LONDON.- Long before photographs of Egypt became familiar through textbooks, tourism campaigns and museum displays, making a picture beside the Nile was a slow, technically demanding process. Cameras were bulky, chemicals had to be carried through heat and dust, and every negative required careful preparation in the field. Yet it was precisely under those conditions that some of the images that helped define Europe’s visual idea of Egypt were made.
A selection of those photographs is now on view at Colnaghi London as part of Out of the Sand: Ancient Egypt Rediscovered, an exhibition that brings together 19th-century photographic material documenting temples, monuments and archaeological sites across Egypt.
At the heart of this history is Maxime Du Camp, who travelled to Egypt with Gustave Flaubert in 1849. While Flaubert recorded the journey in notebooks, Du Camp worked with a camera, producing what became one of the earliest extensive photographic surveys of Egypt.
The results were published in Paris in 1852 as gypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie. The volume, now included in the Colnaghi presentation, contains 125 original salt prints made from photographs taken between 1849 and 1851, together with explanatory texts and engraved plans of Karnak, Medinet Habu and Philae. Produced at a moment when photographically illustrated books were still an innovation, Du Camp’s publication helped establish a model for the systematic visual documentation of archaeological sites.
Photography in Egypt changed dramatically over the decades that followed. In the 1850s, the technical difficulties involved in preparing negatives and transporting equipment meant that photography remained largely the domain of determined travellers and archaeological expeditions. By the 1870s, however, permanent studios had appeared in Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor, serving scholars as well as the growing number of visitors arriving by steamship and railway. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 further transformed patterns of travel and helped expand the market for photographs of Egypt.
Those images became increasingly portable. Albumen prints could be purchased individually or assembled into albums, allowing people far from the Nile Valley to study the architecture and decoration of monuments in considerable detail. At the same time, the photographs inevitably shaped how those monuments were understood, often isolating ancient structures from the modern towns, communities and landscapes surrounding them.
Among the works presented by Colnaghi is a photograph of the Temple of Esna associated with the Sbah studio, one of the most successful photographic businesses operating in the Ottoman world during the second half of the 19th century. Pascal Sbah opened his first studio in Constantinople in 1857 and established a Cairo branch in 1873. After his death in 1886, the business continued under members of his family and later became associated with Sbah & Joaillier.
The Esna photograph records the great pronaos of the temple dedicated principally to Khnum, the ram-headed god associated with creation and the Nile. In the 19th century, the temple remained closely embedded within the surrounding town, with its floor far below the contemporary street level after centuries of urban occupation. The photograph gave European viewers unusually direct access to its dense reliefs and inscriptions, while at the same time visually separating the ancient monument from much of its living urban context.
Another major figure represented in the exhibition is Gabriel Lekegian, an Armenian photographer who established a successful studio in Cairo during the 1880s. His images circulated widely in albums devoted to Egypt and combined archaeological documentation with the commercial demands of an international clientele.
Lekegian’s photograph Temple de Kournah depicts the mortuary temple of Seti I at Qurna on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor. The complex, completed after Seti’s death by Ramesses II, formed part of the sacred landscape of western Thebes. Another Lekegian image records the second court of the mortuary temple of
Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, where later Coptic occupation altered the ancient complex and portions of the temple were adapted for Christian use. The photograph therefore captures not simply a pharaonic monument, but a site marked by successive layers of religious and social history.
Antonio Beato, who settled in Luxor in the early 1860s and remained there until his death in 1906, was particularly well placed to document such changes. Unlike photographers who visited Egypt during a single expedition, Beato was able to return repeatedly to the same monuments as excavation and restoration transformed their appearance.
Two of his photographs focus on the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, whose 134 columns presented photographers with an obvious visual challenge. One view emphasizes the compressed effect created by the immense forest of columns, while another follows the central aisle, where twelve larger columns rise above the surrounding supports. Together, the images reveal how 19th-century photographers developed different viewpoints to make monumental architecture legible within the limits of the photographic frame.
Beato also photographed Luxor Temple, including the section associated with Amenhotep III. The image points to another recurring theme in the exhibition: the fact that Egypt’s monuments were rarely the products of a single period. Luxor Temple was enlarged by Ramesses II, adapted during Roman rule, and later incorporated Christian structures and the mosque of Abu al-Haggag. By the time Beato photographed it, the site embodied more than three millennia of construction, reuse and transformation.
The exhibition also includes work by the photographers known as the Zangaki Brothers, whose precise biographies remain uncertain despite the large number of images they left behind. Probably of Greek origin, they photographed archaeological sites, Nile cities and the construction of the Suez Canal during the closing decades of the 19th century. Their numbered negatives were intended for commercial distribution, and a horse-drawn photographic van enabled them to prepare and develop plates while travelling.
One Zangaki image isolates a wall relief showing Cleopatra VII as Isis. The photograph reflects the renewed fascination with Cleopatra in 19th-century European culture while also demonstrating how photography could detach a detail from its larger architectural setting. Removed from its original sequence, the relief became an autonomous image, one that could be collected, studied and interpreted independently of the monument to which it belonged.
That tension runs throughout the photographic material gathered in Out of the Sand. These pictures functioned as records of monuments and inscriptions, but they were also commodities, souvenirs and instruments through which viewers constructed an image of ancient Egypt from a distance.
What began with the difficult fieldwork of pioneers such as Du Camp eventually became an international photographic industry. The surviving prints now offer more than views of temples and ruins. They reveal the changing technologies of photography, the growth of archaeological interest and tourism, and the ways in which the camera helped determine what generations of viewers saw when they imagined Egypt.
The selection of 19th-century photographs can be viewed at Colnaghi London as part of Out of the Sand: Ancient Egypt Rediscovered, on view through November 17, 2026.
