Exhibition note. (Art).(landscape photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)(Brief Article)

"Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. September 11-December 30, 2001

Unlike the Description de L'Egypte--the engraved and textual squawk-box published between 1809 and 1828--the early photographs of Egypt, from a generation later, speak in whispers. Their stark imagery confronts the viewer with a sphinx's indifference. Maxime du Camp at Abu Simbel (1850), Felix Teynard at the Island of Philae (1851-52), John Beasley Greene on the Nile (1853-54), Francis Frith at the Pyramids of El-Geezeh (1858): these are the scenes of a midcentury desert mystery.

The period of photography selected for "Along the Nile" roughly 1840 to 1870, presents a ranging view of half-light, half-knowing, and half-truths. The images land somewhere between romance and reality. Giza to Luxor, Dakka to the Valley of the Kings, the ancient monuments in these photographs are crisp, but the contemporary figures blur. With long exposure, one might say the very emotions get fuzzy. The photographs look deserted, even for the desert. Cropped and other-worldly, what we see is more like a lunar landscape for the nineteenth century, orientalism passed through a pinhole, a spectral light, a desert vacuumed clean. Whether these prints communicate an aspect of the sentimental, or unsentimental, or mixed emotions of their European buying public is anyone's guess. The picture is not altogether clear. Perhaps this is the point.

Culled from the collection of the Gilman Paper Company, the forty-five prints assembled here are arranged by date. Included are the big names--Du Camp (French), Greene (American, active in France), Teynard (French), Frith (British). There are also a number of lesser-knowns: the German Ernest Benecke (active in France), Gustave Le Gray (French), Felix Bonfils (French), Louis de Clercq (French), Wilhelm Hammerschmidt (German). But even the internationalism of the show presents an enigma. Just when you see the semblance of national painting styles, the system falls flat. Teynard's archaeological gaze, Greene's sublime landscapes, Benecke's ethnography: there is more here than meets the eye.

Co-curated by the Gilman collection's Pierre Apraxine, the show regrettably has been destined for the Howard Gilman Gallery, a dim warren. The gallery is hard to find, and the show is easily confused with a simultaneous exhibition called "The Pharaoh's Photographer" in the first-floor Lila Acheson Wallace Galleries of Egyptian Art. Small and intimate, the Gilman Gallery is also poorly positioned to take on anything of large scale and wide scope, which "Along the Nile" demands.

In fact, the Metropolitan has given over little to this exhibition. There is ...