Grafmonumenten in het Boulaq Museum in Caïro, Egypte before 1871

Hippolyte Délié made this photograph of funerary monuments in the Boulaq Museum in Cairo, Egypt. It’s a remarkable image, as it captures the meeting of two very different modes of production. On the one hand, we have the original stone carvings – the product of highly skilled masons, laboring with chisels and perhaps saws, using techniques that had been developed over millennia in dynastic Egypt. The hieroglyphs are carefully rendered, each one a testament to the carver's expertise and understanding of the symbolic language. Juxtapose this with the photograph itself, a relatively new technology in the 19th century. Photography was a product of industrial chemistry and optics, a process of capturing light with a machine, which was increasingly accessible to a wider range of people. This photograph invites us to consider the relationship between ancient craft and the burgeoning industrial age, raising questions about labor, skill, and the preservation of cultural heritage in a rapidly changing world.