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By the early 1880s, when Petrie began his fieldwork, photography was beginning to be used as a method of recording anthropological and archaeological expeditions in several countries: in England General Pitt Rivers pioneered the use of photography in his excavations. The inluence on Petrie of Pitt Rivers, whom he irst met in 1877 in London, has been much discussed and has now been reassessed by Alice Stevenson (Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, www.archaeologybulletin.org forthcoming). Although Petrie did not participate in any of Pitt Rivers’ excavations, in 1878 he visited Cissbury Hill in Sussex, where photographs were taken, and he must have been aware of the use of photography made by Pitt Rivers and his team to record the excavations both at Cissbury and later at excavations on Pitt Rivers’ own estate at Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire. However, Petrie seems to have seen no reason to use photography while he was surveying the prehistoric stone circles, hill forts and other ancient sites in England between 1872, when he and his father began planning Stonehenge, and 1880. When Petrie was preparing to go to Egypt to survey the Pyramids he amassed and adapted a quantity of surveying equipment for the work at Giza, but there is no mention of a camera (Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology, pp.15-16, see also Drower, Flinders Petrie. A life in Archaeology, pp.31-33). On his irst season in Egypt in the winter of 1880-81, Petrie did not have a camera with him and the famous photograph of him outside the tomb in which he lived at Giza was taken in his second season (1881-82) and not in 1880 (as captioned in Drower’s biography, pl.7). This is conirmed by the fact that the Giza tomb photograph is included on p.23 of Petrie’s photograph album No.5 which is dated 1881-82 (Quirke, Hidden Hands, p.271, Quirke reproduces the photograph on p.272 with the correct date of 1881).

Presumably during the irst season at Giza, Petrie must have come to regret not having a camera as during the summer of 1881 while preparing for his second season, he ‘decided to add photography to the record; never having owned or used a camera in his life, he set to work to design one’ (Drower, Flinders Petrie, p.48). It is typical of Petrie that he preferred to design and build his own camera, rather than merely purchase one. What he constructed was essentially a ‘pinhole’ camera and his diary for 1881-82 (in the Petrie Museum) describes in great detail his construction and

testing of the camera which he inally inished in late September, just in time for his departure for Egypt in early October. The timeline of the construction is reproduced by Eric Renner in an issue of the magazine Pinhole Journal in 1989 which was devoted to Petrie’s pinhole photography. Renner visited both the EES and the Petrie Museum in 1988, researching in the archives and selecting images to reproduce and says (p.3) ‘Flinders Petrie’s pinhole images from 1881 may well be the earliest pinhole images in existence. Certainly they are among the oldest and best preserved’. The Pinhole Journal has ceased publication but copies of the special issue on Petrie (Vol.5 # 3 December

1989) can still be purchased online for only $2: www.pinholeresource.com/shop/.

During Petrie’s irst season in Egypt with a camera he took photographs at Giza, in the Egyptian Museum (then at Bulaq) and in Luxor on a dahabiyeh trip in December 1881/February 1882. The photographs he took in Luxor were not solely for his own research: ‘Petrie that evening set about developing some of the photographs he had taken; for the next few nights he worked until the small hours. Unfortunately the lid of his plate box had a tendency to fall off, and some of his plates had been spoilt, but most had come out well and he had a long list of

people in Luxor who were anxious for copies when he could get them printed in England; it was not easy to buy photographs in Luxor in those days, and few travellers yet possessed cameras of their own’ (Drower, Flinders Petrie, p.56). He also took photographs in March 1882 in the Fayum as at Biahmu ‘I examined the two pyramids and took several photographs’ (Drower, Letters from the Desert, p.38). By the time he went out to Egypt in November 1883

to start work for the Egypt Exploration Fund at Tanis, his camera, its tripod and the necessary heavy and bulky glass plates had become an essential part of his ield equipment.

In these days of digital photography when a camera can be easily carried in a pocket it is hard to envisage using equipment like Petrie’s on an excavation, let alone carrying it on the long walks of twenty miles - or more - which Petrie made on a regular basis during his years in Egypt. When visiting a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in early 1882 Petrie noted ‘The path goes down a cleft in the rock with merely footholds in many places to step on, & I found it rather awkward with a camera and measuring rods’ (quoted by Drower, Flinders Petrie p.55). The camera itself was essentially a ‘box

Flinders Petrie, The Father of Egyptian Archaeological Photography

Petrie is often described as being ‘the father of archaeology’ for his invention of seriation, his methodical approach to excavation, his attention to the smallest detail and his methods of recording and publishing his results. His reputation as a pioneer of modern archaeology is well-deserved but what is sometimes overlooked is the fact that he was among the irst generation of archaeologists to use photography to record excavations and inds, and he pioneered archaeological photography in Egypt.

