Photo Tractatus' photostream

My final post on Flickr as I transition to a new home at www.photo-tractatus.com.

This site will remain up but images are no longer searchable. The mission of the new site will remain intact -- to celebrate Art and Artists with a capital A....

At the beginning of January 1924, the gold shrines surrounding the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun were opened, one after another. The double doors of the first shrine were closed only with sliding bolts of ebony, but the second and third shrines had been secured with elaborately tied ropes that bore clay seals stamped with impressions of the necropolis seal—a crouching jackal over nine bound captives.

Burton's photograph of this uncut seal perfectly conveys the conflicting feelings of archaeological discovery. On the one hand, excitement, even impatience to see what is behind the sealed doors. On the other hand, hesitation and regret at having to cut a rope that someone so carefully tied and sealed more than thirty-three centuries ago.

Simple rope and a clump of clay impressed with seals promised that the treasures within this shrine had remained inviolate since the pharaoh's burial. Once the seal was broken to allow the archaeologists access, only Burton's photograph could evoke its original talismanic power and eloquently testify to the archaeologist's eternal dilemma: as the excavation and tomb clearing reveal things hitherto unseen, it also forever removes them from their undisturbed state.

After the lid was removed from Tutankhamun's outer coffin, a linen shroud gave only a hint of the gilded and inlaid coffin that lay within. A small wreath had been pressed around the vulture and cobra goddesses at the king's brow, and garlands made from olive leaves, blue lotus petals, cornflowers, and celery leaves were draped over his chest.

The most haunting image of Burton's entire Tutankhamun portfolio is this detail of the king's outer coffin. Burton's unusual cropping, which isolates the golden vulture and cobra goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt and the astonishingly lifelike eyes of the pharaoh, creates a dynamic tension that pulls one's focus back and forth between Tutankhamun's divine and mortal personas.

Made of cornflowers clasped in olive leaves that were wrapped around a core of papyrus pith, the wreath—a last gift to the young pharaoh—was extremely fragile after more than 3,000 years and fell to pieces when removed.

In 1914, Harry Burton was hired as a member of the graphic section, initially to photograph tomb interiors and later to record the work of the Museum's excavation team. Burton rapidly gained a reputation as the finest archaeological photographer of his time. Thus, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, he promptly asked the Metropolitan for the loan of Burton's services. For the next eight years, Burton divided his time between Tutankhamun and the Egyptian Expedition.

Between 1914 and his death in 1940, Burton produced and printed more than 14,000 glass negatives; the majority of those negatives and prints are in the archives of the Department of Egyptian Art. To Egyptologists, Harry Burton's photographs are among the great treasures of the department. For the art historian, he has left a complete photographic record of dozens of decorated tombs as they were preserved in the early twentieth century. For the archaeologist and the historian, he has left an invaluable record of the Museum's excavations. Since archaeology is a process of removal and destruction, Burton's stage-by-stage documentation of work in progress allows us to re-create the context of objects that are now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and in New York. Burton's photographs of the tomb of Tutankhamun, much better known than his work for the Museum, give the same thorough record of each new discovery within that tomb.

Far more than dry scientific records, Burton's photographs also inspire a sense of wonder because of his ability to tell a story—to convey the atmosphere of a tomb unopened for more than three millennia, the poignancy of a floral offering left at the foot of a coffin, or the anticipation of an excavator confronted by a sealed door. Burton was a superb archaeological photographer with a knack for producing clear and informative photographs under the most difficult circumstances. In carrying out his documentary mission, he often set up his camera and lights with a sense of artistry as well as practicality and created pictures we find beautiful, exciting, or mysterious. The modern viewer may also find unintended associations in his work. Just as we might admire an ancient alabaster vase in part because its design seems "so modern," some of Burton's pictures remind us of photographs made in the seventy or eighty years that followed. That connection is not altogether accidental. Many artists from the 1920s to the present have tried to apprehend the world by using their cameras to gather and classify an archive of faces, natural forms, or manmade constructions—to examine our own civilization as a future archaeologist might, borrowing from photographers like Burton the strategies of exhaustive documentation and deadpan presentation.

A pharaoh of minor historical importance, Tutankhamun reigned fewer than ten years (ca. 1336–1327 B.C.) and probably died at the age of eighteen. Within a few decades, his makeshift tomb was twice robbed, then resealed and forgotten. Realizing that this one royal tomb remained unaccounted for, Howard Carter, with the backing of his patron Lord Carnarvon, searched the Valley of the Kings for Tutankhamun's elusive resting place. As hope faded after five years of futile work, Carter discovered the tomb's entrance stairway and, on November 26, 1922, first glimpsed the "wonderful things" within. Painstaking examination, documentation, and clearing of the tomb took eight years. Despite Tutankhamun's relative insignificance and minor looting by robbers shortly after his burial, his tomb was essentially intact and remains the richest such discovery ever made. The unfolding of this discovery is preserved for us in Burton's masterful photographs.

Among his duties as expedition photographer, Burton recorded the excavation work in progress, carefully choosing the time of day for optimum effect. In this photograph, with the dust rising, one gets a good impression of the intense activity that enabled the early twentieth-century excavators to shift many tons of debris with what appears to be a cast of thousands. In fact, though the expedition sometimes employed over 500 diggers and basket boys, the excavations were under the constant supervision of the Museum's staff and their Egyptian foremen.

This photograph of the dig alongside the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri might easily be mistaken for a film "still" showing the temple's construction in an epic by Harry Burton's contemporary Cecil B. DeMille. The activity of the hundreds of laborers shown here was, in truth, little changed from the days when their ancestors built the structures they were now helping to unearth.

In January 1927, the Egyptian Expedition uncovered a tomb entrance in the corner of a quarry near Hatshepsut's temple. As he walked down the dark, steep, seemingly endless corridor that led to the first chamber, Herbert Winlock, the expedition's field director, saw the sparkle of salt crystals growing out from all directions. Some looked like huge molars, others like angel hairs, the longest of which he estimated to exceed three feet.

Burton was systematic in his application of photography to archaeology, producing an extensive (if generally rather dry) record of excavations, objects, and royal tomb painting. Occasionally, he spotted something unexpected and momentarily departed from his assignment in order to make a picture so strange and eloquent that even the Surrealists would have been intrigued. Like Man Ray's contemporaneous Dust Breeding (a photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass under a blanket of dust), Burton's photograph measures the passage of time in the infinitesimally slow accumulation of incidental matter.