By the mid-19th century the invention of the new scientific art of photography was beginning to make the world seem a smaller place. Photography’s ability to provide accurate images of far-off lands was quickly appreciated as one of its greatest assets, and possibly nowhere more so than in depicting the monuments of ancient Egypt at that time of ‘Egyptomania’.
Indeed, this was recognised in its earliest days. When the French physicist François Arago introduced the daguerreotype process to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839, he stated that one of the benefits of this new invention was that it would take just a short space of time for a single man to copy the millions of hieroglyphs covering the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, and Karnak – a task that would take legions of draughtsmen 20 years to complete. He also claimed that the images would surpass in fidelity the work of the most capable of painters.
This accuracy or truthfulness was believed to be the cornerstone of the medium by the English photographer Francis Frith (1822-1898), who took some of the earliest images ever made of the monuments of ancient Egypt. His photographs were greeted with awe and wonder by the Victorian public, appealing to both the popular taste for spectacle and the Victorian fervour for knowledge, education, and self-improvement.
