15/02/2026
When French architectural historian Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey left Paris in 1842, his luggage weighed over 100 pounds and his three-year itinerary was ambitious. He was mesmerized by photography — invented just a few years before by a fellow Frenchman — and headed to the eastern Mediterranean to document ancient buildings with his extraordinarily large-format camera.
There he produced over 1,000 daguerreotypes that now include the earliest surviving photographs of Jerusalem, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Turkey.
“No other photographer of the period embarked on such a long excursion and successfully made a quantity of photographic plates anywhere near Girault’s production,” wrote Stephen Pinson, curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum, in the Monumental Journey catalogue. “His photographic campaign remains a feat without analogy.”
Girault de Prangey began his journey in Rome and crisscrossed the Mediterranean coastline before arriving in Jerusalem on May 21, 1844 (two months later than his original plan to be there for Easter celebrations). When he finally reached the Old City, he captured a comprehensive tourist checklist: panoramic views of the walled ramparts, the Damascus and Lion gates, the Pool of Bethesda, the Dome of the Rock, the churches of the Holy Sepulchre and Nativity, the Moroccan Quarter, Robinson’s Arch and tombs in the Valley of Josaphat outside Jerusalem.
“After spending 55 days in the holy city and its environs,” he writes toward the end of his stay in Jerusalem, “I am sure you can share my natural delight in fulfilling a dream cherished since childhood. He went on to say “how happy I am to realize that in a few months I will be able to share them with you as they are, as I bear with me their precious and unquestionably faithful trace that cannot be diminished by time or distance.”
There were other early photographs taken of the sites of the Levant by Europeans which were used as source material for European book illustrators, but most survive now only in their translated medium as etched engravings. Only Girault de Prangey’s daguerreotypes, which he stored meticulously in custom-made wooden boxes, have survived.
Regional photography spread among locals who witnessed the stream of European practitioners and their uncanny new method of image making. Photography was increasingly adopted by Jerusalem’s residents, some of whom learned the craft from visitors. A few even bought their photographic equipment from these foreign photographers, who were eager to lighten their load before beginning the long journey back to Europe. (Girault de Prangey’s camera, for example, has yet to be tracked down.)
As of the mid-19th century, Jerusalem’s residents were photographing their own city. James Graham, a Scottish photographer living and working on the Mount of Olives between 1853 and 1857, trained some of the city’s inhabitants. Around the same time, Yessai Garabedian, the patriarch of the Cathedral of Saint James in the Old City’s Armenian Quarter, began teaching photography courses within his church’s compound. One of his students, Garabed Krikorian, opened the first commercial photography studio in the city, on Jaffa Road, around 1885. And Krikorian’s apprentice, Khalil Raad, is considered the first Arab photographer in the region.
Jerusalem’s American Colony — a utopian Christian society begun in 1881 by a small contingent of Chicagoans — bought a small camera to document the visit of German Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898. This inadvertently began the colony’s photographic department, which produced and sold thousands of photographs of Jerusalem. Its studios also trained local photographers.
Girault de Prangey’s Jerusalem, and other sites look like they are ghost towns. Save for a few blurry figures near the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the city looks like an archaeological museum, not a place where people went about the daily routines of life. For Girault de Prangey's images people were only placed in some frames to give a sense of scale, though there are some rare people portraits as well, as he could presumably also see an ethnographic value to his work. He broke new ground as the photos were of the highest quality that could be produced at the time and the geography covered was as vast as the Levant and still enigmatic and mesmerising for outsiders. The tragedy is in his life-time this monumental work was not appreciated but he had the foresight to preserve them for future generations and they survived despite the dangers from the vagaries of time.
https://www.levantineheritage.com/de-prangey-photographs.html
