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Calcutta International Exhibition,” in Traces of India: Pho-
tography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation,
1850–1900, Montreal and New Haven: Canadian Centre for
Architecture and Yale Center for British Art, 2003.
Maxwell Anne, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Repre-
sentations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identi-
ties, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1999.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, Industrial Madness: Commercial
Photography in Paris, 1848–1871, New Haven; London: Yale
University Press, 1994.
Ringger, Kirsti Asplund, “The Photographic Society of Philadel-
phia Exhibition of 1886,” in History of Photography 21, no.
4 (winter 1997), 283–293.
Tucker, Anne Wilkes, Dana Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryūichi and
Takeba Joe, The History of Japanese Photography, New
Haven; London: Yale University Press and the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, 2003.EXPEDITION PHOTOGRAPHY
As an activity both enabling and symbolizing the ad-
vance of modern industrial economies, expeditionary
enterprise in the nineteenth century was based upon a
new empirical quest for knowledge and a political will to
establish civil order and authority according to Western
ideologies. An expedition might seek places that few
had previously probed to any great extent within the
geographical neighborhood of the expeditionary party’s
own place of origin. With respect to expeditionary pho-
tography, Auguste-Rosalie Bisson’s successful ascent of
Mont Blanc in 1862 is a good instance of a physically
challenging goal relatively close to home. In the nine-
teenth-century sense of the term, however, expeditions
usually entailed a journey by one or more individuals
to explore a region or to reach a destination generally
at some remove from Western metropolitan centers and
their cultural and social extensions in cities and towns
in other lands. This essay examines the emergence
and development of photography as an agent of visual
documentation that became integral to exploration or
expeditionary activities largely associated with notions
of progress, nationalism, and imperial design. Because
photography was a practice adopted by inhabitants of
other regions penetrated by the often unwelcome ad-
vances of Western society, an additional study outside
the scope of the present discussion might examine
photographers of non-European ancestry who undertook
journeys of importance to their own cultures.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
overland journeys and sea voyages involving extensive
exploration had begun to accord a place to artists. Two
instances are the British painter William Hodges on
James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacifi c (1772–
75), and the Frenchman Dominique Vivant-Denon,
for whom it was “imperative to describe everything,”
while depicting antiquities and terrain under Bonaparte
on his Egyptian campaign (1798–1801). Both of these
cases established a lineage of scientifi c and scholarlypursuits on the one hand, and exploits of strategic po-
litical concern on the other. They illustrate the scope
of expeditionary work, which could take the intrepid
traveler over expanses of land and water to regions
whose geographical and physical character had been
only poorly known at best. The apparatus of support
might be private, or sanctioned by governmental author-
ity, or a collective venture with a combination of both.
As such, expeditions must necessarily be understood to
have multiple functions; because they were costly and
fraught with risk, explorers needed to demonstrate the
value of their journeys to their sponsors back home.
Reports and journals recording the encounters of the
expedition became common by the 1830s, together with
hand drawn delineations of places and their inhabitants,
geological formations, fauna, and fl ora.
Despite diffi culties in obtaining successful results
in the fi eld in its fi rst decade or so, early adherents of
photography recognized its implications as an astound-
ing new form of visual documentation more exacting in
its faithfulness to the subject compared to conventional
practices. By 1841, in the spirit of Denon’s delineations
of Egypt, a transitional work appeared by the architect
and Egyptologist Hector Horeau, Panorama d’Égypte
et de Nubie, with aquatints after Pierre-Gustave Joly de
Lotbinière’s daguerreotypes made in Egypt. (Joly de
Lotbinière also contributed to Lerebour’s, Excursions
Daguerriennes.) Photographers would henceforth push
into areas considered exotic and that, although still given
liberal interpretation by Romantically inclined painters,
would undergo increased scrutiny through the lens of
the camera.
Maxime du Camp had realized the implications
of producing photographs of environments rich with
associative and historic signifi cance when in 1850 he
traveled with the writer Gustave Flaubert to Egypt and
the Middle East. Du Camp had received an offi cial com-
mission from the French government, privileging him
to access the lands of the Pharaonic dynasties, which
resulted in over 200 negatives. These comprise images
of monumental Egyptian sculpture and edifi ces with a
clarity and perceived quality of scientifi c observation
that signal a new aesthetic of exploration relative to
prior modes of depiction. Du Camp’s research also
revealed an ethnographic interest in his representations
of Arab culture, and an indication of the psychological
and social complexity of encounter symbolized in the
photographs of the people. Several indications of future
directions are thus present in Du Camp’s achievement:
he contributed to the initial stages of a cumulative pho-
tographic archive important for geopolitical, scientifi c,
and scholarly study; helped to rationalize France’s geo-
political presence in the Orient, and hence reinforce its
nationalistic identity as an industrial power; and assisted
in popularizing Egypt in the European imaginationEXHIBITIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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