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ABSTRACT
From the late nineteenth century, photography was inseparable from archaeological fieldwork, and object photography in particular was crucial to the creation and circulation of the archaeological artefact. Which objects were selected for photography, how they were photographed, and what then happened to both object and photograph: these interrelated aspects of ‘the object habit’ require further interrogation in order to situate the historical acts of knowledge production through which archaeologists, museum curators, and a wider public have apprehended the material remains of the ancient past. In this paper, I draw on examples of object photography in Egyptian archaeology from the 1850s onwards, and in particular, the archive formed during the 1920s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Like the objects themselves, photographs were destined to circulate between field and museum, and the photographic requirements of these complementary spaces arguably influenced both the ‘look’ of object photographs and the way the photographs were themselves used and catalogued, not only at the time of a given excavation, but subsequently. As this paper argues, colonial-era formations of knowledge about the object endure in the archive, obscuring the social and material practices through which photography operated.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Alice Stevenson and Emma Libonati for the invitation to participate in The Object Habit conference and in this special issue of Museum History Journal. Their own comments, and those of two anonymous reviewers, helped focus my thoughts for this paper. I also thank Alice, Emma, and Ivor Pridden at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology for assistance with , and Cat Warsi at the Griffith Institute, Oxford University, for and .
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Christina Riggs is a Reader at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK). She is a specialist in ancient Egyptian art and histories of archaeology, with particular interests in how ancient Egyptian objects have been collected, interpreted, and represented in modern times. Her most recent books include Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2014; runner-up in the BKFS Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies) and Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2014). Her current book project is Photographing Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury), on the photographic archives associated with the 1920s excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Notes
1. See James F. Goode, Negotiating for the Past: Archaeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1919–1941 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) for an overview across the Middle East, and Donald Malcolm Reid, Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums and the Struggle for Identities from World War 1 to Nasser (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2015), pp. 82–101, for the situation in Egypt.
2. A selection: J. A. Baird, ‘Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928–1937: An Archaeology of the Archive,’ American Journal of Archaeology, 115.3 (2011), 427–46; Frederick N. Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); Mirjam Brusius, Fotografie und museales Wissen: William Henry Fox Talbot, das Altertum, und die Absenz der Fotografie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Mirjam Brusius and Theodor Dunkelgrün, eds, ‘Photography, Antiquity, Scholarship,’ special issue of History of Photography, 40.3 (2016); Sudeshna Guha, ‘The Visual in Archaeology: Photographic Representation of Archaeological Practice in British India,’ Antiquity, 76 (2002), 93–100; Christina Riggs, ‘Shouldering the Past: Photography, Archaeology, and Collective Effort at the Tomb of Tutankhamun,’ History of Science online first (2016), DOI:10.1177/0073275316676282; Nick Shepherd, ‘“When the Hand That Holds the Trowel Is Black … ”: Disciplinary Practices of Self-Representation and the Issue of “Native” Labour in Archaeology,’ Journal of Social Archaeology, 3.3 (2003), 334–52; Duncan Shields, ‘Multiple Collections and Fluid Meanings: Alfred Maudslay’s Archaeological Photographs at the British Museum,’ in Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information, ed. by Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 27–46.
3. For Beato, e.g. Antonio Ferri, ed., Il fotografo dei faraoni: Antonio Beato in Egitto 1860–1905 (Bologna: Pendragon, 2008). Individual Egyptologists and archives: Michel Azim and Gérard Réveillac, Karnak dans l’objectif de Georges Legrain: Catalogue raisonné des archives photographiques du premier directeur des travaux de Karnak de 1895 à 1917, 2 vols. (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004); Horst Beinlich, Die Photos der Preussischen Expedition 1908–1910 nach Nubien, Teil I: Photos 1–199 (Dettelbach: J. H. Röll, 2010); Peter Der Manuelian and George Andrew Reisner, ‘George Andrew Reisner on Archaeological Photography,’ Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 29 (1992), 1–34; John A. Larson, ‘The Oriental Institute Photographic Archives,’ in Picturing the Past: Imaging and Imagining the Ancient Middle East, ed. by Jack Green, Emily Teeter and John A. Larson (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012), pp. 51–6; Patrizia Piacentini, ed. Egypt and the Pharaohs: Pharaonic Egypt in the Archives and Libraries of the Università degli Studi di Milano, 2 vols. (Milan: Università degli Studi di Milano/Skira, 2010); Janet Picton and Ivor Pridden, eds., Unseen Images: Archive Photographs in the Petrie Museum, Volume Q: Gurob, Sedment and Tarkhan (London: Golden House Publications, 2008); Piero Racanicchi, ed., Fotografi in terra d'Egitto: Immagini dall'archivio storico della soprintendenza al Museo delle Antichità Egizie di Torino (Turin: Pas Informazione, 1991).
4. On the photography of objects, see also Baird, ‘Dura-Europos,’ pp. 440–3; Frederick N. Bohrer, ‘Photography and Archaeology: The Image as Object,’ in Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image, ed. by Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 180–91; Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photography, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 51–79.
5. Discussed in Christina Riggs, Photographing Tutankhamun (London: Bloomsbury), forthcoming.
6. Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
7. Tony Bennett, ‘Museum, Field, Colony: Colonial Governmentality and the Circulation of Reference,’ Journal of Cultural Economy, 2.1-2 (2009), 99–116.
