Calendar

A Promised Land: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Birth of Photography

Name: Una tierra prometida. Del Siglo de las Luces al nacimiento de la fotografía
Start: 2023-09-20T12:00
End: 2023-09-20T20:00
Location: {

September 20, 2023 - August 18, 2024
Floors 0 and -1 of the Museum.
Group exhibition. University of Navarra Museum Collection

Photo: Thebes, Karnak. Elevation Perspective of the South Gate. Description of Egypt, 1809–1823, Paris.

The albums on display in the exhibition are courtesy of the Ernesto Fernández Holmann and Marta Regina Fischer Fernández Collection.

Artists: albums by Diderot and D’Alembert, Vivant Denon, La Description de l'Égypte, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Dionysius Ehret, David Roberts, Jean-François Champollion, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Genaro Pérez Villaamil, etc. and daguerreotypes, calotypes, and albumen prints by Girault de Prangey, Noël Lerebours, Maxime Du Camp, Félix Teynard, Auguste Salzmann, Francis Frith, Antonio Beato, Louis DeClerq, Félix Bonfils, Adelphoi Zangaki, Gustave Beaucorps, Alphonse Delaunay, among others.

Curators: Rafael Levenfeld and Valentín Vallhonrat

Throughout the 2023–2024 academic year, the Museum invites visitors to take a journey through the origins and development of photography via the University of Navarra Museum collection. The collection focuses primarily on Spanish and Latin American photography, along with a collection on the Orient, designed to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of photography.

The exhibition addresses the different facets of the nature of the photographic phenomenon as the origin of changes in the perception and definition of reality, but also as responsible for the renewal of artistic languages and disciplines from 1839, the year of its invention, to the present day.

It also addresses the conceptual origins of the birth of photography, such as physical, optical, and chemical advances on the one hand, and iconographic creation on the other, with an increasingly realistic appearance, within the tradition of scientific illustration that was renewed and exploited in the 18th century.
The exhibition A Promised Land: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Birth of Photography, with around 900 pieces, fills the rooms of the Museum to show the existence and emergence of the photographic phenomenon, focusing on a journey to the East, and its impact on the development and evolution of the image in society until the mid-19th century.

There are three main themes through which the curators guide visitors toward an understanding of this photographic phenomenon:

1- Collection of albums of drawings and engravings from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century. They reflect the knowledge of the world at that time, from flora and fauna to archaeology and antiquities, from the Middle East, Egypt, Latin America, and Europe.

2- The Napoleonic albums of the occupation of Egypt in 1798: La Description de l'Égypte. Original imperial edition.

3- First photographs of the East and Spain: daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, albumen prints, and photogravures.