Photographs from the Levant taken by the Bonfils Family of
photographers between 1867 and 1912.
Many of
the pictures are marked either A. Bonfils, Collection des vues d'Orient, A.
Bonfils, Beyrouth, Syrie. or A. Bonfils, Collection des vues d'Orient,
A. Guiragossian, Successeur de L. Bonfils, Beyrouth, Syrie. The
"L" was Lydie Bonfils, mother of "A" Adrien Bonfils. It was
Adrien who embarked on he ambitious project of photographing all of that Levant
he saw being transformed by railways, roads and tourism. And it was Lydie, who
on leaving the business to Guiragossian, swore never to touch an egg again in
her life. Eggs, in vast numbers, were one of the main ingredients in their
glass plate based photographic business aimed at the tourist industry of the
time.
(Taken from Aramco World Magazine,
November-December 1983)
Written by Will H. Rockett
Photographed by Felix, Adrien and Lydie Bonfils
Photographs courtesy
Harvard Semitic Museum
The
Arabic phrase musawwir shamsi - one who makes pictures by the sun is probably
the earliest Arabic term for photographer, and tradition has it that scholars,
in considering Islamic prohibitions against graven images, decided photographs
merely recorded the shadows cast by God's sunlight.
There was,
nevertheless, opposition to photography among most religious groups in the
Middle East, and, as a result, visual records of peoples, monuments and scenes
of the region have been usually made and preserved throughout history by
foreigners.
Among the best examples
of this are the famous Roberts Prints, by 19th-century British artist David
Roberts (See Aramco World, March-April 1970). Another earlier example is the
encydopedic record made by some 2,000 European artists, draftsmen and skilled
engravers who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte's army on its 1798 Egyptian
campaign and helped to produce the 20-volume Description de l'Egypte (See
Aramco World, March-April 1976). A monumental work, Description incorporated
generally excellent drawings of the ruins and monuments of Egypt.
Such illustrations,
unfortunately, were not always as accurate as they might have been, since they
were subject to change as they went from the artists on the spot to engravers and
publishers; engravers of that period tended to "translate"
illustrations as they made plates for publication. Until rotogravure printing
came along, this was a process that would affect all such illustrations - as
Dr. Carney Gavin, curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum (HSM), made dear in
this example of 19th-century illustrations: "An Irish nobleman made a
sketch of Beirut harbor in 1836. He then gave it to an artist at the Royal
Academy, who prettied it up. It was then passed on to a German engraver, who in
turn gave it to John Murray of Albemarle Street, a publisher. In the end, what
the public saw wasn't at all bad; but it was really a
drawing-by-committee."
Then, in 1839,
Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre ushered in the age of photography with a public announcement
of the first practical photographic process - the daguerreotype - and within
weeks, reportedly, so-called "Excursions Daguerriennes" began
recording the sights of the East for an avid European audience.
For years before that,
Western interest in the Middle East had been whetted by the then - widespread
knowledge of the Bible, and by such travel literature as Alexander William
Kinglake's Eothen, and William Makepeace Thackeray's Notes of a journey from
Cornhill to Grand Cairo, published under the pseudonym "Titmarsh" As
a result, hardy - and wealthy - souls had begun to add Egypt and the Holy Land
to their "Grand Tour" itineraries, and they in turn began to publish
reminiscences and sketches that stimulated still more interest.
Now,
with photography, travelers could begin to capture such exotica with greater
fidelity than was possible with pen and ink - though even the daguerreotype had
limitations. A one-shot affair, the daguerreotype image was fixed forever upon
a metal plate, and could not be readily reproduced. Engravers, therefore, still
had to be brought in - initially to copy the work on a separate printing plate,
later to engrave lines directly onto the photographic plate itself.
In 1841, the invention
of the paper negative, or "calotype," by William Fox Talbot permitted
the reproduction of multiple images from one original, but Daguerre's method
which offered a sharper, more durable image, held sway among photographers
until Frederick Scott Archer introduced a process using glass negatives in
1851. Prints could be made from these negatives, and then "tipped"
onto the pages oft ravel books-i.e. pasted in by hand, in effect making each
copy an album of original photographs.
