 Thank you everyone for coming out today for this lunchtime talk. I think I'm supposed to be about halfway through a major research project, so I've tried to give you a taste of today. It's been generously funded by the Liverpool Trust, the British Academy, and I've also had support from Ossol's College in Oxford to help give you a home base while I've been doing research in archives. I'm working on an academic book in various publications like that, and there will also be public events like this one at an exhibition about the photography that will open in Lincoln next year, and I hope we'll tour from there. So we're giving a preview. I could talk for hours about this, but don't worry, I won't. We've got to finish within an hour, so I'm going to try to talk for about 45 minutes and then I'm happy to take questions at the end. I hope that will be interesting. I hope there's something for everyone here today. Let me start out by removing all the bump here from my slide. Now we can have a look at the image I wanted to start with, which is to make a point that I think is important when we think about photography. Photographs are much more than what they show or what they seem to show. We're looking here at a picture of a picture, a photo of a photo. Can you make that out? Anybody else? For anybody under the age of 35 in the audience, you're probably thinking that's weird whether they just slap them on a scanner or a photocopier, right? But this was a standard practice until quite recently. If you needed to create a new negative to help circulate an image or make a print of an image, you took a photo of a picture. Now the picture that's in the picture is the road, leading to the Valley of the Kings. If you've ever been a tourist in Egypt, you probably have spotted that. It's quite a recognizable mountain peak in that drop there. The Valley of the Kings is a course where the Tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in November 1922. This photograph appears in the first book that Howard Carver, the excavator, ever published about the tomb. It was rushed into production in less than a year until 1923. We can't publish anything, I can't make them in that kind of speed today. So this book included this photograph. Is it a photograph that he had taken? And is it a photograph from 1922 or 1923? Well, yes and no. The photograph that's in the picture, the photograph that's been photographed, was actually taken in 1910. And then re-photographed probably in 1923 to make the picture that was needed for this book that was being rushed into printing that would want to become a bestseller. It was a matter of convenience how Howard Carver needed a picture of the Valley of the Kings for his book to show roughly where the tomb was located. And he asked his colleague, a man named Harry Burton, to help out, and Burton provided one. It was Burton who had taken the original photograph, not in 1922, but in 1910. And finally in love, I don't know if it was a coincidence or not, it was Carter who, in his previous job, had been responsible for making a little wooden shelter there, which is where the donkeys and donkey drivers who carried tourists into the Valley of the Kings progressed in the shade while a crazy tourist went round and looked at royal tombs. I'm starting with this picture for picture, as I said, to make a point. I think it's an important point that people aren't or aren't just about what they show. They're about relationships between people, and as they circulate between people or appear in publications, or get filed away in drawers or photographs, photographs take on different meanings and different roles. Archaeologists, and I'm one of them by training, are used to thinking about photographs from what they show, what the photograph is of, it's a photograph of the Valley of the Kings. But in this project what I've been doing is looking at the photographs as photographs and as a complete archive of photographs, because asking questions about what kinds of photographs were taken, why, how, by whom, and how they were used, all of these questions that can help us look at something as famous as well known as the Two of Two are Common in a different light. How many of our ideas about the tomb and about King Tut go back to the photographs taken at the time? How did photography play up or down the roles of different people who contributed to the excavation? And what happens when an excavation ends? Where did photographs wind up and which photographs and photographers have been overlooked or yet tests? In the context of the tomb and its discovery, let's go back to that first season, November 1922, the discovery of the tomb, the sealed entrance, it's an underground tomb, so reach down five steps and then the sealed entrance, which was uncovered by Carter's chief chief foreman, Vice, in early November. That was the kind of moment of discovery and quickly backfilled to awake the arrival of the man who was paying for the whole thing, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon who had to get out to Egypt from Downton Abbey. So, Carnarvon had, for about 15 years, he'd been bankrolling Howard Carter to excavate in the Valley of the Kings. This was something that the Egyptian Antiquities authorities had been encouraging because they themselves came forward necessarily the kind of large-scale clearance work, so they occasionally would let a wealthy duet man like Carnarvon pitch in and then give him an experience to excavate like Howard Carter to do the work. Carter is the third man on the right here with the walking stick in the bowtime and for most of the time, Carter had his team of experienced Egyptian workmen with a couple of informant who had been working with for 20 years or so in Egypt and also would have been using as needed local labor including boys and girls we see here in photograph from 1920 so earlier