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The Medium, the Mosques, or the Moon
John Haberin New York City
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey
Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography
What if photography had been around for centuries? What if you could have the illusion of having been there with it, experiencing at first hand ancient civilizations in all their glory? Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey asked himself the very same thing. The medium was just three years old when he set out to document Islamic architecture, before the work of the past fell to ruins.
Girault left France in 1842 with the very latest in technology—an oversized camera and over one hundred pounds of equipment, including chemicals, custom-made boxes, and photographic plates. Three years later, he returned with more than a thousand daguerreotypes and a broader view of his mission. Yet they turned up only within the last century, leaving him largely forgotten until some went up for auction in 2003. 
Now the Met selects well over a hundred, in low light, glistening from behind glass cases, to ask which is the greater marvel, the medium or the mosques. As a follow-up, on the fiftieth anniversary of the lunar landing, the museum finds the medium consumed from the start with the moon as well. But then, so was everyone else before or since, in "Apollo's Muse."
Photography's journey east
Girault undertook, as his show's title has it, a "Monumental Journey," and one can still wonder how he pulled it off, quite apart from the logistics. If you have ever heard early photography explained only to feel that you have failed a class in advanced chemistry, Girault's generation had to overcome the same fears. They knew that the right vapors (for the record, iodine) could make a thin film of silver on copper plates sensitive to light—and that they needed still other chemicals to develop and then to "fix" the image before it was lost. How long, though, should the film be exposed to produce the right depth, clarity, and detail, especially in the Middle Eastern desert sun? Overexposure could leave outlines fading into blue, while underexposure could leave nothing at all. He brought, though, a steady hand and an inquiring mind.
He also brought some relevant experience and an interdisciplinary approach. Born in 1804, he had traveled before in Spain, Italy, and North Africa and had planned a census of all that survives. He had studied architecture, co-founded an archaeological society, trained as an artist, and took an interest in botany. He knew where others were digging or erecting scaffolding to preserve the scene, and he knew that he needed his own skills in watercolor along with the skills of others in lithography if he wished to disseminate his findings. A painting from the 1830s shows his knowledge of Romanticism, with an exaggerated yellow light and leaps into distance that recall the Hudson River School in America. He also took to trees as subjects in themselves and as a frame for architecture, and it took every bit of his skill to capture them.
Girault had also had a head start, trying out the medium in Paris with, of course, studies of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. From there he traveled to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Egypt, and Syria—which then included today's Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel. Greece had only recently won independence, while the Ottoman empire still controlled Egypt and Syria, and each raised difficulties of its own. In Athens he photographed a mere field of rubble along with such obvious landmarks as the Acropolis, and one can dismiss his perspective as a colonialist's, a modern tourist's, or a Romantic fondness for ruins. When he closes in on columns apart from their base, one can dismiss it as, conversely, a Romantic ideal of the monumental. He knew, though, the likelihood of more and more ruins, between wars and the accidental explosion of gunpowder stores, and he felt the need to show things as they had been.
One can subject his European view of the Islamic world to a postmodern critique of "orientalism." Yet he only rarely photographed native people rather than their setting. And if he staged them, multiculturalism in the arts does much the same today. Still, he was open to their use to reconstruct entire cultures. Lithographs after his work tend to combine architectural elements and to populate them. As his journey continued, he moved more toward panoramas as well. He also became more open to a confluence of cultures.
Egypt, he would have known, had been touched by European culture ever since Alexander the Great installed a new upper class. (Experts still debate how to picture Cleopatra.) Jerusalem alone was central to at least three religions, and Girault departs from his script to photograph key sites for them all. Still, he was at his best with architecture—including the mosques that he had set out to find, with close-ups of columns, inscriptions, and decorative carvings. The curator, Stephen C. Pinson, makes clear how much his command of detail improved on his predecessors. He also exposed only half of many large plates at a time, to juxtapose different points of view.
