 hough the prints, golden in tone, were
beautiful, the photographers had to use
eggwhite, or albumen, as a binding agent
on the paper and this eventually became
unpleasant since the Bonfils family apparently
prepared the egg-white themselves.
Lydie Bonfils in 1917 was heard to mutter, "I
never want to smell another egg again", and
supposedly forbade them at her breakfast
table thereafter.
The process could also be dangerous- particularly in the hot climate of the Middle East. As Frith wrote, "When (at the Second Cataract, one thousand miles from the mouth of the Nile, with the thermometer at 110 degrees in my tent) the collodion actually boiled when poured upon the glass plate, I almost despaired of success". The second Bonfils photographer was Felix's son, Adrien. Born at Ales in 1861, Adrien was six when the family moved permanently to Beirut Like his father he did military service - as a brigadier in a cavalry regiment in Algeria - but on the death of Felix in 1885, he returned to Beirut to take over the family business, and was soon setting off on new photographic expeditions and launching publishing projects that easily matched Frith's in quality and quantity. It was Adrien to whom a London agent named Mansell was referring when he wrote, in 1892, to a certain David Gordon Lyon, "I hear from Bonfils that he has made an addition of 150 views to his Egyptian series - shall send these to you when I receive them".
This, says Dr. Gavin's staff, seems to be the first reference to what was becoming the Bonfils collection and to the man who took it upon himself to acquire the photographs: Professor Lyon, the first curator of a new museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the Harvard Semitic Museum. Founded in 1899 - with donations from Jacob Henry Schiff of the New York bank ing house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company- HSM, according to its charter, was intended to provide "a thorough study and a better knowledge of Semitic history and civilization, so that the world shall better understand and acknowledge the debt it owes to the Semitic people". To that end, Lyon began to collect artifacts from the Middle East, particularly the Bonfils photographs. It is not known whether he realized haw valuable they would be in archeology, but it's unlikely. It is only now, Gavin says, that researchers are coming to realize the value of photographs. aLibrarians have leamed to pay careful attention to handwritten notes and diaries, as well as to books and manuscripts. Curators carefully tend sketch pads and ok engravings as 'works of art' But photographs... have until recently remained forgotten".
From the unique Bonfils collection an early tourist guide. Nevertheless, Dr. Gavin says, Lyon did work hard at collecting Bonfils photographs. "Lyon's interest was encyclopedic; one can infer from the Mansell note that he's told the agent he wants all the photographs". Furthermore, he nearly succeeded; despite occasional difficulties with U.S. Customs, he secured nearly half of what was available and went on to catalog them, giving them English titles and museum code numbers. This is known, because Adrien himself had issued three catalogs, organizing 1,684 photographs into nine groups covering Lower and Upper Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia and Greece. In addition, there was a series of 25 "panoramas" consisting of two or more separate pictures which, when placed side by side, showed broad cityscapes of such Eastern centers as Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Damascus and, of course, Beirut. The series was rounded out by a selection of Egyptian views and costumes - including desert scenes and a wedding and a collection of scenes and costurnes of Palestine and Syria.
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Adrien Bonfils outside the family's Beirut studio, from which flowered a prolofic output of meticulously processed prints.
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