Brown_Egyptian_Voyages_Gustave_Flaubert_Maxime.pdf (2.55 MB)
Download fileEgyptian voyages: Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and Fouad Elkoury
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 PhotographyVolume
38Issue
2Pages
161 - 172Citation
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 TitlesVersion
- 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
2014-01-03Publication date
2014Notes
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/10.1080/03087298.2014.890391ISSN
0308-7298Publisher version
Language
- en