“Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey”

Beginning in the first half of the 19th-century, interest in the Middle East, as well as in the ancient civilizations that once flourished there, became something of craze in Europe—one that, among other things, birthed an entire genre of paintings depicting Arab bazaars and the like. Referred today as Orientalism, the style has been increasingly disparaged in recent decades for embodying colonialism’s patronizing view of non-Europeans as an exotic—and distinctly inferior—other. Europeans visitors to the region towing cameras—then a nascent technology—were no less culpable, though some their efforts have proven to be durable in their aesthetic appeal. Such was the case for the work of Girault de Prangey (1804–1892), an artist, architectural historian, archaeologist and daguerreotypist, who spent three years capturing locales throughout Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Jerusalem between 1842 and 1845. During his journeys, he created some 1,000 plates, an amazing feat at a time when photography was a cumbersome practice. De Prangey had a particular eye for ruins—Egyptian, Roman and Greek—and his images of them were among the first ever taken. This show revisits his achievements with 120 examples of his daguerreotypes, along with his watercolors, paintings and illustrations.