Most of the earliest
European photographers of the Middle East - Horace Vernet, Joly de Lotbiniere
and others -were daguerreotypists, but Maxime Du Camp, who accompanied Flaubert
on the poet's 1849-51 excursion to the Middle East, got excellent results with
paper negatives, and Francis Frith, photographer and publisher, secured a firm
place in the history of photography using glass negatives. As an Athenaeum
critic wrote in 1858, "Mr. Frith, who makes light of everything, brings us
the Sun's opinion of Egypt, which is better than Champollion's... Eothen's or
Titmarsh's"
As for Frith, he deemed
himself an artist in league with the sun, writing, "The Sun himself
condescends to signify (the image), and pop it bodily into the box which your
artist provided". And at one point he gleefully recounted the envy of a
French artist he encountered at MedinetHabu:
When, in a few minutes,
I had possessed myself of more accuracy than his labor of perhaps days would
yield, he exclaimed with politeness-and (let us hope) with no dash of
bitterness, nor scornfulnes, nor envy - 'Ah, Monsieur! que wus etes vite,
vite!'
Acceptance of
photography as a fine art was erratic, but it did catch on as a popular art.
The Times of London proclaimed that Frith's photographs "carry us far
beyond anything that is in the power of the most accomplished artist to
transfer to his canvas," and Queen Victoria compiled 110 albums of
photographs. Frith, meanwhile, had turned book publisher, and in addition to
various portfolios and volumes of his pictures, brought out a special Queen's
Bible in 1862-3. It featured 20 photographic views from his collection, and
sold in a limited edition for 50 guineas, a very considerable sum at that time.
The British Journal of Photography said Frith's books were "got up in a
style that renders them fit ornament for any drawing room", and since the
public agreed, Frith's enterprises prospered.
At the root of this
popularity was the "awe and wonder with which Victorian viewers greeted
Frith's startlingly truthful photographs of the most ancient and historic lands
known to them", as historian Julia van Haaften wrote in an edition of
Frith's Egyptian photographs. But there was another element too: the need for
travelers to bring back souvenirs.
Toward the end of the
19th century, middle class Europeans were beginning to travel in such great
numbers that some observers had begun to object. Journalist William Howard
Russell, for example, protested in The Times that tourists "...crowd the
sites which ought to be approached in reverential silence...
Like
their counterparts today, these travelers also demanded keepsakes - and thought
that they had a right to them. A Father Geramb, for example, reportedly told
Muhammad Ali the ruler of Egypt in 1833, that "it would hardly be
respectable, on one's return from Egypt, to present oneself in Europe without a
mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other" Thus, when some
governments in the Middle East began to crack down on such looting,
daguerreotypes and other forms of photography offered travelers an attractive
alternative - particularly when they were made and marketed by
"Bonfils".
Bonfils was by no means
the only good photographer of the period; between the time Daguerre introduced
his process and the time Bonfils began to take and market photographs, some 200
known photographers were in business - some of them quite good. In Luxor, for
example, prints by a man named Beato were on sale, and in Istanbul prints by a
photographer named Sebah could be sent home rolled up in metal tubes. But few
of them compared to the photography produced by the Bonfils farnily-as Gratien
Charvet, founderof the Societe Saentifique et Litteraire in Ales, France, would
vehemently argue.
The man who wrote the introduction to the Bonfils'
1878 collection of photographs, Souvenirs d'Orient, Charvet said
enthusiastically that the "collection of photographs of the Orient's
principal sites - initiated, executed and completed by Monsieur F. Bonfils with
unequaled perseverance - should be regarded as one of the most considerable
achievements - picturesque, artistic and scientific - of our epoch".
Despite this, the
Bonfils family had virtually vanished from history by the time that Father
Gavin and his staff began to dig into the family history. "All we know of
Bonfils", said photographic historian Beaumont Newhall, in answer to
Gavin's inquiries, "is that he was a genius".
As recently as two
years ago, Gavin wrote in the journal Nineteenth Century: "No one
remembers the photographers Bonfils - not even the Sub-Prefect M. Maurice
Bonfils - not even the staff of the Evangelical Library in nearby Saint
Hippo-Iyte dedicated to collecting biographies of local sons - not even the
region's oldest printers and photographers. And at the time of Felix Bonfils',
death in 1885, no obituary nor even notice was published in local journals".
