La Poésie des souvenirs. Album fotografii z Podróży Wschodniej Adama Potockiego i Katarzyny z Branickich Potockiej z lat 1852-1853 w zbiorach Biblioteki Narodowej (AFF.II-31)

• Authors: Malgorzata Maria Grabczewska

Title variants

EN

LA POESIE DES SOUVENIRS. PHOTO ALBUM FROM THE EASTERN JOURNEY OF ADAM POTOCKI AND KATARZYNA POTOCKA NÉE BRANICKA FROM 1852-1853, IN THE COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF POLAND (AFF.II-31)

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The article refers to a photo album from a journey to Egypt, the Holy Land and Istanbul, made during the years 1852-1853 by Adam and Katarzyna Potoccy, Kazimierz Potulicki, the journalist Maurycy Mann, and the painter Franciszek Tepa. The task of these last two was to describe their journey, which resulted in Mann’s three-volume work and a series of drawings and paintings by Tepa, a precursor of orientalism in Polish art. Numerous editions describing this journey were mainly based on printed sources, which led to misunderstandings and false interpretations. They were corrected in accordance with previously overlooked sources taken from the Potoccy family archive from Krzeszowice. The article discusses the preparations, the course of the journey and souvenirs brought back from it. The photo album, transferred with Adam Potocki’s gift in 1932 from Wilanów to the National Library of Poland, is exceptionally important. The album, labeled by Katarzyna Branicka, consists of 33 prints made in 1852, mounted on cards and framed. Twenty-two of them are boards from a publication considered to be the first travel book illustrated with original photographs, published in 1852 in Paris. This is a description of a journey to Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria, taken by Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert in the years 1849-51. Seven photographs were made by Theodore de Leeuw, the owner of the first photo studio in the Near East (1840-1858), the last three were made by Ernest Edouard de Carranza, a French engineer and amateur photographer who was working temporarily in Turkey. All prints were made on a salted paper from paper negatives produced through an analogue process. The article presents the prints in the form of catalogue notes, and describes the processes by which they were made in detail, pointing out differences in implementation of the calotype method by each of the three photographers, and the consequences of these differences for the esthetic values of the photographs. The landscapes by du Camp are examples of a method devised by Louis Desiré Blanquart-Evrard, and are part of a wide-ranging search for an ideal method for multiplicable photographs, as were Ernest Eduardo Carranza’s photographs made in a process devised by Gustav Le Gray and improved by Carranza. Theodore de Leeuw’s prints were similarly so, but he used du Camp’s technique of making wax negatives. The last part of the article describes the working methods of each of the three photographers, and in this way shows three different methods of photographing the Near East in the first decade of the development of photography. From the youthful desire for adventure and exploration of the neophyte journalist du Camp, to the effort of Carranza to satisfy a scientific curiosity, and Leeuw’s attempt to make photography a way of living, we can see three different approaches, connected by the passion, curiosity and courage of the world’s explorers and by the newest feats of technology. The album itself is a world-class treasure. It contains unique, early photographs of the Holy Land and Istanbul, and is also a record of the early beginnings of photograph collecting – a subject which nowadays concerns photographers all over the world.

Keywords

EN

PHOTOGRAPHY; TRAVELS

• Publisher: Biblioteka Narodowa
• Journal: Rocznik Biblioteki Narodowej
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 43
• Pages: 113-166

Contributors

author

Malgorzata Maria Grabczewska

• Biblioteka Narodowa, Zakład Ikonografii, al. Niepodległości 213, 02-086 Warszawa