8. On the interrelationship of photography and science, see (among others) JenniferTucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Kelley Wilder, Photography and Science (London: Reaktion, 2009).
9. Nadia Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
10. Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground, p. 6.
11. Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 132.
12. On Devéria, see Azim and Révillac, Karnak, p. 67, with further references in n. 48.
13. Kathleen Stewart Howe, Excursions Along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1994), pp. 36, 159, plates 80–82; Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (Cologne: Koeneman, 1998), pp. 376, 380–2.
14. On Fenton, see John Hannavy, ‘Roger Fenton and the British Museum,’ History of Photography 12.3 (1988), 193–204 and, on the early use (and non-use) of photography in the museum, Mirjam Brusius, ‘From Photographic Science to Scientific Photography: Talbot and Decipherment at the British Museum around 1850,’ in William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography, ed. by Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean and Chitra Ramalingam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 219–44.
15. The Album has been digitised by the Bibliothèque nationale de France at <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8626090c> [accessed 3 January 2017].
16. Album du Musée de Boulaq, pl. 20.
17. E.g. small works of sculpture in the ‘panthéon’ section, Album du Musée de Boulaq, pls. 4 to 9.
18. Album du Musée de Boulaq, pl. 31.
19. From the Album frontispiece: ‘avec une netteté qui les met en présence des monuments eux-mêmes’.
20. See Alice Stevenson, ‘Artefacts of Excavation: The British Collection and Distribution of Egyptian Finds to Museums, 1880–1915,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 26.1 (2014), 89–102.
21. Melissa Banta and Curtis M. Hinsley, From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 1986), pp. 72–99 offers a useful overview, together with Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology, esp. 105–40.
22. W. M. F. Petrie, Methods and Aims in Archaeology (London: Methuen, 1904), p. vii.
23. See also Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology, pp. 82–4.
24. John A. Hodges, Photographic Lenses: How to Choose, and How to Use (Bradford: Percy Lund & Co., 1895), pp. 31–3.
25. The Art of Ancient Egypt: A Series of Photographic Plates Representing Objects from the Exhibition of the Art of Ancient Egypt at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in the Summer of 1895 (London, 1895).
26. Art of Ancient Egypt, description of the plates (unpaginated). The contents of the cases be gleaned from the more widely printed, 178-page catalogue targeted at visitors: Exhibition of the Art of Ancient Egypt (London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1895).
27. Petrie, Methods and Aims, p. 81.
28. J. P. Droop. Archaeological Excavation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915).
29. Droop, Archaeological Excavation, p. 75.
30. Droop, Archaeological Excavation, p. 36.
31. For a painting of Brugsch taking a photograph in the Giza Palace museum, see discussion in Christina Riggs, ‘Colonial Visions: Egyptian Antiquities and Contested Histories in the Cairo Museum,’ Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 1 (2013), 65–84.
32. Droop, Archaeological Excavation, p. 48.
33. Droop, Archaeological Excavation, p. 46.
34. Peter Der Manuelian and George Andrew Reisner, ‘George Andrew Reisner on Archaeological Photography,’ Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 29 (1992), 1–34.
35. Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photography, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 51–4.
36. Bohrer, Photography and Archaeology, p. 135.
37. Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut.Ankh.Amen, Volume I (London: Cassell and Company, 1923), p. 127.
38. See T. G. H. James’ standard biography Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London and New York: Tauris Parke, 2001 [1992]), as well as C. N. Reeves and John H. Taylor, Howard Carter before Tutankhamun (London: British Museum Press, 1992).
39. Riggs, Photographing Tutankhamun, forthcoming.
40. E.g. Susan J. Allen, Tutankhamun’s Tomb: The Thrill of Discovery (New York; New Haven and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Yale University Press, 2006); George B. Johnson, ‘Painting with Light: The Work of Archaeology Photographer Harry Burton,’ KMT, 8.2 (1997), 58–77; Ronald T. Ridley, ‘The Dean of Archaeological Photographers: Harry Burton,’ Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 99 (2013), 117–30.
41. In the first year of the work, the Times preferred the word ‘craftsmanship’, but by the start of the second season, ‘art’ became a consistent theme (e.g. the heading for a page of photographs, ‘Ancient Egyptian Art,’ 21 September 1923).
42. James, Howard Carter, pp. 277–82, 480–5.
43. Based on the list of objects (and indications of which were not photographed) in Helen Murray and Mary Nuttall, A Handlist to Howard Carter’s Catalogue of Objects in Tutankhamun’s Tomb (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1963).
44. Droop, Archaeological Excavation, pp. 47–8.
45. See Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), which includes Arabic-language sources, unlike the account in James, Howard Carter, pp. 316–84.
46. The phrase is Carter’s, from his account of the examination of the mummy: <http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/4mummy.html> [accessed 8 January 2017].
47. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, transl. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1981 [2000]), p. 12: ‘Odd that no one has thought of the disturbance (to civilisation) which this new action causes’. See also Christopher Pinney, ‘Camerawork as Technical Practice in Colonial India,’ in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History, and the Material Turn, ed. by Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 145–70.
48. Edwards, Raw Histories, p. 52.