FELIX BONFILS (1831–1885)
Grande pyramide de Cheops / Great Pyramid of Giza
£3,000.00
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Born in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in the Gard in the South of France, Félix Bonfils (1831-1885) was a photographer and writer. Having worked as a bookbinder, in 1860 he joined General d'Hautpoul's expedition to the Levant, becoming a photographer soon after his return from Lebanon. The family moved to Beirut in 1867 where they opened a photographic studio called ‘Maison Bonfils’ and four years later Bonfils reported the results of what must have been staggering labour: 15,000 prints of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Greece, and 9,000 stereoscopic views. Those negatives were made on glass plates, coated with a collodion solution sensitised with silver nitrate. The plates had to be prepared on the spot and were exposed and developed immediately afterwards. Prints could be made later, quite literally by sunlight: paper impregnated with a silver salt solution was stretched against the glass plate in a frame, and then exposed out of doors under direct sunlight.
Though the prints, golden in tone, were beautiful, the photographers had to use egg white, or albumen, as a binding agent on the paper and this eventually became unpleasant since the Bonfils family apparently prepared the egg-white themselves. Lydie Bonfils, Felix’s wife, in 1917 was heard to mutter, ‘I never want to smell another egg again’, and supposedly forbade them at her breakfast table.
