The Experience of Elsewhere: Photography in the Travelogues of Pierre Trémaux

Abstract

Between 1852 and 1868, the architect and amateur naturalist Pierre Trémaux (1818–1895) produced three groups of plates and accompanying texts on the geography, architecture, and people of African and Anatolian regions. These luxe publications, produced with the support of the French government, exploit an array of graphic techniques; they combine salted paper prints, engravings, tinted and colour lithographs, photolithographs, and texts in ways never previously attempted. Their examination provides insights into the ways these media interacted, and how comfortably photography in fact sat amongst its predecessors within the long-established context of the travel narrative. This paper will probe the implications of photography for Trémaux’s project through an investigation of his first book, Voyages au Soudan oriental et dans l’Afrique septentrionale. To what extent did the new, mechanical medium clarify or confound his effort to “explain” parts of Africa still hardly known to Europeans? What does this reveal about the role of photographic authenticity in familiarizing imperial audiences with distant places, during a transitional moment in visual culture?

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Kevin Coleman and Jordan Bear at the University of Toronto for their feedback on earlier versions of this article and their encouragement, to the French Studies Department at Brown University and the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University for the opportunity to present this research at an early stage, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their thoughtful comments. I am likewise grateful to the University of Toronto’s Department of Art for their continued support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, Marbot; Rouillé; Bustarret; Le Guern; Howe; Lacoste; and Aubenas and Roubert.

2 I am grateful to Anne Lacoste for emphasizing this aspect of Trémaux’s life and career with me, and for sharing her dissertation on photography and the development of French archaeology. Her study provides the most comprehensive analysis of Trémaux’s photographic work to date.

3 This treatise on Trémaux’s theory of speciation, “perhaps the first … to treat the species problem as being one of definitions of the species concept” (Wilkins and Nelson 189), was, according to Trémaux, written of in “70 or 80 journals or reviews” and “sold out in two months by the Librairie Hachette” (qtd. in Wilkins and Nelson 181).

4 Photographs appear far less frequently than other varieties of representation in the first two publications Trémaux produced about his travels.

5 Voyages au Soudan oriental et dans l’Afrique septentrionale, the first part in the series, was published by Borrani; the second and third parts, Parallèles des édifices anciens et modernes du continent africain and Exploration archéologique en Asie Mineure were published by Hachette. This system of multiple publishers for books belonging to the same series, and published partially simultaneously, indicates the costliness and riskiness of the venture despite government support.

6 See, for example, Behdad and Gartlan; Osborne; Ryan (Photography and Exploration and Picturing Empire); Schwartz; and Schwartz and Ryan.

7 See, for example, Frizot; Osborne 3; Schwartz 17–19, and Ryan (Photography and Exploration 20). For a neat summary of historical views on the uses of photography in exploration, see Ryan (Photography and Exploration 12–16).

8 Because nineteenth-century publications can vary substantially from one copy to the next, three copies of Voyages were consulted for this paper: The print versions in the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) and Princeton University, and the digitized copy of the Grande Bibliothèque de Toulouse, available online through Rosalis.

9 I am using Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison’s definition of objectivity as, in its ideal form, the “[elimination of] the mediating presence of the observer” (82). On the history of the idea of photographic objectivity in the British context, see Bear and Tucker.

10 See, for example, Braun; Bann; and Gervais and Morel.

11 “Il visita d’abord l’Algérie et la régence de Tunis, qui lui donnèrent un avant-goût des explorations.”

12 “Pendant son séjour au Caire, M. Trémaux appris que Méhémet-Aly envoyait une expédition au Soudan … aussi loin que possible dans les régions inconnues de la Nigritie”; “Personne n’était spécialement attaché dans un intérêt scientifique à cette expedition … il y avait à receuillir des faits qui ne pouvaient manquer d’intéresser la géographie, la science et l’histoire.”

13 “[D]e tous les européens qui avaient entrepris de pénétrer dans les contrées centrales de l’Afrique, il n’en était pas revenue un sur dix.”

14 For an introduction to the principles of land surveying in the nineteenth century, see Dewan 55–63.

15 “Des notes écrites sur les lieux mêmes, et concernant toutes les choses qui m’ont présenté l’intérêt.”

16 For a discussion of the close ties between scientific exploration and imperialism, and the crucial role of travel writing in the process of imperial expansion, see Pratt.

17 Here I am using J.F. Staszak’s definition of exotism as that which “opposes the abnormality of elsewhere with the normality of here” (46).

18 “Le plan de publication de M. Trémaux est sage et judicieux”; “[Trémaux] a rélévé avec soin toutes les positions, il a déterminé avec exactitude la ligne de partage entre les vallées des deux Nils; enfin, il a observé les populations et fait des remarques neuves et d’un véritable intérêt sous le rapport des moeurs et des usages, ainsi que du type physique des races humaines”; “L’auteur saura facilement donner aux dessins encore imparfaits le fini qui leur manque; son expérience et son habilité comme artiste en sont une sûre garantie.”

