Upper Egypt, Hypostyle Hall at Karnak

Monumental view of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak in Upper Egypt, drawn from the Nile campaign of Jean Adolphe Braun (1812-1877), the Alsatian photographer-industrialist who founded the Braun studio at Dornach in the 1850s and turned it into a full industrial photographic enterprise by 1860. The Karnak plates form part of one of the most ambitious nineteenth-century photographic surveys of ancient Egyptian sites, produced in the context of the Egyptian Antiquities Service led by Auguste Mariette, whose excavation programme drew international photographic missions to the Nile valley during the 1860s and 1870s. The colossal papyrus-bundle columns of the hypostyle hall are deliberately framed to convey both archaeological precision and Romantic monumentality, in direct competition with the contemporaneous albumen views of Francis Frith, Félix Bonfils and Maxime Du Camp. By this date, Braun had secured a licence to the Swan carbon transfer process (1864) and become the first European industrialiser of the procedure, employing up to 200 staff at Dornach to supply permanent carbon reproductions to the Louvre, the Vatican and the British Museum. Holdings of the Karnak views are dispersed between the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Library of Congress and the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar (principal Braun studio archive). Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: this Karnak view is reinterpreted as a direct-monochrome charbon print using the non-toxic chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, with pigmented gelatin in Noir Musée or Couleur Profonde tissues transferred onto 640 g/m² cotton paper — the direct contemporary equivalent of the carbon transfer Braun industrialised, preserving the deep tonal range of stone, shadow and grain without the dichromate hazards of the Swan-Braun workflow.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art (CC0)