The invention of photography allowed for an easier way of collecting a visual record of important sites and historical landmarks. For this reason, photographers from the streets of Paris to the deserts of Egypt, found themselves tasked with making that record. In “Harry Burton’s Photographs of the Metropolitan’s excavation at Deir el-Bahri” by Bruce Schwarz, Schwarz talks about one such photographer; Harry Burton. Burton was a photographer, active from the late 1800’s until his death in 1940, who spent most of his career photographing archeological dig sites for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his article Schwartz focuses of Burtons time at the Deir el-Bahri dig site in Egypt. As an excavation photographer, himself, Schwarz understood the difficulty of capturing a dig site and its archeological artifacts under unforgiving conditions. But unlike Schwarz, Burton used a large format camera that was as cumbersome as it …show more content…
The way he captured an artifact in his on-site studio or the depth of his dig site images led him to become one of the most well-known excavation photographers. He often had a way of utilizing the unforgiving desert sunlight to his advantage, using it to draw out every detail in his subject. He created these stunningly detailed images of whatever he photographed, allowing viewers to see every groove or crack in the artifacts his photographed. His photographs of dig sites were not bland two-dimensional accounts of progress but illustrative accounts of the anticipation and commotion of a site. His studio work was also phenomenal, his compositions drew views eyes to the intricacies statues by using light and shadows. In all the work Schwarz included, Burton had a way of using leading lines to highlight his subjects drawing attention away from background noise straight to the focus of the photograph. Burton’s images, where as Schwarz says “elegant” and