DuCamp made his only known photographs while traveling with the writer Gustave Flaubert through Greece, the Middle-East and Asia Minor between 1849 and 1851. Albumen prints made from DuCamp's negatives were assembled into a travel album titled Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (1852). This album, the first of its kind in France to use actual photographic prints, brought DuCamp's impressions of exotic and fantastic regions home to the French public. Fortunately for us, DuCamp recorded his experiences in extensive notes.
Every time I visited a monument I had my photographic apparatus carried along and took with me one of my sailors, Hadji Ismael, an extremely handsome Nubian, whom I had climb up on the ruins which I wanted to photograph. In this way I was always able to include a uniform scale of proportions.
The great difficulty was to get Hadji Ismael to stand perfectly motionless while I performed my operations; and I succeeded by means of a trick whose success will convey the depth of naiveté of this poor Arab. I told him that the brass tube of the lens jutting from the camera was a cannon, which would vomit a hail of shot if he had the misfortune to move--a story which immobilized him completely, as can be seen from my plates.
The day I was returning from Dendera I overheard the following conversation between him and Raïs Ibrahim--a curious account of a photographic expedition:
"Well, Hadji Ismael, what news?" asked the raïs as we boarded the cange. "None," the sailor answered, "The Father of Thinness ('Abu Muknaf,' as I am called by my crew) ordered me to climb up on a column that bore the huge face of an idol; he wrapped his head in the black veil, he turned his yellow cannon towards me, then he cried: 'Do not move!' The cannon looked at me with its little shining eye, but I kept very still; and it did not kill me."
"God is the greatest," said Raïs Ibrahim, sententiously.
"And our Lord Mohammed is his prophet," replied Hadji.
From Photography Speaks
By Brooks Johnson, 1989
The Aperture Foundation/The Chrysler Museum,
Norfolk, Virginia
Retrievers' notes: I've extracted material from this book on a number of occasions and I highly recommend it. It is wonderful compilation of essays and revelations by photographers through the years about the theory and practice of their art. I don't know if the book is still in print, but it appears regularly as a used book in the photography section of Powell's, and can be found at most camera shows.