Attempts to Document Classical Archeology in the 19th Century: Science and the Bourgeois

“Everyone will imagine the extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction during the expedition to Egypt; everybody will realize that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived of by the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travelers. To copy the millions of hieroglyphics which cover even the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legions of draughtsman. By daguerreotype one person would suffice to accomplish this immense work successfully. Equip the Egyptian Institute with two or three [examples] of Daguerre's apparatus, and before long on several of the large tablets of the celebrated work, which had its inception in the expedition to Egypt, innumerable hieroglyphics as they are in reality will replace those which now are invented or designed by approximation. These designs will excel the works of the most accomplished painters, in fidelity of detail and true reproduction of the local atmosphere. Since the invention follows the laws of geometry, it will be possible to re-establish with the aid of a small number of given factors the exact size of the highest points of the most inaccessible structures.” Francois Arago (1839) 1

“The cream of the visible creation has been skimmed of, and the sights which men risk their lives and spend their money and endure sea-sickness to behold, - the views of Nature and Art which make exiles of entire families for the sake of a look of them…these sights, gathered from the Alps, temples, palaces, pyramids, are offered you for a trifle, to carry home with you, that you may look at them at your leisure, by your fireside, with perpetual fair weather, when you are in the mood, without catching cold, without following a valet-de-place, in any order of succession – from a glacier to Vesuvius – as long as you like, breaking off as sudden as you like, and you, native of this incomparably dull planet, have hardly troubled yourself to look at this divine gift.” Oliver Wendell Holmes (1861) 2

This post is pulled into two directions and I think it due to an inherent fault of vocabulary, nostalgic sentiment, and our own democratic times. I had wanted to write a post about archeological photographs, and for that I searched under the terms travel photography and expeditionary photography.

But expeditionary connotes a sense of purpose whereas travel supposes leisure, at least to my 21st century eyes. I’ve taken many photographs while traveling; I’ve never experienced an expedition. Growing up on National Geographic and the Travel Channel, I had always imagined that an expedition was more of a quest, and that photographers on that quest were documenting a specific narrative already carefully laid out. Travel photography on the other hand wound up being edited after the fact, the unflattering head shots and the pointless panoramas with the one stranger captured by accident being relegated to the recycle bin because they didn’t fit with the story I wanted to have.

Of course, I feel like such thinking is naïve and so I began to wonder when the modern travel industry really formed, the sort of travel industry that sells postcards and photographs - after all, this is a class about photography – and I kept finding myself back in mid-19th century Europe. Descriptions of this time are often reduced to terms of categorical simplicity. Upheaval, momentum, change, progress. Certainly, national borders were no longer confined to the physical space in which they had once inhabited. A woman sat on the throne of the greatest empire Europe had seen since Rome. Not to be undone, the great nations of Europe forged their own empires, conquering and assimilating hundreds of individual cultures and languages. Nationalism and the search for the collective consciousness flooded society at all levels; scientific research into the past and for the future reached a fervor not seen again until the middle of the 20th century.

In another sphere, not wholly concerned with the rise and fall of technological marvels and scientific inquiry and yet not separate, a powerful mercantile class had risen and grown visible, ungoverned by the restrictive social boundaries of the past. Railways crisscrossed the landscape, cables laid down, and machine-made goods sold on the cheap. Luxuries once available to the wealthy and elite now trickled downwards in society; grand European tours reserved for aristocrats could now be secured with a telegraph communication and a train ticket.

Therein lays the great polarity that is expeditionary photography. I had thought to simply highlight some particular cases of interesting archeological surveys. It was the content of the photographs that I had always been interested in, not the processes or artists or even the mundane reasoning behind the funding. The role photography played in documenting science, when science as we know it was still young and interdisciplinary, gives value to the physical photograph that I had not thought to look for before.