in the work and this is a photograph probably taken by Carter and later on it gets turned into a sort of narrative of the successful search for the team of two archaic and that's how it's currently archived so a lot of hard work had been involved leading up to 1922 what that meant though that we're actually faced with this sealed tomb and Carnarvon had an initial look into it into the first room leading up to sort of looking into that was sort of oh gosh what are we doing now this was an unprecedented find and so Carter realized that he was going to need more help he and the Earl of Carnarvon already had a very good relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York if you've ever been to New York or been to New York and have been there so a rather relatively new museum at that time but a very well-baked world museum and Carter and Carnarvon had a good relationship with him because they were very old antiquities from in years so everybody was very friendly with each other and when the museum in New York got in touch to congratulate Carter they offered you know can we do anything carry out my help and Carter said yes could they lend Burton so Burton's the third man on the left there the plus fours holding his little jotterie holding his cigarette Harry Burton was an Englishman but like Cannes another Englishman Mace they were employed by the Metropolitan Museum by the American institution they were employed to exhibit in Egypt basically the next valley over now all these men had known each other for years 10 or 20 years so they were very friendly and Carter in asking for our help specified these two men especially Burton because Burton was known, was considered to be about the best photographer who was working on Egyptian sites at the time photography in the 1920s might seem a long time ago to us now but it wasn't early photography by means the technology had been around since the 1830s and it really took off around 1880 when pre-coated glass negatives hit the market so photography by the 1920s would absolutely be ubiquitous and have been for some time this slide here I'm going to show you it's a copy it's a reproduction of a painting then in around 1890 we see at the left we see a German Egyptologist Emile Grouch looking at his pocket watch because he's timing an exposure in the camera that's straddling the tripod is straddling a coffin lid and this is the sort of photography that Grouch actually did at Degren's Museum in Cairo or at Giza as it was in 1990 Grouch is wearing a troupage because he was an employee of the Egyptian government Egypt at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire and although at this time from 1882 I'm going to go into a bit of history now because I find when I speak to British audiences they don't know the history so bear with me so from 1882 the kings of the Egyptian government had been pulled by Britain and military troops were occupying Egypt having invaded in the summer of 1882 so there was this veiled protectorate a Lord Cormac called it where Egypt technically is part of the Ottoman Empire and answers to Turkey but in fact is effectively governed and is occupied by Britain the as an aside to cruise where in central Cairo the Egyptian Museum is today right next to that was a huge military barracks for the British troops right up until the 1950s so a bit of background which is going to become important the kind of camera that we see in this painting reproduction of the painting isn't that dissimilar from the kind of camera a view camera, a stand camera that Britain would have used unfortunately Britain's other cameras don't survive today in his hilarious mentions the cameras that he owned but there's no background about what happened to them afterwards so you get a kind of square or a rectangular body of bellows that can expand and the tilt mechanism as well so you could, the lens on the front is interchangeable, you can have different lenses and then you tilt or angle the camera because anyone's ever used a camera like this which helps you with distortion to go about things that are square if you thought otherwise you would have things that are angles excuse me, could you use your mic? sorry, is the mic okay? oh okay, so I'm talking about the camera mechanism right, is roughly similar right, on the tripod of the kind of camera that Britain would have used is that correct? I don't know by the 1920s when Burton is photographing there were film negatives available, so that's one difference in the technology but like a lot of photograph photographers who worked in archaeology, Burton didn't use film negatives he preferred glass negatives large format, 18 by 24 cm or 7 by 9 inch if you prefer imperial he was working with metric negatives, so glass negatives that you could fit into a slide and expose for as long as you need to and take out, what's that? I've actually got an example of a dark side with me which I'll get out afterwards if anybody wants to see what a negative folder at the time looked like so right, so that's just a bit of the technological the technical background to the use of cameras and the use of photography that we'd be dealing with in Egypt in 1920s now the reason somebody like Harry Burton preferred to use large glass negatives is twofold really, first they offered the sharpest detail and secondly you could put them directly, you didn't need to enlarge them so this is one of my photographs of one of Burton's photographs of print from the 1920s in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum in New York as he printed it and mounted it in an album about so big so to give you a sense of that direct printing of a large negative and the kind of detail it let you see it's a photograph, it's one of the first photographs taken in the first room, the so-called anti-chamber of the tomb of Tutor Ghan with alabaster vases lined up and