Met Museum: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey

For those with an interest in early photography the current exhibit at the Met Museum, The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey, is absolutely a "must see." Barely three years after the invention of the problematic daguerreotype process, Girault set off to record the architecture of the eastern Mediterranean, a subject that had always been of interest to him.  His journey lasted three years at the end of which time he returned to France with more than 900 photographs made under the most trying conditions imaginable.  Of those, some 120 are included in this exhibit along with a selection of the photographer's paintings and graphic works.

Though I've read several histories of early photography, I had not been familiar with the work of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey prior to viewing this exhibit.  That's not entirely surprising since Girault's daguerreotypes were only discovered in the 1920's, some thirty years after his death, in a storeroom on his estate and did not become widely known to the public until after the turn of the twenty-first century when they were put on sale by the current owners of his estate.  The Met exhibit is actually the first devoted to Girault to be held in the United States.

The quality of the daguerreotypes on display is nothing short of amazing.  Though Giraud was the first, there were other photographers who were also pioneering travel photography at approximately the same time and in the same locations as Girault.  The Egyptologist John Beasely Greene, for example, completed an extensive photographic record during his field trips to North Africa beginning in 1854.  Many of the architectural scenes he photographed were eerily similar to those captured by Girault.  Greene, however, was not working with daguerreotypes but with the rival process unveiled by Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, the same year Daguerre announced his own invention.  As Talbot's process allowed for an unlimited number of prints to be made from a single negative, it offered an incredible advantage over the daguerreotype, which it soon supplanted, and became the basis of photographic practice until the arrival of digital imaging in the late twentieth century.  But in the early days of photography there was a great drawback inherent in Talbot's process.  Salt prints made from calotype negatives were not nearly as sharp as daguerreotypes.  Seen today, these salt prints, even those made by master photographers, invariably appear "fuzzy" and charmingly old fashioned.  Daguerreotypes, on the other hand, possessed from the very beginning a sharpness and tonal range that modern photographs are hard put to match.  As a result, Greene's photographs, though made a dozen years after Girault's, seem downright primitive in comparison to the latter.

In viewing Girault's daguerreotypes it's important to remember that he did not think of his photographs as ends in themselves.  Instead, Girault used the daguerreotypes for reference in creating other works of art.  He was an accomplished painter and graphic artist who used his photographs at the basis for paintings and lithographs.  It was most likely for this reason that he used non-standard size plates and often took a number of photos of the same subject from different points of view.  For example, Girault took several different views of the minaret and dome of Khayrbak Mosque in Cairo.  His purpose does not become clear until one looks at the excellent lithograph of the same scene that he derived from them.  In like manner, Girault's watercolor of the Ramesseum in Thebes follows closely his daguerreotype of the same subject.

Girault, an intensely private person, did not see himself as primarily a photographer but rather as a scholarly expert on Mideast architecture.  Accordingly, he never attempted to exhibit his daguerreotypes during his lifetime.  One suspects he may have been embarrassed to acknowledge that he used them as sources for his artwork and feared that they may have cast doubt on the originality of the paintings and lithographs.  It's impossible to know then what he actually thought of the photographic medium.  Did he see it as an art form in itself or only as a mechanical means of recording a given scene?  One can only speculate on the importance he attached to the invaluable historical record he created.  Adding poignancy to his daguerreotypes is the unhappy realization that some of the architecture he photographed, such as the Umayyad Mosque in Syria, no longer exists, or else has been so altered that it is no longer recognizable.

The Met deserves a great deal of credit for the presentation it has created for this exhibit.  Daguerreotypes are notoriously difficult to view due to the mirrorlike surface of the plate on which the image has been fixed.  Seen from an angle, the photograph seems to vanish altogether.  Much care has been put into the proper lighting that enables the viewer to see the image as intended.  Even so, it is probably better to plan one's visit for a time when the museum is not overcrowded so that one can stand directly before the daguerreotype and view it properly.

The exhibit continues through May 12, 2019.