Early photographs

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2005 by Alfred Mayor

Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites is the sumptuous catalogue to an exhibition of the same title that will inaugurate the reopening of the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, in 2006. All the photographs reproduced are from the Getty Museum's department of photographs or the research library of the Getty Research Institute. In keeping with the museum's legendary resources, the book lacks nothing. The paper it is printed on, for example, is a little more than twice as thick as the page you are reading. Turning a page makes you instinctively massage it to be sure it is not two. The heavy paper, in turn, lends saturation and a sense of depth to the photographs reproduced.

From its introduction in 1839 photography was used to record Egyptian hieroglyphs more faithfully than the most skillful draftsman, and from there, like a pebble in a pond, subjects came to include "marble-pillared temples, toppled statues, and the exotic foreign panoramas that had long lured travelers to the antique lands." Because many of the early photographers were trained as painters they "mingled the factual with the lyrical.... Early photographs reveal as much about the photographers' sensibilities and the social milieu in which their aesthetic and scientific responses were shaped as it does about antiquity itself." This ambitious combination of evaluations is the main goal of this book of essays by four authors of impeccable academic credentials.

Two of the essays are devoted to individual photographers: the Frenchman Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey and the American William James Stillman. The others are more general, and all of them are interspersed with portfolios of photographs by various photographers. The introduction touches on the three countries that attracted the first photographers: Egypt, Greece, and Italy, and their photographers. In Egypt, Maxime Du Camp photographed and Gustave Flaubert took notes. When they got to the Sphinx, Flaubert noted that "it fixes us with a terrifying stare; Max is quite pale; I am afraid of becoming giddy, and try to control my emotion." And Du Camp wrote: "I cannot remember ever having been moved so deeply." The picture he took shows why. The Sphinx is in a side light that rakes its ravaged features. In the distance are a pyramid and the tip of another. Nothing alive is in sight. At Abu Simbel, Du Camp had his boat crew shovel away enough sand to expose the colossal head of Ramses II, the builder of the temple. For scale he had one of his Egyptian servants sit on top of the head "allegedly by pretending that the camera contained a gun, which would fire if the man did not remain motionless."

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Another photographer of Egypt was Francis Frith, a prosperous English wholesale grocer who traveled to Egypt and the Near East in the late 1850s and later published his large-plate, very spacious views in thirteen portfolio volumes. One of the most intriguing photographs illustrated here shows Frith's riverboat drawn up to the island of Philae in the Nile. Tied up amidships is a little rowboat with a rather limp pup tent set up in the stern--Frith's darkroom, where he applied the last coating to his collodion-on-glass negatives before they were put in the camera, and where he further manipulated them after exposure.

In Rome, one of the earliest and most accomplished photographers was Robert Macpherson, a Scot who had studied to be a surgeon and then turned to journalism, painting, and finally photography. He assembled a portfolio of more than four hundred views, which he sold by mail in various sizes. Technically and aesthetically he was, and remains, one of the finest photographers of the city. Macpherson could not have sold duplicate photographs without the development of a reproducible negative by William Henry Fox Talbot, an English physicist who perfected what he called the calotype negative by 1840, almost immediately after the introduction of the non-reproducible daguerreotype.

Some photographers were content with the unique daguerreotype, notably Girault de Prangey, who was known primarily as a talented draftsman and remarkable lithographer. His interests were catholic and his fortune sufficient to permit him to wander the Near East between 1842 and 1845 making daguerreotypes of scenes in Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Palestine. In all, he made between eight hundred and one thousand daguerreotypes, nearly all of which survive in mint condition because the photographer filed them in the original wooden boxes.

The Parthenon is probably the most famous ancient monument in the Western world, with or without the large sections of the frieze and the freestanding statues that Lord Elgin walked off with in 1801. The Parthenon has endured many other changes since its heyday in the fifth century BC. These are chronicled by John Papadopoulos, a professor of classics and archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, in an essay illustrated with early photographs. Frankish, Byzantine, and Ottoman structures were still in place when the first photographs were taken, only to be demolished when Greece decreed a return of the building to its classical state. The evolution of the monument is fascinating as presented here so gracefully by a man who knows his subject to the last stone. Papadopoulos then launches into an equally engrossing account of the town that evolved around the Acropolis and the temple known as the Theseion at its base.