Tombeau de la chrétienne. Vue du côté nord. (Tomb of the Christian Woman. View of the North Side.)
John Beasley Greene (American, born France, 1832–1856)
1855
- Medium
- Albumen print
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image/paper: 22.8 × 28.4 cm (9 × 11 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Gift of the Lunn Gallery
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
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.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
