The Beginnings of Photography, the Beginnings of the Photography Archive: Bonfils at the Harvard Semitic Museum

Abstract

The article highlights the creation of the Maison Bonfils photographic collection and its transformation into a museum archive by the Harvard Semitic Museum. On the one hand, it examines the archiving of reality through photographic practice and analyses the epistemological premises of documentary photogra¬phy applied to the object “The Holy Land.” On the other hand, it describes the transformation of the Bonfils collection into a corpus and its reception by the scientific community of the Ancient Near East. In both cases, we observe the im¬plementation of a literal conception: on the one hand, the geographical territory is interpreted as the perfect equivalent of the biblical text and, on the other hand, the photographs of this territory are used as an immediate and totally transpar¬ent document of the historical reality of the 19th century.