stacked up against a wall of the tomb and you can see the number cards in place you make those up 57, 60, 140 went back and those were cards to number each object in sequence as it was found and we'll see how those cards stayed with the objects as work proceeds from the tomb so it's a cataloging system that's imposed I'm sorry it's not a great photograph partly because it's by me partly because the album's leaves are in plastic so there's a bit of reflection there now Britain also used a smaller negative, it's known as a half plate it's about 13x18 cm 4x6 5x7 that kind of thing but again those would be printed directly so it's just a way to have another camera or a photograph of small objects sometimes and this is an example of those again in the albums in New York where now three prints fit on the page and these are all bits of chariot chariots that were found disassembled in the first room of the tomb so dozens of individual chariot parts get cataloged and photographed we actually have a photograph of a team taking one of these photographs so there he is in his postboards again and he's working here looking at my values the camera is upside down the camera is fixed in a stand so that it can photograph vertically instead of being on tripod and photographing out we're upside down I'll come back to this setup later and talk about the reason for it and what kinds of photographs it produced for now I wanted to use this picture to follow up a couple of other points about photography at the Tomb of Tudor Common so first, where are we this is not the Tomb of Tudor Common this is a neighboring tomb much larger also much later belonged to King Saidid I and the Egyptian Antiquities authorities gave Carter this tomb to use as a place to store and to work on and conserve the artifacts and to photograph them before they were created up and shipped to Cairo telling me it was known as the laboratory tomb and I'll come back to that so this tomb is also we'll see later it's where the unwrapping of the mummy takes place in 1925 and this is indeed where Burton did a lot of the photography of individual objects once they've been repaired because they let him have a lot of daylight and some electric light so he does a lot of photography using just the sunlight second point in this photograph how many people are there in the picture thank you, yes there are two there's Burton and there's an Egyptian man waiting to one side possibly one of the bais there are several, it's usually translated as the senior experienced Egyptian excavators I ask the question though because very often and I've seen this happen quite recently as well when photographs like this are reproduced in books or used on TV or in museum exhibitions only the white guy gets identified and often the Egyptian guy isn't even mentioned now there's one reason I could say is that we don't know the names really we don't have the way these photographs were published and recorded at the time no one made notes of names of the Egyptian workmen we do know some of them we know them before senior guys Ahmed Gergar Gathe Sam Hussain Ahmed Salih and Hussain Abu Awad why don't we know their names as well as we know Pervertons or Howard Carter's and why can't we identify them specifically in the photographs that's a big gap in our knowledge but to not even mention as I've seen happen if there is an Egyptian workman archaeologist in the picture is quite an oversight and quite telling it wasn't only the experienced excavators who kept the excavation going and there were also a team of local carpenters that we see here in a photograph probably taken by the old carmaran himself and so it's the man and boy on the right are part of this team of local carpenters all three by the way are Christians and still are in this part of Egypt and then the man in the the topay hat is a friend of Carter's who pitched in for a couple of years he was a retired engineer named Arthur Calender and I've actually just heard that his great-nephew possibly I'll be able to check he might be working here but Calender had been an Egyptian engineer so he could stake railways because it was the British who built the railways in Egypt at the time Burton himself also had Egyptian men who worked with him again for 20 years more as assistants as photographers assistants we only know the name of one of them his son Burton and we know about him from letters of Burton's widow afterwards during the Second World War but here's a picture of these three of the assistants that are behind Burton Burton there and he's plus fours outside looking down outside the tomb and in this instance using a film camera a million picture camera which is a story in itself so all these Egyptian workers tried to think of as being part of the team seen at the time as second class and not named but I think that's something that we now need to challenge in terms of how we think about who excavated the tomb of Tehran and took the photographs so when we're gone thinking about the photography so Burton gets lent as it were by the Metropolitan Museum to Carter to partake in this find of the century in 1922 they were talking about that way this is the great discovery and photography was so important to the work of Tehran in the tomb that the schedule of work was actually adjusted to accommodate Burton to accommodate what he needed in practical terms the times of day which were best to shoot all those kinds of things there's a huge public interest in the tomb and this photograph gives you some idea of that because all the other people around there are not working, they're tourists so if you have already booked a tour to Egypt in the winter of 1922 to 1923 you really hit it lucky and people are pressing in they're looking down they're at the road level looking down at the tomb entrance and watching the work that's being done so there's huge public interest