19 To cite the most recent examples, the French auction houses Tajan and Kohn sold one photograph and four photographs, respectively, in 2013 and 2016; the American photography dealer Hans P. Kraus, Jr. offered an unbound copy of the entire publication at Paris Photo 2016, alongside photographs of Egypt by Greene, Teynard, and others.

20 The number of instalments comprising Voyages remains unclear. Marbot and those who have built on his research, including Rouillé, write that Voyages and Parallèles appeared together, in 35 total instalments, whereas Jean-Yves Tréhin holds that Voyages alone was issued in 35 instalments. An 1858 article published in the Bulletin de la Société de géographie appears to corroborate Tréhin’s number, by suggesting that the two books were issued in at least 26 and 28 instalments, respectively: “M. Trémaux presents the 25th and 26th instalments of his Parallèles des edifices anciens et modernes du continent africain, as well as the 27th and 28th instalments of his Voyages au Soudan oriental” (210). (“M. Trémaux présente ensuite les 25e et 26e livraisons de son Parallèles des édifices anciens et modernes du continent africain, ainsi que les 27e et 28e livraisons de son voyages au Soudan oriental.”) However, an 1862 advertisement in Trémaux’s Voyage en Éthiopie offers the complete publication for 160 francs; given the per-fascicle price of 10 francs, this again suggests a number of instalments closer to 17 or 18 (that is, half of 35)!

21 “Ces ouvrages d’une exécution splendide, mais d’un prix élevé, présentaient, dans une série de planches en partie coloriées, des vues pittoresques … C’était une révélation pour les yeux et pour l’esprit.”

22 “[D]es deserts brûlant … des peuples barbares et indiscilpinés … tels sont les principaux obstacles qui ont resisté aux investigation et ont rendu victimes presque tous les explorateurs”; “la végétation y prend les forms les plus riches et les plus extraordinaires; [la nature] produit des types de végétation si étranges, que la parole seule ne saurait les décrire”; “les moeurs et usages sont, dans un grand nombre de cas, diamétralement opposés aux idées reçues dans notre Europe”; “l’Afrique cache dans son sein de riches contrées qui deviendrait une source de prosperité pour les nations civilisés”.

23 “[D]essiné du sommet des plus hautes montagnes, et par des points de vue les plus remarquables”.

24 “L’ouvrage sera publié en trois séries, dont deux relatives à l’Afrique, contenant: La première, la partie pittoresque et scientifique.”

25 “Vivement intrigué par ce que je voyais, je lessai aller la caravane, et je dirigai mon chameau près du rassemblement : là, du haut de ce grand quadrupède, je fus témoin d’une scène des plus étonnantes”; “Je dois le dire, malgré tout la bizarrerie et l’étrangeté qu’une telle scène avait pour moi, j’ai senti immédiatement tout ce que cette danse exprimait de regrets et de désespoir, et plus encore, une certaine aspiration à vouloir sacrificier dans un suprême effort tout ce qui reste de la vie.”

26 These numbers are based on the three copies of Voyages that I examined. Other (complete) versions may include a different number of photographs or lithographs.

27 “[À] pouvoir représenter des individus des peoples les moins connus.”

28 “Cette femme d’ailleurs a été reproduite très exactement par la photographie.”

29 “Ces reproductions supplémtaires … sont destinées à être contre-collées sur les planches mêmes qu’elles reproduisent ou à leur versos, si l’on désire conserver la photographie comme authenticité de document.”

30 Directly below this title appears the subtitle, with the exact coordinates of the scene: a conspicuous example of the comingling of the romantic and the scientific at play throughout the volume.

31 In the February 1862 issue of the Bulletin de la Société de géographie, Trémaux writes that his images, selected by an editor of Tour du Monde to accompany texts about the Nile River Valley published in issue 48, ran without any mention of their “véritable source” (82). It is interesting to note that Trémaux does not seem disturbed by what today would constitute a grave misuse of proprietary material. He simply mentions the episode, alongside two others of a similar nature, in a footnote.

32 For a comprehensive account of the use of photography versus other media in the nineteenth-century illustrated press, see Gervais.

33 In the nineteenth-century critic Ernest Lacan’s many writings on his voyages-by-photography, Claire Bustarret has equally seen echoes of Romanticism’s “picturesque imaginary” (“l’imaginaire pittoresque”) (qtd. in Caraion 78).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Kate Addleman-Frankel

Kate Addleman-Frankel is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of Toronto, whose research focuses on the intersections between photography and printmaking in the nineteenth century. She is the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.