ABSTRACT
When the writer Maxime Du Camp (1822–94) went to Egypt in November 1849, accompanied by his friend Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), the two sailed up and down the Nile for six of the eight months of their stay before going on to travel another ten months in Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. Du Camp acquired a camera for this trip, and most of his 216 negatives were made during the Nile part of his journey, 125 of which were published in what became the first major photographic album of its kind. 1 Not only was Du Camp hyperactively engaged in photographing (Flaubert wrote in a letter home, “I don't know why Maxime hasn't killed himself with this raging mania for photography” 2 ), he was also making papier-mache impressions of reliefs and taking copious notes which served as raw material for three books and numerous short stories. Flaubert, to the contrary (and much to Du Camp's annoyance), spent a good deal of his time lounging on the boat's deck or in the shade of a palm tree, a lassitude that turned out to be the gestation period for his extraordinary novel Madame Bovary, which he began writing upon his return to France. The results of Du Camp's frenetic efforts, by comparison, are the epitome of the ordinary. His observations are commonplace, his writing a series of banal clichés, and his photographs mostly unimaginative frontal compositions. What does distinguish Du Camp is his maniac determination to leave no stone unturned, a persistence that exaggerates the ordinary by its sheer force. While Flaubert has provided posterity with incisive insights into the daily lives of the bourgeoisie of his time, Du Camp has unwittingly provided an intensified example of the bourgeoisie itself.