Above: Petrie taking a photograph while working at Abydos in 1900. Reproduced courtesy of Stephen Quirke and Ivor Pridden ©Petrie Mu-seum of Egyptian Archaeology. Below: The photo Petrie was taking - of squashed bronze vessels from the tomb of Khasekhemwy, © EES

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of japanned tin about the size of a biscuit tin’ with a sleeved opaque h o o d w i t h i n wh i ch Pe t r i e c o u l d i n s e r t a n d r e m o v e the glass plates to be exposed (Drower, Flinders Petrie, p.48). In addition, there was the tripod on which the camera had to be mounted and which Petrie had also designed himself. This on occasion proved to be useful for things other than supporting the camera, as in December 1883 when Petrie was prospecting sites in the Wadi Tumilat before starting his EEF excavations at Tanis and found himself suddenly in deep mud ‘I went down so deep that I lost my balance in trying to pull my feet up, and over I went sideways. I saved myself by sticking in the hand in which I carried my shoes and then by the camera stand and Khalil, I got on end again and hauled myself out’ (Drower, Letters from the Desert, p.45). In these early days before the invention of ilm, images had to be exposed onto glass plates so any excursion would have involved carrying as many of these as would be thought necessary. Petrie favoured a relatively small size of glass plate - ¼ plate (his measuring 3 by 4 ¼ inches) - perhaps initially for ease of transportation, both from England and within Egypt, though in his Methods and Aims in Archaeology, he said ‘..the ¼ plate is by far the most useful, being right for lantern slides and large enough for most objects’ (Petrie, Methods and Aims, p.74). The plates were stored in boxes (one for unexposed plates, one for exposed ones) separated by slips of cardboard, and a separate box housed different relectors. Petrie would develop his negatives the same evening but usually left printing until he was back in England. In Methods and Aims, published in 1904, he devoted one chapter to ‘Photographing’ and it is full of typical Petrie-esque didactic comments: ‘It is undesirable to have a specially compact camera...’, ‘...the fashion for wide-angle lenses is useless for everything excepting architecture at close quarters...’ ‘The instantaneous shutter is a useless article for all ixed objects...’, ‘Rapid ilms are another fashion better avoided...’ but at the same time it contained much good and practical advice for anyone of the period wanting guidance on how to take photographs for use in archaeological reports.

One of the consequences of having to carry around heavy and bulky boxes of glass plates is that Petrie had to be very selective as to what he photographed since he

had a limited number of plates available in the ield. This may go some way to explain why there are so few photographs from some of his early excavations or survey trips. By far the bulk of the EES ‘Delta’ images taken by Petrie are of the work at Tanis when he was living on the site and did not have to carry the equipment and glass plates around - by contrast there are very few images from his trip along the Wadi Tumilat. This element of necessary selectivity, which was still applicable to some extent until recently for archaeologists using ilm cameras before the onset of the digital age, also explains why there are not as many images of the sites he visited, the countryside or of the local people (or indeed of Petrie himself) as we would like to have in our archives. Petrie’s view of photography was very utilitarian - the images

were taken to serve the needs of publication so excavated o b j e c t s , f o r example, were all arranged for p h o t o g r a p hy with their final destination in mind, as Stephen Quirke has noted

‘The objects were sorted into the positions that would suit the published plate in the inal excavation report’ (Egyptian Archaeology 36, p.7) and they were only rarely photographed in situ. The Archive of the Petrie Museum has two images which together illustrate very well Petrie’s technique when photographing objects

for publication. One was taken when Petrie was working for the EES at Abydos in 1900 and shows him photographing bronze bowls from the tomb of Khasekhemwy (facing page); the photograph he took is preserved in the EES Lucy Gura Archive. The second Petrie Museum photograph was taken at Harageh in 1914 when Petrie was working for his own British School of Archaeology in Egypt and shows Petrie with one of his team members setting up objects to be photographed (below).

Ivor Pridden of the Petrie Museum, who kindly scanned this image for me, has been unable so far to identify in the Archive the image that was being taken by Petrie but it may yet come to light as the Petrie Museum photographic collection is digitised.

Petrie continued to use variants of his original camera for the rest of his long archaeological career, both in Egypt and in Palestine and one of his later cameras (no longer a ‘pinhole’ one) is in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society (Picton and Pridden, Unseen Images. Archive Photographs in the Petrie Museum, p.14) and in the care of the National Media Museum in Bradford. The negatives which Petrie produced with his home-made cameras, and the high quality prints which can still be made from them, are a testimony to both his inventiveness and his photographic skills.

dr paTrIcIa SpeNcer, eeS GeNeral edITor

Images, this page: Left: One of Petrie’s later cameras, in the collection of The Royal Photographic Society (now in the possession of the National Media Museum, Bradford). Scanned from Picton and Pridden Unseen Images and reproduced courtesy of Golden House Publications and with the permission of the Royal Photographic Society and the National Media Museum ©The Royal Photographic Society. Above: Petrie (left) and a colleague setting up a photograph of stone vessels at Harageh in 1914. From the photograph album of Dr Walter Amsden. Reproduced courtesy of Stephen Quirke and Ivor Pridden © Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.

Above: Three images showing how Petrie arranged objects for photography with the eventual book plates in mind. All © EES Lucy Gura Archive. L-R: Ivory lion gaming pieces from the tomb of Djer at Abydos; Inscribed lintels from Sixth Dynasty tombs at Dendera; Grave goods found with an intact Sixth Dynasty burial at Dendera. Below: A photograph of bows and arrows from the tomb of Den at Abydos, marked up for cropping.

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