ON SEPTEMBER 10, the day before we were attacked, I attended a press preview for two small photography exhibitions devoted to Egypt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Along the Nile, a show mounted by the photography department, features photographs of Egypt made in the 1850s and 1860s. The other, The Pharaoh’s Photographer, presents stills and silent-movie footage by the Met’s own archaeological photo-documentarian, Harry Burton. Once the museum reopens, both shows are set to run through the end of December. Every photograph takes the past as its subject—and turns that subject into an object. And like a photograph, the past is two-dimensional. In one way, ancient Egypt exists in the same place, the same uniform and intelligible past, as the Declaration of Independence, or Omaha Beach, or the day before yesterday. But in another way, ancient Egypt exists in an entirely other place—broken off from us, unintelligible: Its gods had animal heads, its magicians were the most powerful, its writing was pictures. Countless slaves toiled to raise monuments to their incestuous masters in the Valley of the Kings. Maxime Du Camp was a nineteenth-century French journalist and photographer. The son-in-law of Jean- François Champollion, the discoverer of the Rosetta Stone, Du Camp made this first photo-documentary tour of the ruins of ancient Egypt in the company of his young friend, the novelist Gustave Flaubert. While the novelist sampled Oriental sensation, the journalist recorded images of the temple at Abu Simbel (at a site now submerged by the waters behind the Aswan dam), the Sphinx (half-buried, its nose defaced possibly by a Napoleonic cannonball), the Pyramids, Amenhotep’s Colossus, and the Tomb of Ozymandias (he of Shelley’s poem: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair). The photographic prints themselves possess the uncanny patina of old objects. These pictures also look eerie because they are empty, no people at all save for the lone figure of Du Camp’s assistant posed beside a column, or at the base of a statue, to establish scale. It may be that pre-tourist Egypt didn’t have much in the way of everyday activity around its monuments. Or perhaps the photographer chose a quiet time to shoot. Or the vacancy may be a side effect of technology: Anything that moves would not appear at all, or would leave only the ghost of an image on the paper negative’s necessarily long exposure. The one picture Du Camp did take of a camera-shy Flaubert in a Cairo back street wearing native dress relies on its caption to declare its meaning. It could be a picture of anyone. Those European and American photographers who followed Du Camp into Egypt—George Wilson Bridges, Félix Teynard, John Beasley Greene, Ernest Benecke, Théodule Devéria, Gustave Le Gray—either found new subjects or new takes on now standard motifs. The German Benecke’s portraits of Egyptian musicians, of two dancing girls, of a master and two slaves in Cairo, and his photograph of an autopsy of a crocodile, have that posed frozen quality and grainy focus that makes old prints look more like art objects than like documentation. An early example of society photography, Le Gray’s 1867 photograph of the shipboard fête for His Highness Ismail Pasha makes the occasion look even duller than it must have been. WHEN PHOTOGRAPHERS MIGRATED from paper to glass negatives in the 1850s, they were able to produce sharper pictures with shorter exposures. Félix Bonfils and Francis Frith worked with the newer technology. Their photographs have a clarity that immediately distinguishes them from their predecessors. An example of contemporary state-of-the-art imaging, Frith’s stereo view of the Chapel of Rameses II, displayed in a stereopticon rather than on the wall as a print, is every bit as arresting in the context of this two-room gallery exhibit as it must have been when it was first published around 1860. On the documentary side, Bonfils’s picture of the Temple of Dendur clearly shows the actual condition and site of a monumental structure that now resides inside its own glass pyramid pavilion at the Metropolitan Museum, just down the hall from the department of Egyptian Art where The Pharaoh’s Photographer is hung. From 1918 until his death in 1940, Harry Burton documented the epic excavations conducted by the Met Egyptologist Howard Carter and his British patron Lord Carnarvon in the Nile valley. Part of Burton’s job was to catalogue all the finds of the expedition, both in the place of their discovery, and again after being removed to the collection. Additionally, Burton recorded the events of the dig, most famously the unearthing and opening of Tutankhamen’s Tomb. Burton’s are archives with a difference. His subjects have historic, dramatic, and scholarly interest. His photography, straightforward and transparent, lets the people, events, and things speak through it. Exposed on glass negatives, using some artificial but primarily reflected available light, his photographs of tomb interiors show the storerooms to be more like high-end attics or curiosity shops than awe-inspiring displays. In some pictures, the objects have been tagged with identification numbers before being moved. In a time-lapse study, four images made in 1936 record the complete unwrapping of a mummy, a long-standing mystery revealed. Burton also took pictures of people, of native bearers in the procession of objects taken from the tomb, of Howard Carter looking through the open doors of Tut’s second shrine, of tourists and curiosity seekers at a site that has inspired countless romances and scary movies. The Hollywood connection is more than speculative. Met Museum trustee Edward S. Harkness purchased a hand-cranked movie camera for the Egyptian expedition in 1921. The new equipment made it to Luxor in 1922, and Burton taught himself how to work the machine. The expedition acquired a second camera the following year, and in 1924 the museum photographer went to Hollywood to study film lighting. It’s plain that someone in Hollywood, when it came to shooting Boris Karloff in that early talkie The Mummy or Abbott and Costello in Meet the Mummy, must have been aware of the footage Burton shot of the excavations and of daily life in modern Egypt. Eight minutes of silent movie abstracted from thirteen hours of documentary reels shot by Burton along with Albert M. Lythgoe, the curator of the Met’s Department of Egyptian Art, is the real reason to visit the show. Scenes of labor and dust in the Nile Valley, of exhumations from sealed tombs, of mummy coffins placed in crates that are actually a second funeral, complete with a woodie station wagon for a hearse, make explicit the nature of Egyptian toil. All this in a haze of desert light and billowing dust that lets the decay of the ruins appear present and ongoing. THE MOVING-PICTURE VIEWS of daily life in Egypt are of a different order. They show Giza and the Sphinx, of course, but also bustling, random Cairo street scenes chaotic with people and animals and feluccas on the Nile. There is a stretch of travelogue, riding along the Nile on Harkness’s private steamer. Watching a 1930s Hollywood movie, we would know exactly who these white-suited men are: They are the professors and plutocrats in pith helmets whose curiosity or ambition or acquisitive nature excites wrath and envy and draws down upon them the mummy’s curse.