Arago’s quote gets to the heart of this complex semantic relationship between expedition and travel. As a man of science, he was of course more than delighted with the technological impact photography would have in the field of science. It would serve as a means of both innovation and preservation. The failed French 1798 campaign into Egypt explains away some of his dark bitter observations, but his remarks concerning the preservation of monuments from “the greed of Arabs” and the “vandalism of certain travelers” also indicate an awareness of visitors to these ancient sites that had little to do with science. He was talking about the layman, amateurs, and newfound tour takers with the money and leisure time to indulge in vacations and fads.

Writing twenty years later, Holmes had thought to encourage his readers to a ‘brief, stereographic trip’, further narrowing the gap between those dark, unknowable spaces left in the world and bright, sunlit civilization, a major artistic theme of the 19th century. In the space of twenty years, expeditionary photography moved from being a scientific tool to a form of mass-communication. Somewhere, between 1840 and 1860, the birth of travel photography as an industry takes off.

When he spoke to the Académie des sciences in 1839 about Daguerre’s invention, Arago was not without his share of national pride. He recognized that that the daguerreotype would completely revolutionize the world in many ways, from graphic design to industrial sciences to travel writing, or the voyage pittoresque. 3 Extraordinarily popular since the late 18th century, the voyage pittoresque featured ancient monument and views of foreign countrysides, not unlike travel literature today. It is perhaps due to Arago that Daguerre received a lifelong pension from the French government and all the accompanying accolades for his work. "To those who are not indifferent to national glory, and who know that a people excels in achievement over other peoples only in proportion to their respective progress in civilization, to those we can say that the process of M . Daguerre is a great discovery... the beginning of a new art in an old civilization; it means a new era and secures for us a title to glory." 4

Figure 1: Early French Expeditionary Daguerreotypists

• Joly de Lotbiniere (1839 – 1840)
• Greece and Egypt
• 92 plates, no longer extant
• Excursions daguerriennes; aquatints in Panorama d'Egypte et de Nubie
• Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1842 – 1845)
• Mediterranean, Near East
• 800 to 1,000 plates

Within months, daguerreotypists could be found in Egypt and beyond, photographing the classical world. Many of the daguerreotypes taken during this period are no longer in existence, most likely due to the process of photomechanical reproduction. Outlines would be made of the daguerreotype and then reproduced by an etcher in intaglio for printing. Either the manual or chemical procedures usually damaged the original plate.

Daguerreotypes were terrifyingly unwieldy for expeditionary work. Each plate was unique and could not be easily replicated unless through etching, and while this method worked well-enough commercially, it did not lend itself to collaboration in the scholarly world. Furthermore, transforming the daguerreotype plates into a series of lithographs meant that not only would the whole publication process became that much more expensive, but the aesthetic punch photographs packed over traditional drawings and etchings was lost.

Ultimately, Talbot’s negative-positive procedure proved far more useful. (Interestingly enough, not only was Talbot a photographic wunderkind, but he also was fluent in ancient Assyrian and Egyptian hieroglyphics, ultimately producing “The Talbotype Applied to Hieroglyphics” in 1846 followed by a series of other archeological photographs.5) The negative-positive technique made photographic replication entirely feasible. Many of the most iconic photographs of ancient ruins and archeological digs can be found as calotypes and albumen prints. It also made it cheaper to mass-produce voyage pittoresques, which the growing bourgeois consumed. But the negative-positive method wasn’t a cure all. Despite Arago’s earlier claim that the photograph would enable highly precise mathematical detail, the physical technology still wasn’t as accurate as a trained draftsman. Calotypes lacked the tonal range daguerreotypes offered and the paper fibers diffused light in such a way as to render images in soft, romanticized detail. Photographs of great archeological events spread through the mass world, but the science still relied upon old-fashioned techniques for data collection and replication. Lastly of course, the salted paper process was patented and worse, English.

