[Valley of the Tombs, Palmyra, Syria]

A naval officer and amateur photographer, Louis Vignes first made photographs, using paper negatives, on campaigns through Sicily, Turkey, Lebanon, and Palestine between 1859 and 1862. Because of his familiarity with the Middle East, Vignes was selected to accompany the archaeologist and early photography enthusiast, the Duc de Luynes, on a scientific excursion in 1864 from Beirut to Palmyra and areas surrounding the Dead Sea. A selection of sixty-four of Vignes’s photographs from this trip were reproduced as photogravures by Charles Nègre for the pictorial atlas of Luynes’s Voyage d’Exploration à la Mer Morte (1875). Nègre likely also printed several sets of albumen prints from Vignes’s glass negatives, including views of Palmyra, which were not published in the book. This photograph of the Valley of the Tombs shows the largely intact Tomb of Elahbel in the left middle ground of the view. The tower, built in 103 AD, was one of the best preserved monuments in Palmyra until it was destroyed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in 2015.
The dark smudges in the print are evidence of the difficulties Vignes faced while processing his negatives on site in challenging conditions.