Ruins of the Temple of Amun-Re, Karnak

Félix-Adrien Bonfils
French, 1831–1885
Ruins of the Temple of Amun-Re, Karnak, about 1867
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
21.7 x 28.3 cm (8 ½ x 11 ⅛ in.) Sheet
24.2 x 31.7 cm (9 ½ x 12 ½ in.) Mount
Janos Scholz Collection, 1984.048.017.C

Excerpt below from our new book A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame, v.II.

Maxime Du Camp and his contemporaries, including Auguste Salzmann, Félix Teynard and John Besley Greene, were photographic pioneers, and the allure of their work sparked a thriving interest in the Middle East. Other European commercial photographers followed them in specializing on the region. Francis Frith, Félix Bonfils and others produced fascinating images in such numbers and variety that they influenced the knowledge and perception of these countries in Western Europe. Their enterprise typifies the rapid growth of international photography studios of the era.

Félix Bonfils was a cabinetmaker’s son, born at Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in the Languedoc region of southern France. He followed his father in an artisan’s career, learning the craft of bookbinding. In 1857 he married Marie-Lydie Cabanis and embarked on the life of a professional craftsman. Bonfils fulfilled his national service in 1860 as an infantryman in General d’Hautpoul’s campaign to subdue factional fighting in Lebanon. He may have first encountered photography during this expedition, for after returning to France in 1864 he opened a studio in the nearby town of Alès. Within a few years, Bonfils’s young son Adrien fell ill, perhaps with consumption, and he believed that the boy’s health would benefit from the dry desert environment he had known in the Levant.

In 1867, Bonfils took his wife and six-year-old son to Beirut. The city was then the capital of Mount Lebanon, and held jurisdiction over an autonomous Syrian province in the Ottoman Empire. The state was prosperous and peaceful under the administration of a Catholic executive, approved by both Turkish and French governments. Bonfils opened a photography studio in Beirut, and set out to compile a sweeping catalogue of images representing Middle Eastern subjects to appeal to tourists and customers back in France. His initial concentration on architecture may reflect the limits of his technical expertise. Bonfils traveled through the Near East, Egypt and Greece collecting negatives with several cameras in different formats. In December 1871, when the photographer described his activity to the Société Française de Photographie, he had 590 original negatives, most of which were stereographs, and a stock of some 15,000 albumen prints. Over the following generation, hundreds of expatriate and local photographers established themselves in the Middle East to cater chiefly to Western customers, including Antonio Beato at Luxor, Hippolyte Arnoux at Suez, and Pascal Sebah in Istanbul.

Bonfils’s innovation was to use mail order to serve a new, international market for his photographs. In 1872 he contracted with Charles Taber & Company to distribute his work in the United States. In the worldly and affluent whaling capital of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Taber published a catalogue of Bonfils’s photographs, listing 367 available subjects, as well as 158 stereocard views. This distribution system became so successful that by the mid-1870s Maison Bonfils had also opened shops in Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, and at Alès in France for the trade of photographs produced in Beirut. In 1876, Maison Bonfils began publishing a catalogue for European customers. This list included portraits and genre photographs of Near Eastern subjects. The Bonfils catalogue became a particularly valuable source for European and American universities, which acquired Bonfils’s photographs as representational documents for historical and anthropological study.

Bonfils’s photographs of the ruins of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak were popular for their evocation of ancient Egypt. They capture the incredible scale of the complex, suggesting the human ingenuity and effort that built it, and the time and geological events that toppled it. This enormous temple in the precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak was constructed in the 19th Egyptian Dynasty (about 1290–1224 BCE). Standing behind the second pylon of the Temple of Amun, it consisted of a forest of huge stone columns occupying 50,000 square feet (4,645 square meters). Its 134 colossal piers were arranged in 16 rows; most of them were about 50 feet (15 m) tall, surmounted by closed capitals. Two center rows were taller than the 122 columns surrounding them, rising to a height of about 69 feet (21 m). They supported a clerestory that ran the length of the central aisle, providing a row of small windows on either side that admitted soft illumination. The interior architectural decoration of the hall suggested the foliage along the edge of the Nile. The tall central columns were shaped like papyrus plants, which flared into flowering crowns at the top, like stalks blooming in the sunshine. Along the cool, shadowy floor of the long hall stood many statues depicting gods and kings. The outside walls of the temple were carved with images of the military exploits of Seti I and Ramesses II in Syria and Palestine. Inside the building, the walls were decorated with scenes of religious ritual, in which the king is seen interacting with different gods. Processional images may suggest that pharaonic coronation ceremonies were performed there.

When Bonfils photographed at Karnak, many of the exterior columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall had fallen, and were buried to half their height in sand and rubble. To emphasize this chaos, the photographer created an unstable composition, placing a nearly vertical standing column just off center. The disarray draws the eye into the image, with its fascinating voids and hieroglyphic details carved into the stone. Deeper in the middle ground, the ruins of the taller clerestory can be seen. This is accentuated by a turbaned figure sitting in a triangle of light; that shape is repeated in reverse on the other side of the column leaning on a diagonal—a right triangle on its apex. Bonfils's photograph captures the play of light on the chips and bumps on the surface of stone, the geometry of the enormous blocks, collapsed into deep piles and partially covered in sand. The spatial and visual complexity of this image seems chaotic, and gives a sense of the entropy imposed by time and natural forces. This image challenges the viewer to consider the great cultural achievements of ancient Egypt, their disintegration, and the passage of millenia. 

During the early 1870s, Maison Bonfils continued to expand its stock, producing figural subjects to supplement its architectural studies and travel views. The firm published images of the local and regional costumes of the Middle East, perhaps in response to the Braun Compagnie’s popular European costume photographs. Lydie Cabanis Bonfils is credited with producing these photographs of ethnic and religious costumes. It was she who worked with Muslim women inside and outside the studio, because of Islamic proscriptions against men photographing women.  Lydie Bonfils’s interests were broad, and the studio catalogue included Turkish, Syrian, Palestinian and Egyptian costumes and subjects, as well as wedding scenes. Later, presumably through her initiative, the studio produced costume tableaux representing stories from the Bible. The photographers’ son, Adrien Bonfils, grew up in the studio, and he too became a skilled photographer, assisting his mother as a portraitist and in the field. He also followed his father into the French military as a young man, rising in the ranks of a cavalry regiment in Algeria.

Late in the 1870s, Maison Bonfils began publication of Souvenirs d’Orient, prints from some of its most popular images gathered in folios. Ultimately, five deluxe volumes contained 250 photographs, geographically organized with explanatory texts in French, English and German. This publication was awarded a medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, the year Félix Bonfils retired from the studio. The family returned to France, where in 1880 the photographer established a collotype printshop at Alès, intending to make the firm’s most popular images available in this more affordable medium. The rarity of these prints, however, suggest that the enterprise was short-lived.