Daguerreotypes did prove highly advantageous in one particular aspect. They enabled mapping. Sites and monuments could be photographed panoramically, allowing topographical charts to be easily captured along with an inventory of sites. By the 1850’s, a trend emerged, moving expeditionary photography from the realms of artistic sightseeing and into one of technical reconnaissance. 6

One of the greatest daguerreotypists you’ve probably never heard of, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey was born into a distinguished, well-off family in Southwestern France. The art and architecture of the region, so distinct and redolent with Islamic mosaics and Roman arches, provided Girault de Prangey with plenty of photographic fodder. Unlike many other early daguerreotypists, Girault de Prangey was an extremely competent artist and specialized in architectural drafting. Despite claims otherwise, reproducing Daguerre’s methods were not easy. The high-quality of his ‘beginners’ work, as evidenced by extant plates, seems to indicate that Girault de Prangey was not self-taught; it’s likely that Jules Ziegler and/or Hippolyte Bayard provided tutoring.8

Although smaller, more portable cameras were made available, Girault de Prangey used a larger than average custom-made camera, about 7 x 9 in (19 x 24 cm). From 1842 until 1845, he traveled the Mediterranean with oversized plates and apparatus, waiting up to 10 minutes per custom-sized plate and ultimately making nearly 1,000 of them. Some of his most famous work includes those made of Baalbeck, Syria (today Lebanon). In the past, the viewership had focused upon Rome, Greece and Egypt. Baalbeck had not yet been over-excavated by scholars and contained very fine examples of classical architecture. Despite their ruined state, Girault de Prangey managed to capture the pure symmetry of design and intent so typical of this architecture.

Nearly all of his daguerreotypes have survived; Girault de Prangey understood the chemistry of the process and took care to minimize inherent vice, carefully cataloging his plates and handling them rarely throughout the years. Like many early expedition daguerreotypists, he had intended to publish his work. He found the endeavor to be highly expensive – his anticipated work would have consisted of 20 parts with 4 plates per part at 16 francs per part, not including all of the accompanying text – and he never completed more than six parts. 9

He also discovered, perhaps roundaboutly, that the labor and expense, not to mention the intrinsic qualities inherent in the original photograph, were lost in replication and made his work redundant. It also took him a few years to gather his work into one portfolio for publication, including the creation of his series of lithographs. By the time he was prepared to publish in 1850, others had already been illustrating books with photographic prints. The mass industrialization of photographic materials and production had begun.

Among the most popular photographic formats of the 19th century was the stereoscopic photograph, a photographic technique that created a 3D illusion by using a specially designed camera. By the 1860’s, commercial firms like Anthony and Co. were producing thousands of different stereographic views for middle-class audiences, prompting Oliver Wendell Holmes to view it as a defining moment in human history. For the first time, people could experience a variety of natural wonders and environments from around the world.9

The daguerreotype did not fail the scientific community. Major socio-anthropological surveys would be conducted by daguerreotypes, including wars and the Wild West. Archeologists would continue to use daguerreotypes for specific tasks until the invention of albumen and more elegant technology. Using calotypes and albumen prints instead of daguerreotypes to catalogue ancient sites imbued them with a processed beauty that continues to capture the human imagination. People had long been fascinated with travel narratives and images of far-away places and with the mass-production of photographed sites previously reserved for the elite of society coincided with a great social revolution, perhaps driving the technology to get better, faster.

Resources:

1. Claire L. Lyons, 'The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Photography', Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 27.

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture’, The Atlantic Monthly, 8:45 (1861), 13–30.

3. Claire L. Lyons, ‘The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Photography’, Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 28.

4. Claire L. Lyons, ‘The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Photography’, Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 27.

5. Mike Weaver, “Diogenes with a Camera,” in Mike Weaver, ed., Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography (Oxford: Clio, 1992), 1-25.

6. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London: I.B. Tauris 2003; and Steven Hoelscher, ‘The Photographic Construction of Tourist Space in Victorian America’, Geographical Review, 88:4 (1998), 548–70.

7. Lindsey S. Stewart, ‘In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotype of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey’, Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 72 -98.

8. Lindsey S. Stewart, ‘In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotype of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey’, Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 72 -98.

9. Ellen Strain, ‘Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century’, Wide Angle, 18:2 (1996), 70–100.

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