Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller and widely available in the Penguin Classics edition called Flaubert in Egypt. (A few notes from his friend and fellow traveler Maxime du Camp have also been collected in this volume.) Positioned against the photographs themselves, however, even the young Flaubert seems out of sync and unrewarding. (For an opposing reaction, see Michael Kimmelman’s fulsome review in The New York Times.) Written in the tradition of Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (1802) and to a lesser extent Constantin-François Volney’s Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1821), Flaubert’s chatty notes speak little to the empty images before us at the Met. It is perhaps in the bleakness of Madame Bovary (1856), the kiss-off of romantic ambition, that Flaubert finally translated his visions from Giza and Thebes.
As a grammar, photography is not in the present tense but always a past participle. Where engraved material like the Déscription de L’Egypte presented an idealized vision and memory-theater of the Orient, in the photograph what you see is what you get, or more precisely what you saw is what you got. The early photographs of Egypt reveal a kind of emulsified lost time.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Egypt was no longer carrying on the spirit of 1789 and contending with the Ottoman Empire. It was fast becoming France’s cotton belt (the modern cash crop was first imported by Mehemet Ali Pasha in 1821). Intensified trade, modernization and public works, the Suez Canal, and international debt were soon to follow. Tourism, likewise, which was already in full swing when Flaubert arrived in Cairo (note the international guests in the Hôtel du Nil), would only redouble. Thomas Cook would soon begin his cruise-line approach to travel, offering his first tour of the Nile in 1869. It is worthwhile to note that Hammerschmidt and Bonfils, two of the last photographers in the exhibition, were among the first to set up full-scale studios in Egypt, offering their images for sale not in London or Paris but in Cairo. These photographs were destined for travel souvenirs, those symbolic nothings, a suitable end-point for the show. This is truly an Orient at light speed, where time gets bent, and the ground is no longer firm.