Proof: Maxime Du Camp’s Photographs of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa is the first exhibition to focus on The Met’s rare collection of photographs made by Maxime Du Camp in advance of his landmark 1852 book,
Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie. This work, the first photographically illustrated book to be published in France, solidified European perceptions of the Middle East and North Africa and arguably set an aesthetic standard for documentary photography—one characterized by cool neutrality. Du Camp’s “proof prints” (those made prior to the official publication) instead reveal a wider range of possibilities for the genre.
Proof offers a unique opportunity to compare these early prints, including previously unseen and unpublished views from a portfolio and an album, to those made from the same negatives in 1852 for wider circulation. Through a selection of approximately 55 works, it shows us that the photographic interpretation of the world was as malleable in the 1850s as it is today.
The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.
In October 1849, 27-year-old Du Camp—a writer and aspiring journalist with big ambitions—left Paris to photograph sites across the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily in Egypt. He was officially encouraged by France’s Ministry of Public Instruction to collect visual proof of what he saw by exploiting photography’s “uncontestable exactitude.” A year and a half later, Du Camp returned to France with more than 200 paper negatives, from which 125 were selected to illustrate
Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie. The published images—produced as salted paper prints by Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Évrard at France’s earliest commercial photographic press—are made in cool, gradated tones that one contemporary critic described as “vaporous gray.” Demonstrating Blanquart-Évrard’s “lead pencil” effect, they register the varied landscapes of the region uniformly, asserting a familiar objectivity reminiscent of older print technologies. The book’s well-known photographs stand in stark contrast to several sets that Du Camp printed privately (perhaps with the help of his former teacher, Gustave Le Gray) before planning his publication. These proof prints are remarkable for their surprising range of warm colors, handwork, and a luminescence that recalls their Mediterranean origin.
Drawn entirely from The Met collection, Proof features a set of early prints that Du Camp made upon his return to France and offered to the architect, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, as well as a unique album of images particularly varied in appearance that he may have printed while still in Egypt. Uniting these understudied prints with the later ones from Blanquart-Évrard’s edition,
Proof will reveal new aspects of Du Camp’s celebrated project and illustrate the sheer range of salted paper prints that could be produced in his time.
Du Camp was accompanied on his trip by his friend, the then-unpublished novelist Gustave Flaubert. When they returned home, both men penned narrative accounts of their travels together, but Flaubert’s version of the friends’ journey, published posthumously, differed substantially from that of Du Camp, in which Flaubert is not even mentioned. Inconsistencies between Du Camp’s proofs and the published prints are likewise revealing; in contrast to the book’s focus on expected monuments and ancient ruins, the proofs provide evidence of modern civilization in unfamiliar, arid landscapes. Instead of offering objective proof of his Mediterranean subject, Du Camp’s project presents a view complicated by personal ambition, emergent technology, and the taste and temperament of its 19th-century European audience.
Proof: Maxime Du Camp’s Photographs of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa is organized by Stephen C. Pinson, Curator, with Virginia McBride, Research Associate, in The Met’s Department of Photographs.
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October 26, 2023