620
John Beasly Greene was born in Le Havre but was
an American national by virtue of his father’s citizen-
ship. John Bulkley Greene (1780–1850), a native of
Concord, New Hampshire, had been a resident of France
since around 1814; at the time of his death he was the
head of Greene & Co., the major American bank on the
Continent, and a leading fi gure in American expatriate
community in Paris. John Beasly Greene, his only son,
inherited the status and the fi nancial independence to
devote himself to his joint avocations of photography
and Egyptology. His teachers were preeminent in their
fi elds: Gustave Le Gray taught him photography and the
waxed paper process; Emmanuel, Vicomte de Rougé,
Champollion’s successor as head of the Egyptian De-
partment of the Louvre, taught him hieroglyphics. No
dilettante, Greene was inducted (as a foreign member)
into the prestigious Société asiatique, the French ar-
chaeological society, in 1853, at the age of twenty-one;
in 1854, he became one of the founding members of the
Société française de photographie.
Greene completed two extended trips to Egypt in
the course of his brief career. On the fi rst, made during
the winter season of 1853/54, he traveled up the Nile
as far as the Second Cataract in Nubia, photographing
the landscape, notable landmarks, and ancient Egyptian
monuments along the route. Greene returned the fol-
lowing winter season (1854/55) with a fi rman (permit)
to excavate at the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III at
Medinet Habou at Thebes. Greene systematically pho-
tographed the progress of his excavation of the second
courtyard of the Temple, the hieroglyphs that covered
the walls of the courtyard, as well as architecture and
details of the temple complex itself. The images of Me-
dinet Habou include a remarkable series of views of the
site taken from different points of the compass and at
decreasing distances, in which the massive structures are
so diminished by the vast scale of the empty landscape
surrounding them that they look like miniatures.
Greene also made two trips to Algeria. In December
1855, he joined an offi cial French expedition as offi cial
photographer for a two-part exploratory excavation
of “Le Tombeau de la Chrétienne” (the Tomb of the
Christian Woman), a 1st century BC burial mound
near Tipasa, about 85 miles west of Algiers. He re-
turned to France when the fi rst phase of the excavation
ended in early January 1856, but was back in Algeria
in mid-February, six weeks prior to resumption of the
excavations. It is probable that Greene used those six
weeks to visit Constantine, an ancient city 200 miles
northeast of Algiers, perched dramatically on a high
plateau above—and half-encircled by—the deep gorge
of the Rhumel River. The photographs he made of
Constantine and the landscape surrounding it are among
Greene’s fi nest, most compelling images: tight, almost
abstract compositions that seem charged with emotion
and portent. When the excavations at the Tomb of the
Christian Woman ended in early April, Greene sailed to
France from the port city of Cherchelle, where he took
his last photographs.
Greene made a third trip to Egypt in early November- Already seriously ill when he arrived in Cairo,
he died a few days later, the victim of an unidentifi ed
“cruel disease” (probably not tuberculosis). His death
was announced at a meeting of the Société française de
Photographie, and in the French, British, and American
press. He was just 24 years old.
Greene’s photographs are metaphors for his emo-
tional response to Egypt rather than the more descriptive
records produced by contemporaries such as Maxime
du Camp or Leavitt Hunt. His Egyptian photographs
are characterized by their emphasis on the emptiness
and vastness of the Egyptian sky and landscape, which
dominate most of the compositions and overwhelm the
scale of even the most massive of the ancient monu-
ments in most of Greene’s images. His images reveal an
extraordinary, proto-modernist eye, interested in the im-
pact of graphic form, which distinguishes Greene from
his contemporaries: his signature image, “Bank of the
Nile, Thebes,” consists of three simple elements—the
dark straight line of the west bank of the Nile supporting
the darker silhouette of a small oasis centered against the
faint outline of the Theban Hills behind it—suspended
between an area of slight tone at the bottom (the Nile)
and blankness that fi lls the upper half of the frame (the
sky)—is a composition unparalled in 19th century
photography. Greene organized his Egyptian photo-
graphs into three series: “P” (Paysages, landscapes),
“M” (Monuments, architectural monuments), and “I”
(Inscriptions, hierogylphic inscriptions). The images
in each series are numbered in geographical sequence,
south to north, with the series number inscribed in the
negative, usually in the lower left-hand corner. The im-
ages were also often signed “J.B. Greene” in the nega-
tive, usually in the lower right of the print. The highest
recorded numbers for each series are M-42, I-108, and P-
56, and each series includes photographs taken on both
his trips to Egypt, in 1853–54 and 1854–55. There are
also numerous Egyptian images that were not assigned
a series number. The total body of Greene’s Egyptian
photographs numbers approximately 300 images.
Greene made no effort to organize his Algerian work,
which consists of only about 40 images (including
those documenting the excavation of Le Tombeau de la
Chrétienne), all of which seem more personal and more
purely pictorial than his Egyptian photographs. The
photographs he made at Constantine, and particularly
those taken in the Gorge of the Rhumel, seem so brood-
ing and fi lled with portent that it is tempting to believe
they are expressions of a premonition on Greene’s part
of his impending death, and what he intended to do with