442
made papier maché impressions of wall carvings and
hieroglyphs. After leaving Egypt for Palestine and Syria
his production tapered off considerably.
Du Camp’s photographs, all of monuments, refl ect
his working purpose and follow the pattern of earlier
documentary etchings and lithographs, especially those
in the 24 volumes of the Napoleonic Description de
l’Egypt [Description of Egypt] (1809–1828). Du Camp
moves from a distant overall view to a closer one, at
times honing in on a detail or two, always positioning
his subject in the center of the frame. The overall effect
is straightforward and banal. The poor quality of the
photographs printed by Du Camp himself also indicate
a lack of concern for aesthetics. The one original aspect
of his work is his use of a Nubian man, ostensibly as
a measure of scale, but who is often almost invisible,
posed in odd nooks and crannies of the ancient tombs
and temples.
Upon his return in 1851 Du Camp showed his pho-
tographs to the newly founded Société Heliographique
and that September Francis Wey published an exten-
sive celebratory review in La Lumière [The Light]. Du
Camp’s efforts resulted in the fi rst travel album of its
kind, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie. Published in
May 1852 by Blanquart-Evrard in an edition of ap-
proximately 200 large leather-bound copies, it contains
125 photographs and a lengthy introduction. Elegant and
costly, the album was partially funded by individual and
government subscriptions. Photographs were also sold
separately and occasionally exhibited, as in 1855 at the
Exposition Universelle in Paris where they garnered a
Second Class medal.
Despite his success Du Camp subsequently aban-
doned photography completely to devote himself to
what became a prodigious literary production. He had
already published Souvenirs et paysages d’Orient [Ori-
ental Recollections and Landscapes] (1848), an account
of an 1844 trip to Greece, Constantinople, and Algeria.
Two subsequent books are directly related to his pho-
tographic trip, an autobiographical fi ction, Memoires
d’un suicidé [Memoirs of a Suicide] (1853) and a travel
account, Le Nil [The Nile] (1854), as well as a short
story, “L’Ennuque Noir” [The Black Eunuch]. In addi-
tion, during the 1850s and 1860s, Du Camp published
poems, reviews of art exhibitions, and was a founder of
the literary journal Revue de Paris (1851-1858). Later he
turned his attention to the documentation of his native
city and its political upheavals. He devoted nine years
(1866–1875) to his most ambitious documentary enter-
prise, a six-volume account of the functioning of Paris,
its food supplies, transportation systems, prisons, and
so forth. He was admitted to the prestigious Academie
Française in 1880, fourteen years before his death in
Baden-Baden on 8 February 1894.
Du Camp’s voluminous archives, including corre-
spondence, manuscripts, negatives and unpublished pho-
tographs are in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France
in Paris. Copies of his album can be found in several
major institutions such as the Bibliothèque National
in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Individual prints are in numerous public and private
collections. His work is highly regarded, primarily for
its pioneering status, having had little direct stylistic
infl uence on subsequent photographers.
Julia BalleriniBiography
Maxime Du Camp was born of aristocratic parents in
Paris on 2 February 1822. He learned photography in
preparation for a trip with Gustave Flaubert to the Near
East in 1849–1851 and produced the fi rst major travel
album of its kind, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie
(1852). Subsequently Du Camp abandoned photogra-
phy to devote himself to his activities as a writer. Two
books published in the 1850s, an autobiography and
a travel narrative, are related to his photographic trip.
Du Camp also published poems, reviews of art exhibi-
tions, and was a founder of the literary journal Revue de
Paris (1851–1858). Later in life he turned his attention
to the documentation of his native city and its political
upheavals, his most ambitious enterprise being a six-
volume account of the workings of Paris, from sewers
to summits. He was admitted to the Academie Française
in 1880. Forever a bachelor, he died in Baden-Baden
on 8 February 1894.
See also: Le Grey, Gustave; De la Grange, Baron
Alexis; Wey, Francis; Société Héliographique Française;
Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré; Expositions Univer-
selle, Paris (1854, 1855, 1867 etc.); and Bibliothèque
National.Further Reading
Ballerini, Julia, “The In-Visibility of Hadji-Ishmael: Du Camp’s
1850 Photographs of Egypt,” in The Body Imaged, edited by
Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon, London: Cambridge
University Press, 1993
Ballerini, Julia, The Stillness of Hajj Ishmael: Maxime Du Camp’s
Photographs of Egypt, 1850, Publisher t.b.a. 2003.
Bonaccorso, Giovanni, Du Camp: Voyage en Orient, Messina.
Dewachter, Michel and Daniel Oster, Un voyageur en Egypte vers
1850: “Le Nil” de Maxime Du Camp, Paris: Sand/Conti, 1987
(Annotated edition of Du Camp’s Le Nil with introductory
essays and illustrations.)
Maynial, Edouard, “Flaubert orientaliste et le Livre posthume
de Maxime Du Camp” in Revue de litterature comparée 8,
1923, 78–108.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, “The Photographic Adventure of
Maxime Du Camp,” in Library Chronicle of the University
of Texas at Austin 19, 1982, 19–51.
Peloritana, 1972 (Annotated edition of Du Camp’s unpublished
travel notes).