1383
and culminated in 1858 with the two volume Egypte
et Nubie containing 160 photographs. It is considered
one of the masterworks of early travel photography.
However, Teynard’s project was not the fi rst sustained
photographic record of Egypt, nor was it the fi rst lavish
photographic publication based on the ruins along the
Nile. Maxime DuCamp, traveling with Gustave Flau-
bert, had photographed along the same route in 1849–51.
It was DuCamp’s photographs, brought out by Gide et
Baudry in 1852, that received attention and accolades
as the fi rst and extensive photographic record of the
sites of ancient Egypt and the fi rst photographically
illustrated travel book. In January 1853, before Goupil
began printing Teynard’s photographs for distribution,
DuCamp received the Legion of Honor in recognition
of his photographic work.
Teynard’s photographs epitomize the tensions in-
herent in early expeditionary photography: on the one
hand, the acceptance of photography as the newest tool
in the long effort to create accurate visual records of the
world, the latest technological innovation in the long
tradition of drawn and printed topographic views; and,
on the other, a growing appreciation of the photograph’s
unique ability to capture and convey the sense of a
place as experienced at the moment the photograph was
made. In short, the tension between neutral record and
the evocation of experience. Teynard’s project must be
seen as part of the drive to apply the new technology
of photography to record the physical world, in this
case the sites of ancient Egypt. From this perspective,
photography, rather than a radical break with the past,
was part of the continuum of strategies in the ongoing
project to replicate and reproduce for publication views
of the world, a project which began with the printing
revolution of early modern Europe. Teynard embraced
this view of photography as a complimentary tech-
nique to earlier modes of recording when identifi ed his
project in the subtitle of Egypte et Nubie, as a “photo-
graphic atlas complementing the great Description de
l’ Egypte”—the massive multi-volume publication ofTEYNARD, FÉLIX
Terris, Adolphe. Rues des Grands
Carmes, Marselles.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith
Foundation Gift, 1995 (1995.171)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.