Felix Bonfils, Europe, France, ca. 1875. A vintage albument print entitled, "Entrée de Jerusalem par la porte de Jaffa". Felix Bonfils was a French photographer who was captivated by the Middle East. In 1860 he was a bookbinder and joined General d'Hautpoul's expedition to the Levant. Upon his return from this trip, he became a photographer. When his son became ill, he recalled the beautiful verdant hills of Beirut and sent his son there to recover. In 1867, the entire family moved to Beirut where Bonfils and the family established a photo studio called Maison Bonfils. Felix Bonfils took thousands of photographs of the Middle East and in 1872 published "Architecture Antique" by Ducher press. Bonfils's work was appreciated by tourists of the Romantic Orient. This photograph is a fine example of Bonfils's oeuvre, an intriguing view of the Port of Haifa in the late 19th century, with Bonfils's signature in white at the lower left, and the title prefaced by number 1037 on the lower right. Size: photograph itself measures 9-1/4" x 11" (23.5 x 27.9 cm); on cardboard mount 11-7/8" x 9-7/8" (30.2 x 25.1 cm)

From the exhibition catalogue entitled, "Remembrances of the Near East: The Photographs of Bonfils, 1867-1907" (1980-1981), "Bonfils's photographs of the Near East - its landscapes, its cities, its architecture and its peoples - are some of the most telling and evocative traces of the Romantic Orient made in the last century. They are picaresque since they are images of travel and souvenirs of distant locales meant to instruct and entertain. They are picturesque in that they depict the exotic as well as the natural in order to pictorially delight. Formal rules of composition are consciously adhered to but just as intentionally abandoned for the spectacular and exceptional visual insights that are remarkably modern. . . Bonfils shared in and helped create the prolixity of the Oriental dream. No other firm produced such a consistent quantity of good photographic imagery of the Near East. It published literally tens of thousands of prints and lantern slides forming one of the most extensive visual anthologies of Near Eastern material culture. Bonfils's work is a veritable photographic chrestomathy, like those selected Arabic texts compiled earlier in the century and designed to teach the language, except here it is the visual language of the look of the Orient." (Remembrances of the Near East: The Photographs of Bonfils, 1867-1907 - and exhibition catalogue from the Collections of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House and the Harvard Semitic Museum- exhibition dates: May 23- September 1, 1980, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House; The Jewish Museum, NY, September 24, 1980 - January 4, 1981; The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL and the Harvard Semitic Museum, Cambridge, MA)

Provenance: Ex-private NYC, NY collection

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#109226

Minor creases, tear, and abrasion to lower left.