Since then, however,
Dr. Gavin and his staff have learned a lot about the Bonfils family. In fact,
it was two of Dr. Gavin's volunteers - Al and Phyllis Weisman - who first
turned up evidence that there was more than one Bonfils photographer: in a New
Hampshire barn, they came across the effects of a missionary who had
photographic prints signed, "A. Bonfils". "Until then", Dr.
Gavin said, "we had found only 'F. Bonfils'".
"They were an
incredible family", said Dr. Gavin. They were descendants of Theodore, the
emperor of Abysinia, and are related through marriage to the actor Peter
Ustinov. One of them, Adrien, was alternately a sergeant brigadier of the
Chasseurs d'Afrique, a photographer in his father's studio and a Beirut
hotelier. The father, Felix, was the son of a wood-lathe worker, but built up a
photographic business with connections in Cairo, Alexandr. ia, Paris and
London, as well as Beirut and Ales, the Bonfils home in France. And when Lydie
Bonfils, the third photographer, left Beirut in 1916, it was as an evacuee on
the deck of the U.S.S. DesMoines.
Little of that was
known at first, but bit by bit over the last 12 years, research by Dr. Gavin
and his staff has pieced the story together. It is a story of affection, piety
and devotion - to each other and to their adopted homeland, Lebanon - and it
begins in the small French town of Ales about 1860 when the family Bonfils set
of for Beirut one after the other.
The first to go was
Felix Bonfils. Born in 1831, Felix took up the trade of bookbinder, but in 1860
joined General d'Hautpoul's expedition to the Levant to end an outbreak of
factional fighting. Evidence suggests that Felix became a photographer sometime
after his return from Lebanon, possibly as an amateur. Then, however, when his
son Adrien fell ill, Felix remembered the cool green hills around Beirut and
sent him there to recover. With him went Felix's wife Lydie Bonfils, and when
she returned, apparently as enthusiastic about the Middle East as Felix had
been, they decided to return en famille.
Since Felix was by then
working in Ales as a printer, producing heliogravures - a photographic process
invented by Abel Niepce de St. Victor, cousin of the man frequently called
"the father of photography", Joseph Nicephore Niepce - he decided to
try and support himself in Lebanon by taking up the trade of la photographie.
Though it may seem like an odd decision, it turned out well; in 1867, the
Bonfils family arrived in Beirut and four years later Felix reported the
results of what must have been staggering labor: 15,000 prints of Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, and Greece, and 9,000 stereoscopicviews.
Those negatives were
made on glass plates, coated with a collodion solution sensitized with silver
nitrate. The plates had to be prepared on the spot-usually in a tent in the
Middle East, although Francis Frith occasionally used cool tombs and temples as
well. Then they were exposed and developed immediately afterwards. Prints could
be made later, quite literally by sunlight: paper impregnated with a silver
salt solution was stretched against the glass plate in a frame, and then
exposed out of doors under direct sunlight.
Though
the prints, golden in tone, were beautiful, the photographers had to use
eggwhite, or albumen, as a binding agent on the paper and this eventually
became unpleasant since the Bonfils family apparently prepared the egg-white
themselves. Lydie Bonfils in 1917 was heard to mutter, "I never want to
smell another egg again", and supposedly forbade them at her breakfast
table thereafter.
The process could also
be dangerous- particularly in the hot climate of the Middle East. As Frith
wrote, "When (at the Second Cataract, one thousand miles from the mouth of
the Nile, with the thermometer at 110 degrees in my tent) the collodion actually
boiled when poured upon the glass plate, I almost despaired of success".
The second Bonfils
photographer was Felix's son, Adrien. Born at Ales in 1861, Adrien was six when
the family moved permanently to Beirut Like his father he did military service
- as a brigadier in a cavalry regiment in Algeria - but on the death of Felix
in 1885, he returned to Beirut to take over the family business, and was soon
setting off on new photographic expeditions and launching publishing projects
that easily matched Frith's in quality and quantity.
It was Adrien to whom a
London agent named Mansell was referring when he wrote, in 1892, to a certain
David Gordon Lyon, "I hear from Bonfils that he has made an addition of
150 views to his Egyptian series - shall send these to you when I receive
them".
Adrien Bonfils outside the family's Beirut studio, from
which flowered a prolific output of meticulously processed prints.
