Dhe photography is dizzy. We all understood that a long time ago. But we have to keep reminding ourselves that it sometimes shapes our picture of the world in such a way that even our memory is falsified. If it happens on the spot, it can be a punch in the face. For example in Giza. Like metastases, the districts, settlements, new development areas and adjacent communities of the twenty million inhabitants of Cairo are spreading in all directions and reaching so far into the surrounding wasteland that no expensively equipped expedition is required to get to the pyramids. Rather, one can stroll from a last row of guest houses and apartment blocks to the buildings as comfortably as if they were lying in their front yard. And yet our picture will forever locate her in almost divine solitude in the infinity of the desert. Out of time and far removed from anything that has to do with reality. Powerful, enigmatic, commanding attention. Alone with yourself. And yourself enough. This is how the first photographers saw and depicted them. And so the following generations imitated them by trying to hide every trace of modernity. Really her?
“I followed the call of a romantic and perfect past that interested me more than the unnatural and troubled present,” confessed photographer Francis Frith, who made three trips to the Orient in the 1950s. The pyramids were already a travel destination in ancient times, described by Plato and Herodotus. Medieval pilgrims traveled along the Nile. And towards the end of the eighteenth century, with the battle cry “Retour d’Égypte”, the Europeans had really caught an Egyptian fever that spread to the culture of the home. When Francis Frith planned his travels, he was able to refer to Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s “Handbook for Travels in Egypt”.
Egypt in the 19th century
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Return from Egypt
He was not the first photographer in Egypt. Fifteen years earlier, visitors had experimented there with daguerreotypes, August Salzmann had used his documentation to correct the depictions of early, strangely distorted copper engravings, and Maxime Du Camp, together with Gustave Flaubert, collected the results of his two-year journey in the magnificent volume “Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie” full of glued-in photographs. But Francis Frith developed a business model from it. No effort was too great for him to expose and immediately develop glass plates in huge format despite the most complicated technology. He transported the material and a collapsible darkroom tent 1500 kilometers across the desert by boat or camelback. Wherever possible, he used burial chambers as his laboratory, although he had to share them with bats.
His photo book on the Orient became a bestseller with two thousand copies, and the production of the hundred and forty thousand prints required for it laid the foundation for a company from which he soon supplied the whole world with his photographs. Thanks to his own travels and employed photographers, he had motifs from all continents in stock. He became the largest picture manufacturer in the world. Back then, you bought your prints like you buy postcards of sights today. And like these, they served as a reminder of sublime feelings or cheerful moments. Hence the perspectives that come closest to the longing. And no look at reality.