Photography | Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey

See also: IH Christie's Important Daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Part II London 5/18/03 Sale 6978

Mavi Boncuk | 

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (21 October 1804 – 7 December 1892) was a French photographer and draughtsman who was active in the Middle East. His daguerreotypes are the earliest surviving photographs of Greece, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Turkey. Remarkably, his photographs were only discovered in the 1920s in a storeroom of his estate and then only became known eighty years later.

Girault de Prangey studied painting in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and in 1841 he learned daguerreotypy, possibly from Louis Daguerre himself or from Hippolyte Bayard. Girault de Prangey was keenly interested in the architecture of the Middle East, and he toured Italy and the countries of the eastern Mediterranean between 1841 and 1844, producing over 900 daguerreotypes of architectural views, landscapes, and portraits.

After his return to France, Girault de Prangey made watercolour and pen-and-ink studies after his photographs and published a small-edition book of lithographs from them. He also made stereographs of his estate and the exotic plants he collected. Girault de Prangey did not exhibit or otherwise make his photographs known during his lifetime.[1]

(pictured 1843 Üsküdar)

In May 2003, Sheik Saud Al Thani of Qatar purchased a daguerreotype by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey for a world-record price of £565,250 or $922,488.

On 30 January 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened "Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey". Approximately 120 photographs that the amateur archaeologist created in Greece, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and the Levant during a self-financed tour of the region in the early 1840s were presented. They included the Parthenon in Athens, the Khayrbak Mosque in Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Organized with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, it was the first comprehensive exhibition in America devoted to the French artist.

(pictured Constantinople, rue sous le petit champ des morts)  [probably 1843]

[1] Girault de Prangey’s work appears to have been a private passion and his daguerreotypes were apparently never exhibited or exposed to the public gaze during his lifetime. While he was not the first photographer to explore the Near East, the work of others before him no longer exists. This is all the more extraordinary as he never married and had no heirs. On his death, the villa was abandoned, and the gardens and buildings soon suffered neglect. It is to a neigbouring landowner, who acquired the derelict villa after the First World War, that we owe the rediscovery of these gems of early photography.