Folio. 12 pp., 11 engraved plates, publisher’s original wrappers, lightly rubbed at spine, foxing to text pages, otherwise plates in very good condition, Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres, Paris, 1855.

Synopsis

John B. Greene was an American archaeologist based in Paris where he was a member of the Société Française de Photographie and a pupil of Gustave le Gray. He made two expedition to Egypt and Nubia between 1853 and 1855, to photograph the land and document the monument and their inscriptions, he took over two hundred photographs. In 1855 he published his photographs and he died in Egypt the following year perhaps of tuberculosis, his negatives were given to his friend, fellow Egyptologist and photographer Théodule Devéria. Green’s photographs are abstract deserts landscape of exquisite subtlety from a age consumed by the precision with which photography transliterates reality.