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Egyptian voyages: Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and Fouad Elkoury

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-08-10, 14:08 authored by Kathryn BrownKathryn Brown
This article analyses a suite of black-and-white photographs entitled Egyptian Suite produced by the Franco-Lebanese photographer Fouad Elkoury between 1985 and 1990 and published in book format in 1999. This work retraces the journey to Egypt undertaken by Gustave Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp in 1849–50 and calls into question the colonialist assumptions that underpin their textual and photographic records. Through a close reading of individual images, it is argued that Egyptian Suite stages an interplay between authorial control and the randomness of mechanical recording in a way that undermines the colonialist viewpoint of Flaubert and Du Camp’s image of the ‘Orient’. In his visual interrogation of the idea of Egypt advanced in this nineteenth-century account, Elkoury also poses questions about the ontology of photography and reflects on ways in which photography may be conceptualised as an art form.

History

School

  • The Arts, English and Drama

Department

  • Arts

Published in

History of Photography

Volume

38

Issue

2

Pages

161 - 172

Citation

BROWN, K., 2014. Egyptian Voyages: Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and Fouad Elkoury. History of Photography, 38(2), pp. 161-172.

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-01-03

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in History of Photography on 22nd May 2014, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2014.890391

ISSN

0308-7298

Language

  • en