Original Photo Album of Eighty-Six Albumen Views of Egypt

Cairo: Lekegian and Zangaki, 1880. Very Good-. [Cairo]: Gabriel Lekegian and Zangaki Brothers, n.d., ca. 1880s. Large oblong folio (25x34cm.); original brown cloth album with binder's ticket of the Parisian establishment Anc. Mon. Martinet to front pastedown; [50]ll. thick blue card stock filled nearly to completion with eighty-six (86) albumen photographs (mostly 20.5x27cm or the inverse) captioned in image. Album rather worn with spine mostly detached and frayed, corners bumped with some exposure, otherwise Good to Very Good, images all bright and fine.

Substantial album of photographic portraits and views produced by two of the most prestigious studios operating in Cairo in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The majority of the images (seventy-three in all) were produced by Gabriel Lekegian (ca. 1853-1920), an Armenian-born artist who first began his career in Constantinople as a water-colorist before setting up a professional photography studio shrewdly located across the street from the Shepherd's Hotel in Cairo's European District. (In fact the earliest image in this album is of the facade of the bustling Hotel). As well as producing images to quench the colonialist thirst of the tourist trade, Lekegian is today remembered for his modernist tendency to portray the everyday: the peasants, the workers, the women and children of Cairo. One researcher has written "His subjects were perhaps more multifarious and diverse than any other photographer working in Egypt at the time" (Armenian Photographer Foundation).

The remaining thirteen images signed in image by the Zangaki Brothers, Greek Cypriots who, like Lekegian, discovered the fruits of the tourist photograph trade and opened their own studio in Cairo contemporaneously with their Armenian competitor, producing "some of the finest images of late Victorian Egypt" ("Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography," p. 1521).

The album is a valuable display piece of both quotidian Victorian Cairo and its ancient environs, capturing its most destitute inhabitants as well as the monuments that brought the European tourists in by droves. Recognizable landmarks pictured here include the Pyramids and the partially uncovered Sphinx, the Mosque of Mohammad Ali, the Khalifa Tombs, the Obelisks of Heliopolis, the bas reliefs of the Temple of Rameses, the Colossi of Memnon, Luxor Temple, and Karnak.