19th century Pyramids Frith and Felice Beato

1. photography: Frances Frith, 1859

photographer: Felice Beato +/-1860

Early photographs of pyramids

1. 

Francis Frith, The Pyramids of Gizeh, Egypt, 1858, albumen, 34.2 x 48.2 cm, Museum Ludwig / Lebeck Collection. 
posted without permission, will be removed from this blog on request.

Imagination, mistakes, corrections and Cestius' pyramid in Rome

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Piranesi engraving of the Cestius Pyramid, Rome
 One of the key  buildings in my imagination (it still stands proudly on a busy roundabout in Rome ) is Cestius’ Pyramid in Rome. This Cestius guy wasn’t bothered enormously by modesty so he got himself buried under a 37 m. high pyramidal mausoleum. A delusion of grandeur if ever you saw one. The romans had seen pyramids when venturing into Egypt some 15 years before its constuction. So Egypt, being an new province of Rome (Aegyptus) was very much à la mode when Cestius died. However the builders must have built it from imagination rather than  from a proper set of measurements since the inclination of  its sides is way too steep for an Egyptian mausoleum. Some thousand sevenhundred fifty years later Piranesi (1720-1778) made a famous engraving from the pyramid of Cestius in Rome for his ‘Vedute di Roma,’ the first widespread work of  art to satisfy the eyes and imagination of ‘tourists’ making their Grand Tour of Europe at home. 
Thus, Cestius ‘mistake’ was to be continued in the minds of antiquity lovers, architects and dreamers.
Unfortunately, the spread of  Photographs from the likes of Felice Beato (+/- 1860) finally corrected our vision and idea about how a pyramid looked like. As a blogger of the speculative possibilities of photography I do deplore this correction.
Wikipedia facts and figures:
The pyramid was built about 18 BC–12 BC as a tomb for Caius Cestius, a magistrate.  It is of brick-faced concrete covered with slabs of white marble standing on a travertine foundation, measuring 100 Roman feet (29.6 m) square at the base and standing 125 Roman feet (37 m) high.[1]
In the interior is the burial chamber, a simple barrel-vaulted rectangular cavity measuring 5.95 metres long, 4.10 m wide and 4.80 m high. When it was (re)discovered in 1660, the chamber was found to be decorated with frescoes, which were recorded by Pietro Santi Bartoli, but only the scantest traces of these now remain. There was no trace left of any other contents in the tomb, which had been plundered in antiquity. The tomb had been sealed when it was built, with no exterior entrance; it is not possible for visitors to access the interior.  

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• Cestius Pyramid, Rome 2009, copyright photography@swad.be

Le gorge du petit Ailly meets the sea, Varengeville, Normandy, France

photo: photography@swad.be
Le gorge d'Ailly meets the sea. This is a place of wonder a couple of meters below the place where Monet painted his 'gorge du petit Ailly' . But I hate Monet. Just a little one to keep your nose to the grindstone.

Byron's cave

'Lord Byron's cave' in Portovenere, Liguria Italy. 'artists and tourism' indeed. Byron may never have ventured here, although he was an excellent swimmer.

French communards

After the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war parisian insurgents took power in the post war chaos.  The so-called 'Paris Commune' lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871.
The french government abolished the commune. Around 18.000 parisians were killed by government soldiers during bloody week
A lot of the the french communards were executed.

The psychiatric patient in the previous article actually depicted such an execution in the top-right hand  corner of the Charbonnier photograph. In his drawing he adds an executioner to the already coffined communards. So the drawing must have been based on these two photographs. Ironically, with the photographic process of 1871 it was important to have your subjects to sit  motionless.
The french commune and its bloody suppression took root in the collective memory of the sane and the insane alike.








photographs: probably André Adolphe Eugène Disderi 

Charbonnier documents french psychiatric hospitals.

Jean-Philippe Charbonnier
Hopital Clermont
[Psychiatric hospitals]
1954
 
Gelatin silver print
Galerie Agathe Gaillard

LL/15415
 
In 1954 Jean-Philippe Charbonnier documented French Psychiatric hospitals and this photograph was a part of that series. Some of the photographs were published in Réalités in January 1955. In 2006 a 24 page booklet Jean-Philippe Charbonnier: HP hôpitaux psychiatriques was published by Le traitement contemporain n°4 in conjunction with gallery Agathe Gaillard.
This message was taken without permission from http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_PHOTOGRAPHER_Jean-Philippe__Charbonnier_.
Will be removed on simple request