This, says Dr. Gavin's
staff, seems to be the first reference to what was becoming the Bonfils collection
and to the man who took it upon himself to acquire the photographs: Professor
Lyon, the first curator of a new museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the
Harvard Semitic Museum. Founded in 1899 - with donations from Jacob Henry
Schiff of the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company- HSM,
according to its charter, was intended to provide "a thorough study and a
better knowledge of Semitic history and civilization, so that the world shall
better understand and acknowledge the debt it owes to the Semitic people".
To that end, Lyon began
to collect artifacts from the Middle East, particularly the Bonfils
photographs. It is not known whether he realized haw valuable they would be in
archeology, but it's unlikely. It is only now, Gavin says, that researchers are
coming to realize the value of photographs. Librarians have learned to pay
careful attention to handwritten notes and diaries, as well as to books and
manuscripts. Curators carefully tend sketch pads and ok engravings as 'works of
art' But photographs... have until recently remained forgotten".
Nevertheless, Dr. Gavin
says, Lyon did work hard at collecting Bonfils photographs. "Lyon's
interest was encyclopedic; one can infer from the Mansell note that he's told
the agent he wants all the photographs". Furthermore, he nearly succeeded;
despite occasional difficulties with U.S. Customs, he secured nearly half of
what was available and went on to catalog them, giving them English titles and
museum code numbers.
This is known, because
Adrien himself had issued three catalogs, organizing 1,684 photographs into
nine groups covering Lower and Upper Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia and
Greece. In addition, there was a series of 25 "panoramas" consisting
of two or more separate pictures which, when placed side by side, showed broad
cityscapes of such Eastern centers as Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem,
Damascus and, of course, Beirut. The series was rounded out by a selection of
Egyptian views and costumes - including desert scenes and a wedding and a collection
of scenes and costumes of Palestine and Syria
As
these catalogs suggest, Adrien's output was prolific. But in addition to this
expansion of his father's business, he was also experimenting with mechanically
colored prints - they were done in Zurich, by the photochromie process - and
made four trips to Philadelphia to explore publication opportunities, including
a proposed New Testament Illustrated with Photographs, and a book on the
journeys of St. Paul.
Meanwhile, the Bonfils
family had added a third photographer to its roster: Lydie Bonfils, a fact that
emerged when the HSM staff found a reference by an English clergyman named
Manning, in his 1874 volume, Palestine lllustrated by Pen and Pencil, to photographers
whose prints he used in preparing his own sketches. Among them was "Madame
Bonfils of Beyrout".
Lydie, it seems, had
decided that mixing albumen for her husband and son was not enough, and
apparently got involved in portraits and costume studies in the Beirut studios;
descendants, in fact, have confirmed that she worked in the family's Beirut
studio for some time after her son abandoned the trade in the early 1900s.
There is evidence too that she ranged more widely. In Brummana, a member of the
Maksad family told of "Lady Bonfils" stopping a Druze shaikh to pose
for her one morning, just after the outbreak of the First World War. And her
own photo, according to Nitza Rosovsky, an historian of old Jerusalem, appears
in one of the prints in the Harvard cache; she is standing on the pyramid at
Giza.
Thus Lydie, despite a
growing distaste for eggs, apparently continued the business after Adrien had
begun to turn his attention to a proposed medical spa in the mountains of
Lebanon - even issuing her own catalog until the First World War forced her
removal from Beirut and brought an end to the prolific photographic output of
this remarkable family.
By then, however, the
work of the Bonfils family was not only extensive, but of an unparalleled
quality. It is, in fact, an incomparable legacy to both history and art - for
reasons that Dr. Gavin explains in detail in The Images of the East
For one
thing, writes Gavin, "Bonfils prints were meticulously processed
originally." Although only 18 glass negatives are known to have survived
(the rest were washed clean to make fresh negatives, lost in troubled Beirut,
even smashed to provide lens makers with fresh "ground glass" during
a shortage in the 1950s), the original prints are virtually grain-free, thanks
to the albumen emulsion and the fact that they were made directly from contact
with the plates. Consequently, writes Dr. Gavin, the prints “can often yield
invaluable visual data to modern image enhancement techniques"
In addition, the
Bonfils subjects "were selected in a consciously encyclopedic spirit that
has preserved a vast range of data for the geographical, ethnographic,
biblical, archeological, architectural and historical studies that Bonfils
intended to promote"
This was certainly true
of Adrien as his introduction of the unpublished photographically illustrated
Bible proves:
Twenty centuries have
passed without changing the decor and physiognomy of this land unique among
all; but let us hasten if we wish to enjoy the sight. Progress, the great
trifler, will have swiftly brought about the destruction of what time itself
has respected... Already in the ancient Plain of Sharon... The immortal road to
Damascus has become no more than a... railway!
