A Summer Selection at Hans P. Kraus, Jr.

The current exhibit. simply entitled A Summer Selection, at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. on Park Avenue is held together by only the loosest of themes - photographs depicting warm weather scenes - but for all that presents an excellent opportunity to view masterpieces from the earliest days of the medium, many of them by artists who have been unjustly forgotten over the course of time.  These individuals were not only pioneers in mastering the intricacies of salt and albumen printing as a means of expressing artistic vision, but a surprising number established themselves among the world's first travel photographers.  Somehow managing to transport their burdensome equipment to what were in the mid-nineteenth century distant and highly inaccessible locations, they returned with scenes that gave many Europeans their first glimpses of the Mideast.  For us in the twenty-first century, these same images present a view of the exotic worlds that existed before the advent of tourism robbed them of their true character.

One overlooked photographer was François Joseph Édouard de Campigneulles, an artist so obscure that he doesn't even merit a Wikipedia entry.  Born in 1826 in northern France, he must already have attained a high level of proficiency in photography when in 1853 he joined a Grand Tour of the Mideast that included stops in Egypt, Palestine and Syria and from which he returned with 86 calotype negatives.  The images de Campigneulles printed from these upon his return to France were subsequently displayed at an 1859 salon sponsored by the Société Française de Photographie where they must have caused quite a sensation.  At the present exhibit, there's an excellent albumen print showing the ruins of Abu Simbel that's notable for the low perspective from which the photograph was taken.  This causes the image to tilt back dramatically on its axis, though there may already have been some natural curvature to the temple facade.  In addition, there are three three calotype negatives on display.  One is of the Kait Bey Mosque in Cairo, the other a general view of the ruins of Luxor, and the third of the Nubian temple of Sebouah that's remarkably similar to an earlier salt print by Ernest Benecke that's also on display.

Another photographer who exhibited at the 1859 SFP show was the Scotsman James Graham, and he is represented here by a marvelous 1857 salt print panorama depicting the pyramids at Giza that fully captures their grandeur and mystery.  Complementing the work of de Campigneulles and Graham is John Beasley Greene's Sphinx and Pyramids, Necropolis of Memphis, Giza (calotype negative) and Felix Teynard's details of the sculptures at Karnak (both salt print and calotype negative).

In contrast to these Mideastern photographs are several taken by better known photographers much closer to home.  These include Roger Fenton's Salmon Pool at the Sale Wheel River Ribble (albumen print, 1859), the Reverend Calvert Richard Jones's Vigneron, Hotel de Bourgogne (calotype negative, 1840's-1850's), and Alvin Langdon Coburn's The cloud, Bavaria (photogravure, early 1900's).

Perhaps the most intriguing image at this exhibit isn't a photograph at all but a c. 1821 camera lucida drawing by John Frederick William Herschel showing the Lake of Brienz from Iseltwald.  It was, of course, Herschel's facility at camera lucida drawing compared to his own poor drafting skills that eventually led a frustrated Henry Fox Talbot to invent photography.

The exhibit continues through August 18, 2017.