in the museum why Burton also takes publicity shots and tries to take some movie picture film snippets of which apparently have been digitized and preserved in the Metropolitan Museum he'd never used a film camera before but he sort of had to because one of the wealthy American patrons of the museum in New York bought the expedition a movie camera so he just kind of had to get on with it and there's lots of letters to the curator in New York saying he broke again I don't know how to develop the work but the first footage is really disappointing and actually the same patron then paid for Burton and his wife to go to Hollywood in between the first and second season and gets in training at the movie studio and the other thing is the post office it's all a bit more Trump really but it's all just sort of over the top we're going to take him to Hollywood and we're going to show this nice English photographer from Lincolnshire how to make a movie about the tune of tune on common which never actually happens for reasons which will become clear but again I think as a kind of side element of the photography we're working photography that Burton is there to do it tells us about the press interest, the public interest and the ambitions of the people who are involved in this project publicity have been orchestrated from the start of the discovery by Lord Carnarvon who signed a deal with the London Times giving them exclusive access to news about the tune interviews with the workers with the staff and with Burton's photographs this probably seemed like a good idea about Carnarvon at the time because it would help defray his expenses and give him a math piece give him an official way to present the tune but it immediately caused problems for two reasons first of all, this is an image from the illustrated on the news from sort of the other direction of the previous photo we saw all those tourists looking down the tune are taking pictures themselves so it was a struggle from the start to try to control the public presentation of the tune and photographs of the tune all they could control really was what Burton did inside the tune the second reason this was about the deal it was 1922 and either to have just one kind of call that one it's independence from Britain there's a long messy backdrop to that was a revolution 1919 and the British then acted in 1922 they acted unilaterally to call Egyptian elections while maintaining British control of the Suez Canal so it wasn't really what Egyptian politicians wanted but it was better than nothing so there's a newly elected national government in Egypt and they take a great source of pride as do many of the Egyptian population and cultural figures, literary figures newspapers in Egypt they're immensely proud of this fine of tune and common and the timing coming as it does he becomes a symbol of the resurrection of the whole country so for Egyptian papers to find themselves being told by a British lord that they have to talk to them in times to get news about the Egyptian discovery didn't go over very well as you can imagine and these are the kinds of photographs that the times had the first lived on so these are the first photographs that Bertrand took in the first chamber of the tune before everything was disturbed and was supposed to feel that this was just as it was completely untouched this is actually about six weeks after the initial discovery the tune has since been ripped up for electric lighting so this is made this photograph is only possible because there's electric lighting the basket there is propped up just so to hide a hole, an ancient hole which was perhaps hopefully made a bit larger so that Carter and Carnarovan and a couple of other people could get through secretly and have a look at what lay beyond so this photograph is but not if it seems but this is the kind of photograph that Carnarovan and Carter could control and Bertrand is the only person who takes the photographs inside and there we have it and that's what makes the real impact in the press is when these these are first published in January, the final year I think in early January of 1923 and I'll just show you the back of that same so that's an actual print I guess Bertrand was printing them and giving them to the times that they were posted to London so there's always a couple of weeks delay by the time they appear in the press and the back of the photograph and these things and objects really matter, the back is covered with copyright stamps and credit lines and not to be published for such and such a date it's all about what we call PR today so why was there so much press and public interest and that's pretty much who don't comment we tend to take it for granted that ancient Egypt is interesting we're probably all here today because the same ancient Egypt is interesting and I actually don't think anything is necessarily interesting I think it's always worth asking why then, why there so I mentioned earlier that political background right of the British occupation and the Revolution of 1919 which Bertrand had actually witnessed who was doing war work at the time for the British passport office and then it was only really 1920, so less than two years before the discovery that tourists had started to go back to Egypt Thomas Croke I think when they started its tours again in 1920 so there had been a few years when Egypt was just a place of bad news so I think the discovery of Tirocon in 1922 gives the British and the Egyptian press something positive to cover and something to claim for different purposes going back here's another spread from the illustrated London news which was a sort of sister of Italian so they had a reciprocal arrangement to use Bertrand's photographs so the discovery of an intact tomb in the Valley of the King was big news, yes it was a rare and astonishing find but the tomb and