Still, the gentleman scholar was first and foremost a gentleman. Back in France, he experimented with newer modes of photography like glass negatives and paper positives, but the amateur botanist was mostly content, like Claude Monet at Giverny, to cultivate his garden estate. After all his efforts to sort, store, label, and catalog his daguerreotypes, he never once tried to exhibit them in the nearly fifty years before his death. He always had his limits as an artist—even as his bridging art and archive anticipated street photography and photojournalism in the century to come. He decided what he needed to record, and that was that. And yet, as it surely was for him, it can restore a sense of wonder at the medium and the past.
That old devil moon
Surely those who spend their time contemplating the moon are a little dreamy. Not for Caspar David Friedrich, whose two men (perhaps the artist himself and his favorite pupil) are at once dandies and observers. They are communing as much with one another and themselves as with the moon in earthshine, while a tree rises up from a dead oak and a boulder to encircle them all. They are caught up in moonlight all the same, just as Friedrich disdains the middle distance. It speaks to Romanticism's thrilling dialogue between observation and reflection. It speaks, too, to that dialogue in the human imagination whenever it comes to the moon.
The painting, from the Met's collection, precedes 1830, but "Apollo's Muse" means to document, as the subtitle has it, "The Moon in the Age of Photography." And here the hardest of hard science is never far from the popular imagination. Care to know who took over painstaking drawing from telescopes after Galileo went into house arrest—and who soon after turned to engravings for a wider public? (Francisco Fontana and Claude Mellan.) Who contemplated the moon from the very origins of photography, and who at the turn of the last century produced more than seventy large plates for a comprehensive lunar atlas, every page on view now? (Some curiously small and faint efforts in daguerreotypes, but then Warren De La Rue, Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, and John Adams Whipple, followed by Maurice Loewy and Pierre Puiseux, each with a greater precision than last.)
From there, make not one small step for a museum-goer, but one giant leap for mankind. The space race, too, was the pursuit of not just global supremacy, but also a collective self-image. Eager space dogs and smiling cosmonauts boast of a people's republic that hardly existed outside Soviet propaganda. Meanwhile news feeds from mission control boast of a can-do spirit. Buzz Aldrin plants the American flag, but also a scientific experiments package, in photos by Neil Armstrong. Aldrin also left his footprint, where no wind or water can efface it, but no more so than images of "earthrise" and the earth as a "blue marble."
Between those two extended historical moments, a room for art seems mundane by comparison. Not that it was above embellishments, like a photo that Edward Steichen hand colored to capture moonlight. Nor was it above popular culture and speculative science. A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 film by Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, sure looks fanciful, but did you know that Jules Verne had From the Earth to the Moon end with a Pacific splash down in 1865? Studio portraits on a lunar crescent had quite a fashion, while Man Ray posed a light switch in front of the moon on commission for a French electric company. What could be more fantastic or more commercial?
Art gets a second chance across the corridor, for the fifty years since touchdown. Photography does not dominate this room either. Artists, it turns out, were responding to the moonshot from the moment it took place. Robert Rauschenberg in silkscreen collages it together with other dreamy aspects of the Florida landscape, Nancy Graves turns it into near-abstract mappings, and Nam June Paik lets it flutter and stumble past on TV. Garry Winogrand was at the launch of Apollo 11 himself. Wry as ever, he watches not so much the launch as overwrought witnesses, while one woman turns to train her camera on him.
Not that contemporary art insists on purity, not when women's clothing adopted a pixilated NASA print. Nor has it lost its sense of wonder ever since. Even Sarah Charlesworth turns down the irony for once, for a telescope pointed at the moon, while a long exposure from Darren Almond makes moonlight look like dawn. Observation matters, but so does observation about observation—and so does its tactile imprint in an accordion book by Kiki Smith, where crinkled black paper stands in for the lunar surface. Aleksandra Mir (no relation to the Soviet space station) is enough of a feminist to know that men alone walked on the moon, but who can resist First Woman on the Moon on an artificial beach in the Netherlands, as children splash in the water and clamber over the sand? Apollo 11 may have departed, but Winogrand can still see the rocket trail in the sky.
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 12, 2019, "Apollo's Muse" through September 22.