Francis Frith (English, 1822 – 1898)
Hall of Columns, Karnac, 1857
Albumen print
Gift of Winston and Jeffrey Adler Collection of 19th Century Photography
1986.28.2
Hall of Columns, Karnac (1857) embodies the world-shrinking effect of photography from its earliest years. This photograph was captured by British photographer Francis Frith using the albumen method just a decade after its inception. Frith’s process was grueling. He had to erect darkrooms on-site, quickly wet negative plates before exposing them to his chosen vantage points, and immediately develop them before drying. This arduous process would culminate in photobooks, which circulated throughout the United Kingdom and continental Europe with the promise of transporting his audience, regardless of class or status, to the newly British-colonized lands of Egypt and Palestine.
In the nineteenth century, Frith’s Hall of Columns would have functioned to visually transport viewers thousands of miles away to the ruins at Karnak in an instant. Warping time and space in this way informed British imperial ambitions. The colony of Egypt seemed palpably within reach. Its cultures and histories were increasingly familiar through photography. Hall of Columns would be stitched together with thousands of other photographs and knowledge mined from sacred, forbidden sites, forming the orientalist pseudo-science of Egyptology. The ability to capture sites like Karnak through the tangible medium of photography supplemented pillaged artifacts and knowledge, which together fed a European imperialist desire to possess and exploit colonized peoples and places. Hall of Columns, and countless other photographs of colonized heritage sites, represents the commodification of foreign lands and cultures. The publication of such photographs for mass consumption, turning sacred sites into visual tokens for European education and entertainment.
Andrew Handrea, Loeb Curatorial Research Intern, Summer 2020
Further Reading:
- Barbara Watterson and Kathleen M. Pickavance, “The Photographs of Francis Frith (1822-1898): A Victorian View of Ancient Egypt,” Archaeology Vol. 37, No. 6 (Archaeological Institute of America, 1984).
- John Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (Taylor & Francis, 2013).
- Marie-Therese Jammes and Andre Jammes, “Egypt in Flaubert’s Time: The First Photographers: 1839-1860,” Aperture No. 78.
- Paul E. Chevedden, “Making Light of Everything: Photography of the Middle East and Current Photomania,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin Vol. 18, No. 2 (Middle East Studies Association of North America MESA, December 1984).
- Photographs of Egypt and the Holy Land (American University in Cairo Press, 2008).
- Yeshayahu Nir, “3 Early Traveling Landscape Photographers: Wet-Plate Photography 1857-1863” in The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography and the Holy Land, 1839-1899 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
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