the photographs of the tomb became the arena for conflict that developed and was played out between Carter and the Egyptian antiquities authorities who for the first time were answering to the Egyptian government and I should explain, there's not a simple kind of nationalistic alliance here the Egyptian antiquities authorities it actually was run by a Frenchman and many of the lead employees were British so it's not that there's a simple framework but there's a context that are about what's going to be appropriate in an independent Egypt that you can't have girls and Howard Carter doing what they like any more inflecting and selecting conventions and basically the conflict was about who would own the finds and who had the right to speak for the tomb to speak for ancient Egypt and the Metropolitan Museum staff clearly felt that it was their right and they also felt they had the right to receive some of the finds from the tomb even though their contract if you read it the way I read it means that that wasn't such a rare find that those finds should stay in Egypt and nothing legally should have left the country but it's considered out for a debate that's why the Metropolitan Museum was so willing to help out by a weak experiment for a few weeks a year they weren't going to get a cut of finds and I think we can then see how photographs become part of this institutional narrative discourse of how the tomb is presented in press so this is a good spread for that from November of 1923 the peak of interest and the archaeologists white guys are spoken of as men of science men who use the utmost care and courtesy to remove objects from the tomb and carry them to the laboratory which is the picture that you see right up there that's the laboratory tomb that's the one stuff telling about that work this is a scientific endeavor and you can't argue with science can you and then we see Mace and Alfred Lucas the Egyptian government chemist working on the tombs is nicely kind of almost mirror photographs of them placed across the gutter of the newspaper doing terribly delicate and important things to objects yes the objects did require cleaning repair consolidation usually with wax because there was a fragile but this is really about presenting the work of British experts as science and science is something that only white men do only they have the authority over the fragile remains of Egypt's past let's compare that to a reconstruction done by a British artist but not published in the Times this was something that circulated separately and then gets picked up I found it in an Egyptian monthly magazine the Crescent Hilaal where we see Egyptian working only doing the work the very delicate fragile work of dismantling the shrines in the burial chamber these massive gilded wooden shrines that surrounded the sarcophagus and the coffins and so I think it's interesting perhaps that an Egyptian publication picked up on this illustration as a way to show well who is doing the work of archaeology now dismantling the shrines was a logistical nightmare and we do have Burton's photographs which show that you couldn't actually go up and look at the guys into the space it was a very confined space and it was a space of collective effort so here we have two of the four men Carter mayors were with his heron you know as he's comparing notes discussing what to do next and our calendar in the man that we saw earlier in the good helmet they had to take the shrines apart in order to get them out in that confined space and you could see this very little clearance to the ceiling so this photograph is going to tell us a very different story and we could read them in different ways again who's doing the work what's the nature of the work why take a photograph of it in the first place and how so Burton's had to bounce the electroplot of the ceiling here from the lamp so again electroplot and then a reflector in the back as well to help get this and I think you could think quite these photographs are they're showing they're partly a just in case I think just in case it all goes wrong and we've got photographs of these shrines get the drop of it but really they're also about showing that kind of care and the nature of the work the strain, the effort it's heroic anyway it's like making Carter in calendar that would be the narrative of the use of the British press they're the heroes but we could then look at them again in another way and actually who's doing the work and how are they doing it together two months after this photograph was taken this is the second season so two months later February 1924 Carter downed tools and what he called a strike he claimed that the Egyptian authorities were interfering with the work and so work on the team stopped for a year they locked him out of it in 1925 when a more pro-British Egyptian government had put in place with support from the British so it picks up in 1925 Britain no longer takes those kinds of shots we don't get the heroizing of work in progress in the tomb the mood has changed there's also no longer the contract with time so there's no longer incentive to take photographs like that showing work being done and helping to construct these narratives we do still get photographs as Britain takes this for all the people who had gathered for the start of the unwrapping of the Royal Mami, it's a momentous occasion so it's something to commemorate it's a very different kind of photograph here we've got Harman the Egyptian antiquities officials one of the oldest guys here Carl von Lepp from Robert Chauvin who's trying to train his Egyptologist in the 1870s in Karno and Ben completely shut out so here's a moment, there's a very different moment and then there's Carter looking a little bit chastened and a little bit nervous as well because they're about to unwrap the mummy and the man next to him here, Lako, is