Vues en Egypte,

A landmark in the history of the photobook, illustrated with 125 salt prints. This famous volume is renowned for its stark images, a radical departure from the Romantic model.

Du Camp and his travelling companion, the novelist Gustave Flaubert, left France at the end of October 1849 on an archaeological mission on behalf of the French Ministry of Education. Before leaving Du Camp had been instructed in Gustave Le Gray's waxed-paper process for making photographic images, and returning home some eighteen months later he had some 220 negatives.

The expedition followed the standard itinerary of the day, going up-river from one ancient site to another, before moving across to Palestine, they visited numerous sites including Karnak, Thebes, Luxor, Denderah, Baalbec, Jerusalem, etc. It is interesting to note that David Roberts Made a similar journey in the 1840s when producing his Holy Land and Syria.

Although the journey is familiar, Du Camp's are not. They are completely new. 'Faced with a scene before his camera, Du Camp – neither trained artist nor professional photographer – seems to have disregarded any preconceived Romantic accretions attaching to his subject, and by intuition discovered a gritty, elevational reality. His imagery demonstrates a conspicuously rigourous point of view for a neophyte photographer, unfettered and remarkably consistent' (Parr and Badger).

All this was in keeping with the scientific nature of the mission. In order to provide a human scale for the images, Du Camp's Nubian boatman, Hadji Ismael, was posed alongside many of the ruins; thus adding to the visual consistency of the work. Du Camp not only recorded architecture but also the land itself, a careful record of the relationship between sky and land, water and desert, the contours and rhythms of the rocks. When he returned to France in 1851 he gave his paper negatives to Blanquart-Evrard who had just established his manufacturing facility at Lille. It is not known how many copies were produced, possibly as many as one hundred. Blanquart-Evrard was a perfectionist in his manufacture and the published views are of a uniform, unfaded steely-grey, and today the photographs look virtually the same as when first made.

The photographs produced are remarkable, completely unromantic but nevertheless finding a beauty in their brutality. A direct expression of what caught his eye, a 'vision filled with understated drama and tension among form, space, and light' (Truthful Lens). Not so much a poetic celebration of the grandeur of Ancient Egypt, but a record of the ensuing neglect. Studies of travels constitute one of the basic staples of early photographic books, reflecting the tastes of early adopters of the new medium, and Du Camp's work was highly influential in establishing a template for such works that ran through to the twentieth century.

This was Du Camp's sole photographic work. Flaubert's input into the work is not known, but it seems he was more interested in the pleasures of the flesh than in ancient ruins.