1405
rately came to be photographing the Sphinx on the same
day in November 1839, scant weeks after Daguerre’s
public demonstration. Lotbinière went on to make an
extensive daguerreotype record of his travels over the
next year. Jules Itier (1802–1877), a government func-
tionary in the French trade ministry, was an early adopter
of Daguerre’s technique and made daguerreotypes on
trade missions to Senegal (1842) and China, Singapore,
the Philippines, Borneo, and India (1843–1846). Baron
Louis Gros, a French diplomat, made and exhibited
daguerreotypes of the monuments and landscapes he en-
countered on extensive travels in the Americas, Greece,
and England. While yachting in the Mediterranean in
1845, Christopher Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot’s
cousin, and Reverend Calvert Jones made a number
of calotype views, including early two part panora-
mas of Naples. The Reverend George Bridges (active
1846–1852) photographed extensively during a tour of
the Mediterranean and North Africa. Ernest Benecke
(active 1851–1853), the son of an Anglo-German bank-
ing family, also compiled an extensive calotype record
of travels perhaps undertaken to familiarize himself
with family business interests in the region. In most of
these cases, the work was shared privately or had limited
exposure in exhibitions organized by the newly formed
photographic societies. Lotbinière is the exception in
that his work was reproduced in some of the fi rst books
to feature illustrations derived from photographs—those
by Lerebours and Horeau, for example.
Excursions daguerrienes, representant les vues et les
monuments les plus remarquables du globe (1840–44),
published by the Parisian optician Nicholas Lerebours,
was the fi rst book of travel images derived from da-
guerreotype images. Excursions eventually comprised
100 plates of views of Egypt, Italy, Greece, Russia,
France, and other countries provided by a number of
early daguerreotypists. In this fi rst use of the photo-
graphic image as document of travel, images were
reproduced as engravings derived by tracing the outlines
of the daguerreotype image and then laboriously adding
by hand the exquisite detail which the daguerreotype
was capable of rendering. Although a very few plates
were printed directly from the daguerreotype plate using
Fizeau’s process, the plates were engraved copies after
daguerreotypes. While Excursions was the largest and
earliest photographic entry into the travel book market,
it was rapidly followed by others that reproduced either
daguerreotypes or calotypes through engraving, aqua-
tint, or lithography—see for example, Hector Horeau’s
Panorama d’Egypte et de Nubie (1841) and Pierre
Tremaux’s Voyage au Soudan oriental et dans l’Afrique
septentrionale exécutés de 1847 a 1854 (1852–1854).
The fi rst travel book with direct photographic illustra-
tions was Maxime Du Camp’s Egypte, Palestine et Syrie
(1852). Du Camp’s book comprised 125 calotype prints
derived from paper negatives nade during a lengthy
journey in 1849 to 1851, printed by Blanquart Evrard,
and accompanied by short texts supplied by Du Camp.
Although the work was judged extraordinarily suc-
cessful—Du Camp was awarded the Legion of Honor
in recognition of his achievement—probably no more
than 350 copies were printed.
These initial productions defi ned an elite market
for deluxe photographically illustrated travel accounts
for the scholar or arm-chair traveler. While amateurs
continued to make photographs on their travels, entre-
preneurial photographers realized that market demand
could be better and more economically met by superior
printing technology utilizing wet collodion glass plate
negatives from which a large number of albumin prints
could be made. Frances Frith should be credited with
developing and refi ning marketing strategies for travel
photographs by recognizing the existence of distinct
market segments. Beginning in 1856 with his views of
Egypt and the Holy Land, Frith produced photographs
in a range of formats, including stereo-views, which
were affordable to a growing middle class while appeal-
ing to Victorian ideals of self-improvement by offering
direct visual knowledge of the world. After fi rst work-
ing with established publishers, Frith formed his own
photographic publishing fi rm—Frith & Co.—which
continued to offer, throughout the nineteenth century,
views of local and foreign destinations from a network
of operators, as individual prints, collected in volumes,
and in sets of stereo cards.
The photographically illustrated travel account,
which paired text that reported incidents encountered en
route and offered instruction in the history and culture
of the region with photographs, functioned as both the
document of a completed journey and the stimulus for
journeys of the imagination. Frances Bedford accom-
panied the Prince of Wales’ 1862 tour of Egypt and the
Holy Land as the offi cial photographer. On his return,
prints were offered for sale through his Bond Street gal-
lery and later compiled in The Holy Land, Egypt, Con-
stantinople, Athens, etc. (1867). Both offered the British
public vicarious participation in the royal journey and a
record of the tour. The production of images of foreign
or distant locales, ala Frith, Bedford, and innumerable
other operators, was accomplished within a distinct set
of practices associated with view photography, defi ned
by expectations shared by maker and consumer. View
or topographic photographs did not suggest or allude
to a place, they delineated it precisely. Dramatic effects
of light and shade that might confuse the presentation
of a complete, spatially coherent, record of site were
avoided. A well-executed view was as much a map as it
was a picture, offering a clear understanding of the dis-
position of structures, access into and within the space,
and relative scale and distance. Indeed, the fi ne detail