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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 Pyrami ds
he amassed and adapted
a quanti ty of surveyi ng
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 Drowers biography,
pl.7). This is conirmed by the fact that the
Giza tomb photograph is included on p.23
of Petries 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 Petries 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 Petries 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 Petries 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 i n
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 Petries 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
hood wi t hi n
whi ch Pet r i e
c oul d i ns er t
a n d r e mov 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 -
plate (his measuring 3 by 4 inches) - perhaps initially for
ease of transportation, both from England and within Egypt,
though in his Methods and Aims in Archaeology, he said ..the
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.
Petries view of photography was very utilitarian - the images
were taken to
serve the needs
of publ i cati on
so excavat ed
ob j e c t s , f or
example, were
all arranged for
p h ot og r a p hy
with their final
desti nati on i n
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
Petries 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 Petries 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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