the Frenchman he's actually brought them to the service and he's trying to keep the whole thing going so photographs tell complicated stories when you start digging around the next few minutes, the last few minutes here, I want to look at more detail of the kind of photographs the kinds of photographs that Rotary took and we could start with the mummy unwrapping itself so they're quite, I think again if you just think, oh it's a photograph of such and such, it's quite a limited view on the Griffith Institute at Oxford University there are the beholders of how Karno's archives so they've got about half of the photographs the negatives of Burton's material and the way they've that you can search for these online you can really only search by, well what object is it so yes, we could think it is X it is the mummy and search by that, but the photographs are actually quite different and they're doing different things so this is a photograph looking down, you can see the tripod legs so it's not just possible in the burial chamber which won't very big if you remember how close the shrines were to the ceiling but as high as you can get with this camera to get a view of the mummy in its coffin, it's inside two coffins there because they're stuck together with resin so with the lids off and before it's moved out of the burial chamber has to be carried over to the laboratory for the unwrapping again it's a kind of insurance shot just in case something terrible goes wrong but also a bit of a you know, this is the condition as soon as we got the lid off as soon as we started looking at it it's a bit rough and ready you can see the cardboard boxes and brushes, tools lying around it's not a pretty pretty shot, it's not something they would have been thinking of publishing for instance a bit of a contrast then when it gets over to the laboratory too we're prepared for the unwrapping which is really more jiggling than unwrapping and cleaned up isn't it so nice clear space around a sheet draped around the coffin so it's being presented in a much more orderly fashion so again, a different kind of photograph and then photographs likely did in the rooms of the tombs photographs moving through the body as layers and objects are removed the pre-printed cards like we saw on the bases that are put here on bits of jewelry and amulets that are taken off of the body when they get to the point of on the last day decautating the body they take the head off in order to remove the gold mask and then they want to take photographs of the head and study the head so I think Burton had at this point a publication in mind he takes two photographs of the head lying on this nice clean square of a cloth and those are published cropped so that you only see the white background what that cloth is doing we know from photographs of the work in progress it's hiding the scissors and the scalpels and the flakes of linen textiles and rags that have come off of it so those I think have taken thinking that we might publish these and they look nice but he takes other shots which I think weren't to make the publication at all where the head is cropped up it's actually the handle of paintbrush on a rough wooden board and these photographs are taken full face taken for the back and taken left and right profile which is a very well established very long running on a century of history behind this visual trope bringing measuring skulls, studying skulls to pick these skulls and heads as part of race science so there's a way in which photography replicates and engages with earlier forms of visualizing the engine past in contrast to the 10 or so shots he takes of the head he takes almost 20 shots of the gold mine mask and regrets afterwards that he didn't take more that he didn't have more time so he pressed for time to get the gold mask and solve the gold coffin repair and conserve and ship to Cairo for security so he takes views from pretty much every angle that he can get of the gold mummy mask without its beard obviously being not attached if you remember that ridiculous news story from last year I wanted to then talk about the background that he's using in his backdrop we didn't have it in the first season but from the second season onwards you can see it better in this photograph he's using a round table with a round cloth covered board and then a stiff paper backdrop that goes halfway around it and again I know he's doing this in the daylight so one of the objects have been conserved, cleaned, repaired he's got them up there in the laboratory tomb and he can use that sheltered daylight area to bounce with his assistants that sunlight onto them and take as much of an exposure as he needs and that backdrop then helps minimize the shadows and gives them the light to bounce up of and then if you look at the bottom there's a number that has stayed with the object so we can get for one object we can get several photographs at different stages and sometimes a couple of different different angles and sometimes he plays around and tries a different angle or different lighting, different focus usually he gets the shot that he wants but he does tend to take two negatives, two photographs of each object and that's for a reason which I'll come back to right at the end that's because he's given two negatives to Carter and Carter then divides those roughly half and half keeps about half of them for himself and gives half of them to the Metropolitan Theon in York, so I'll come back to that so here we get this little gold statue of a snake one of mini statues from the tomb which all of which are found wrapped up in linen and kept in shrines so we again get kind of working progress shots, this interim stage of discovery so the objects we're kind of going backwards here now we've got the glamorous view and now we see this interim view looking down into the shrine where the objects