To Adrien, his family's
duty was quite clear: . . . before progress has completely done its destructive
job, before this present which is still the past has forever disappeared, we
have tried to speak, to fix and immobilize it in a series of photographicviews.
Such foresight at that
time is amazing since very few of the photographers of that period nor their
subjects were conservators. Mardik Berberian of Amman, son of one of the first
Armenian photographers in Damascus told Dr. Gavin that many pictures were lost
because no one cared for them:
"We loved those
pictures . . . but no one was interested then. Those who had sat for portraits
had died; Amman was shown as a mere village; all the places we had photographed
have changed so much we couldn't imagine anyone ordering a new print from those
old negatives".
Even today such
attitudes are not uncommon. "Everywhere in the world people are unaware
they have such photographs,' said Gavin. "Most people don't realize that
they've captured that moment... that will never come again"
The Bonfils family,
fortunately, did realize what they had - and kept them. Thus their photographs
include shots taken decades apart, another reason why the Bonfils collection is
incomparable. Indeed, Dr. Gavin wrote, ''Bonfils' activity spanned the period
when the most profound changes began to alter Eastern landscapes and ways of
life irretrievably, so that the family was consciously able to record scenes
unchanged for millennia as well as (towards the end of Adrien's activity) the
advent of occidental technology and mores"
The Bonfils' records
have practical as well as historical value. Some years ago, for instance, at an
Oxford conference, Subhe Qassem, Dean of Science at the University of Jordan,
told Dr. Gavin he could "identify virtually every tree in the pictures
taken around Jaffa. That means I can tell you how these people are living and
how the agricultural year is going for them" Such are the things we can
learn today about our past from photographs that might have been scrapped in
the normal course of the photographers' career.
At that same
conference, a geologist named Finzi said that archeologists could make more of
a contribution to modern science if they could "tell us how man has lived
with the soil through the centuries" Dr. Gavin showed his photographs of
Jordan in the last century to Finzi and Finzi said such a photographic record
could revolutionize geology and agronomy. "I can see where the topsoil is
in the picture, and if we can tell how it's moving, then we can plan for the
nutrition of the future". This approach - geomorphology - may still be
highly theoretical, but the work of the new photo-archeologists like Dr. Gavin
may well make it a reality.
No one is making
greater use of the photographs than the archeologists themselves. Experts have
used Bonfils photographs to help preserve facades and an arch at Petra.
"The arch," noted HSM's photographic historian Elizabeth Carella,
Uhad collapsed long ago. Our photographs show the arch with such clarity, stone
by stone, that it is possible to reconstruct it".
Another example had to
do with a Bonfils panorama of the Roman forum of Philadelphia, now engulfed by
Amman's business district, but still remarkably well preserved when Bonfils
took the photograph. Still other photos promise help in restoring the interiors
of stately old Damascene palaces, long forgotten by Damascenes themselves.
American Indians used
to call photographers "soul-catchers," because they believed a part
of their spirit was lost when they were photographed. But today the reverse is
true: archeological photography is helping the Middle East to recover the
spirit of the past.
This is particularly
true regarding the men and women of the past whose lives, skills, and character
the Bonfils photographs capture with love and respect. “The Bonfils enjoyed a
very special rapport with their sitters,” says Dr. Gavin - and the photographs
do seem to suggest a close relationship between photographer and subject, one
reason, perhaps, why the portraits have a special power.
In the Bonfils photos,
the landscapes, the city capes and the ancient ruins are bathed in the golden
light good memories bring to bear on places still dear to us in dreams. But it
is the human face that most clearly speaks to us in these photographs - faces
of dignity, of grace, of serenity. Such portraits - an old man with a
mansaf for beating mattress stuffing
into freshnes; a woman posed with a cigarette; a man with great mustache
bedecked in the full gear of the tourist-guiding Dragoman, a girl of Bethlehem,
dressed in her best embroidery - are, along with the landscapes and cityscape,
indeed a legacy of light.
Will H. Rockett, is
An associate professor at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, and editor of its
journal Endeavors.