John Beasley Greene’s photography project, The Nile, undertaken during his expeditions to Egypt between 1853 and 1854, is an early example of combining archaeological documentation with photographic artistry. At the age of just 21, Greene—a Paris-based American from a wealthy banking family—embarked on his first photographic journey along the Nile. Trained by Gustave Le Gray, a master of the waxed-paper process, Greene harnessed this innovative technique to produce salted paper prints with nuanced tonal detail. His work was both a scientific endeavor to document ancient Egyptian monuments and landscapes and an exploration of the aesthetic potential of photography.
Set against the backdrop of mid-19th-century Egyptology’s emergence as a formal discipline, Greene’s project reflected the dual colonial and scholarly interests of the time. Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte had fueled European fascination with Egyptian antiquity, and figures like Greene sought to document the monumental remnants of this ancient civilization. However, Greene’s photographs go beyond mere documentation, presenting desert landscapes with stark compositions that emphasize minimalism and abstraction, exploring the interplay between light, texture, and emptiness.
Greene’s visual style is characterized by expansive compositions that juxtapose monumental ruins with vast, desolate landscapes. He often positioned structures like pyramids, temples, and inscriptions against barren sand and sky, creating an ethereal, almost otherworldly atmosphere. His restrained use of foreground detail and the diffuse tonal gradients of his waxed-paper negatives lend the images a dreamlike quality. These landscapes appear devoid of human presence, heightening their sense of timeless isolation while subtly reinforcing a perspective of the Orient as a repository of cultural heritage.
Issued as the album Le Nil, monuments, paysages, explorations photographiques (Blanquart-Evrard, 1854), Greene’s work has been prominently reassessed in Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt (Met, 2001) and the first major solo survey Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene (SFMOMA, 2019; Art Institute of Chicago, 2020). Important groups of prints and waxed-paper negatives are held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