are still wrapped up in linen that's with Egyptian art statues like this, that's what they were for they wanted to be seen they were saved projects to be wrapped up and kept out of sight and then in the same day so earlier in the day we go backwards in time again a shot of the same shrine in place of these staged shots of removing objects from the tomb and sometimes Britain will take two versions of that they'll take one like this one before the little number cards are in place but then you'll take another one with the little number cards in place so we're more of a kind of working photograph to help the archaeologists track the object through its different ladders through its stages and work that are going to turn it from an Egyptian object, whatever it was doing in ancient Egypt and turn it into something that archaeologists can use and stick it in a museum and I think these photographs are quite again you can read them in different ways or think about them in different ways one thing that they're doing, yes, is that practical task of helping keep track of objects as archaeologists remove them archaeology as a destructive process in a way it's about undoing all the things that have been done in the ancient past but then these photographs they've also convinced us quite successfully perhaps that we're seeing with ancient Egyptian eyes we're not, we're seeing with Burton's camera lens and it's not the same thing here we are again as we started Burton at that vertical style that I promised to explain just a little bit more about the setup so the camera's looking straight down at a piece of round box that's what we would say today and that's what the object is on that bit of charade there and then there's a white or light colored piece of car underneath it another photograph they're the same setup when he printed this he would have cropped it or you cropped it further down by object but you can see the frame there and the pale surface so and this is to reduce shadows there's still shadows here but photographic thing full of the bracelets that we saw still in place on the arms of the mummy looking very different here when they're isolated and pristine and organized with their cards on this glass background so the whole thing is to isolate the object and look it's just against this kind of clear pristine space that it's again for study or an object that you could put in a museum not every photograph that Britten took was a success and himself was anxious about whether he'd done the right thing sometimes and not every object from the tomb was as carefully catalogued and recorded and preserved as we're supposed to think and this was a long project 10 years it took from start to finish and done under very difficult conditions sometimes in every way by the time Britten actually took his last 20 photos which was around New Year's 1933 he took his last photos for Carter in the tomb and he wrote to his boss at the Metropolitan Museum that he was thrilled to be done and he was fed up with the work and with Howard Carter so isolation like this dead against this clean pale background here printed and mounted against another pale background of the photo album isolation that's certainly what many of the photographs in our collages produce seem to be about as if the more clear and clutter can depopulate in the images the closer it can get us to the real thing to ancient Egypt but as I said at the start of my talk today when we look at photographs as photographs we see that they aren't about isolation at all but about connections between times, places, ideas and most of all between people so I mentioned with the snake statue that Britten tried to take two exposures each time two near identical negatives so that Carter could keep one and the other could go to the Metropolitan Museum Britten's employer by 1928 about halfway through the project there were no objects from the Timothee Gang common we're going to be in Egypt legally instead Carter negotiated for the Egyptian government to repay the dowager counters of Karnarman for the expenses the family had incurred around £3,000 of time just to make that clear as I read it the Egyptian government paid for something legally and morally it already owned Carter also put some of his own money into the work the Metropolitan's contribution in kind through Britten's labour and Mesa's labour had more than £8,000 but the Metropolitan never pursued this with Carter or the Egyptian authorities and just kept seeing the natives and the albums so Britten's natives lived pair of alive between a Manhattan cold store and an Oxford archive room what that allows us to do I mean the importance that I mentioned was more than £3,000 of them although usually because of this duality we're usually seeing people say there's 1,400 or 1,500 there's actually many more what this allows us to do is to compare in some cases which negative did Britten actually print in how he printed so this bed is a good example of that he printed the negative that the Metropolitan Museum owned and that is the print in their albums and he's cropped it in close to the bed and we have a little number that if we look at Oxford's negative we can see is that inside Oxford's negative also shows us that what he cropped out are the two Egyptian youths assistants in the background holding up the bath job behind the bed who speaks for Ancient Egypt who really takes these photographs and who is to easily cropped out I hope in this talk today I've got a lot of material and a lot of different points we can see that the camera tells us a lot the camera tells us a lot about King Tino Common about his tomb in Ancient Egypt that's all quite true but when we look at photographs of what they are not just what they show we see something surely just as important we see art world and its recent histories some of which are more visible than others