View of Luxor
John Beasley Greene (American, 1832–1856)
1854
- Medium
- salted paper print from waxed paper negative
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image: 23 x 30.5 cm (9 1/16 x 12 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
- Culture
- America
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Photography
- Credit line
- The A. W. Ellenberger, Sr., Endowment Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
On the first of three trips to Egypt, John Beasley Greene created some 200 photographs. His work rarely documented favorite tourist sites in a conventionally descriptive manner; rather, he concentrated on poetic landscapes and archaeologically significant monuments. In this haunting photograph of Luxor, Greene's ability to depict expansive pictorial space is clearly evident. By surrounding the low, blocklike forms of the site's architecture with large vistas of vacant desert and sky, he emphasized a feeling of isolation and abandonment.
