Talk: Prints and (Egyptian) People before Photography
November 8, 2023
1:00pm - 2:30pm
Representation of Labor from the Encyclopedia to the Description de l’Égypte
The most important product of Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt (1798 – 1801) was the Description de l’Égypte. This monumental 23-volume-book has been repeatedly compared to the infamous Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, as endeavors of Enlightenment. Looking into the drawings engraved in both books, this talk shows that although their continuity in form, printing techniques and the empiricist ambition for precision and exhaustive representation, differences between the two media are not less striking. To illustrate both these continuities and ruptures, this talk focuses on the representation of Egyptian craftsmen in the plates on modern Egypt in the Description. Examining the image of Egyptian artisans by Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755 - 1805), scientist, painter and inventor of the pencil, this talk will further argue that although this latter’s work is a good example of technical progress in the representation of labor in the history of French media, the same work, through a metonymic colonialist gaze, depicts Egyptians’ workshops, machines, and, more importantly, physiology and physiognomy in ways more similar to labor representations older than the Encyclopédie. Bringing up the technical progress, this talk sheds light on several connections between the engravings of the Description de l’Égypte and the collection of Prints and People before Photography, the current exhibition at the Benton Museum.
Speaker Bio
Fadi Awad ELSAID is a Ph.D. candidate in Francophone and Arabophone Cultural Studies at LCL, UConn. He studied Arabic language, literature, and second language teaching in Egypt, at Mansoura University and the American University in Cairo. In 2018, he obtained a master’s degree in Arabic studies at Sorbonne University in Paris.
THE WILLIAM BENTON MUSEUM OF ART
University of Connecticut
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