John Beasley Greene 1832-1856
Luxor, Historic Sculptures of Pylone, Right Colossus, 1854
Salt print from a paper negative
29.8 x 22.8 cms
11 11/16 x 8 15/16 ins
11 11/16 x 8 15/16 ins
9567
Printed between January and March of 1854 From a series on sculptures and inscriptions taken in Luxor, this image shows the white crown of the colossus of Ramses II, partially...
Printed between January and March of 1854
From a series on sculptures and inscriptions taken in Luxor, this image shows the white crown of the colossus of Ramses II, partially buried. This print is mounted on bristol with blindstamp 'A. Binant', signed, dated, and numbered '84' in the lower left in the negative.
J.B. Greene's life was short, yet it includes some of the boldest compositions and most dramatic landscapes of any early photographer.
Andre Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, writing in The Art of the French Calotype noted:
Greenes work is atypical...His monuments and especially landscapes seem distinctly distant. Nor do they really seem to be of anything in the normal sense. Greene also had an exceptional attitude toward the representation of landscape space. In the manner of Chinese landscape painters on
scrolls, his lens seems to scan a terrain rather than extract it as a fixed whole from a single vantage point. The effect of this is greatly heightened by the emphasis on tonal nuance and an interest in slender sketches of transparent land masses rather than the usual emphasis on a solid monument surrounded by a site.
In Greenes pictures, the monuments and the sites are organically fused and seem made of the same stuff. At age twenty-two, such insights were precocious in the extreme, and his invention regarding expanses of uncharted space takes on greater meaning in the light of the evidence that seems to place him in an American context. It had been rather difficult to imagine an insular English sensibility capable of conceiving such boundless horizons in photography. (p. 1212, no. 186)
Bruno Jammes was responsible for the reemergence of factual information onf Greene. In an article published in the journal History of Photography (vol. 5, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 305-324) titled John B. Greene, an American Calotypist, Jammes traces the few known sources on Greenes life and career and discovers others, illustrating the essay with more than a dozen views by the
photographer and Egyptologist.
From a series on sculptures and inscriptions taken in Luxor, this image shows the white crown of the colossus of Ramses II, partially buried. This print is mounted on bristol with blindstamp 'A. Binant', signed, dated, and numbered '84' in the lower left in the negative.
J.B. Greene's life was short, yet it includes some of the boldest compositions and most dramatic landscapes of any early photographer.
Andre Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, writing in The Art of the French Calotype noted:
Greenes work is atypical...His monuments and especially landscapes seem distinctly distant. Nor do they really seem to be of anything in the normal sense. Greene also had an exceptional attitude toward the representation of landscape space. In the manner of Chinese landscape painters on
scrolls, his lens seems to scan a terrain rather than extract it as a fixed whole from a single vantage point. The effect of this is greatly heightened by the emphasis on tonal nuance and an interest in slender sketches of transparent land masses rather than the usual emphasis on a solid monument surrounded by a site.
In Greenes pictures, the monuments and the sites are organically fused and seem made of the same stuff. At age twenty-two, such insights were precocious in the extreme, and his invention regarding expanses of uncharted space takes on greater meaning in the light of the evidence that seems to place him in an American context. It had been rather difficult to imagine an insular English sensibility capable of conceiving such boundless horizons in photography. (p. 1212, no. 186)
Bruno Jammes was responsible for the reemergence of factual information onf Greene. In an article published in the journal History of Photography (vol. 5, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 305-324) titled John B. Greene, an American Calotypist, Jammes traces the few known sources on Greenes life and career and discovers others, illustrating the essay with more than a dozen views by the
photographer and Egyptologist.