Art Institute of Chicago

Tombeau de la chrétienne. Vue du côté nord. (Tomb of the Christian Woman. View of the North Side.)

John Beasley Greene

Date

1855

Medium

Albumen print

Culture

United States

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Documenting archeological sites in Egypt and Algeria, John Beasly Greene produced fewer than 350 images in a mere four years (he died on his third trip to Egypt at the age of twenty-four). Greene’s twin pursuits of photography and archeology matched the larger 18th- and 19th-century penchant for memorializing lost civilizations through the wonders of modern technology. From the photographer Gustave Le Gray, Greene learned the newly perfected waxed-paper negative (a salted paper print technique), a process that was relatively easy to use in the field and which offered good tonal range as well as detail. In December 1855, he joined a French expedition to Algeria as the official photographer for the excavation of the Tomb of the Christian Woman, located outside Algiers. His pictures of the burial mound are enigmatic, focusing on the overall form of the structure rather than on particular archeological details.

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