Gaddis and Seif: The Unknown Pioneers of Egyptian Photography
Kenzy Fahmy
Tucked away at the foot of the Sofitel Winter Palace in Luxor is a small shop full of little treasures and souvenirs, reminders of Egypt’s wonders. From alabaster sculptures and other Pharaonic replicas to hundreds of books and photographs, the place is more than just a shop, it’s a museum, and it’s an important part of our heritage. It was here, in 1907, that Attiya Gaddis, and later Girguis Seif, opened a photography studio, becoming two of the first Egyptians to enter a field that had up until then been almost exclusively dominated by Europeans.
Throughout the 19th century, Egypt served as a playground for European ‘archaeologists’, a completely novel field still, and tourists, many of whom went back home with illustrations, photographs and even artifacts collected as souvenirs from their adventures here. But our story goes back a little farther than that, back to the infamous French campaign in Egypt.
Napoleon’s expedition was a failure in many ways; within a few years of him having landed on our shores, and after numerous military defeats, the larger-than-life general decided to flee back to a increasingly unstable France. He withdrew so quickly that most of his army and many of the scientists and artists that were part of the expedition were left behind. But out of this short-lived campaign the field of Egyptology was born. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, as well as the rigorous documentation of the country’s archaeological sites, sparked an interest in Egypt’s ancient history that would eventually lead to the frenzy of 19th century archaeology and tourism. Napoleon’s Description de l’Egypte almost singlehandedly birthed the obsession with Egypt and the wave of orientalism that filled the world’s museums and private collections with pieces of our heritage.
The late 1830’s saw another important turning point, the French invention of a new type of photography called daguerreotype photography, where images are fixed onto silver-plated copper sheets. With this invention, the photographic documentation of Egyptian culture and heritage became much more accessible. Further developments in the technology over the next few decades only made things easier, and advancements like shorter exposure times, reproducible negatives and the introduction of the flash were making it feasible to take pictures which would otherwise have been impossible.
By the mid-19th century, Egypt had begun to go through a massive growth spurt; the cotton industry was reaching its peak, industrialization and development were in full swing, and steam boats were making travel easier than ever. The country witnessed a flood of incoming tourists and expats, many of whom wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that could be found in the newly modernized country. Foreign photographers began setting up studios in Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said and Luxor to satisfy a rapidly growing demand not only for travel photography, but for portraiture too.
But economic limitations and restrictions in access to the necessary skills and equipment kept most locals away from this booming new field. Up until the 20th century, the only known Egyptian to produce photographs was Colonel Mohammed Sadiq Bey, who in the late-1800s took some of the earliest known pictures of Makka and Medina in Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t until the very early-1900s that the first Egyptians entered the market in any significant way, and this is where the two main characters of our story come in.
Attiya, who grew up in a small Upper Egyptian village near Luxor, lost his father while still a young boy, an event which prompted his mother to take him to Luxor so he’d have access to better education. The two lived there while Attiya attended school; at the time the town was sitting atop Luxor Temple, still mostly buried beneath the sand. It was in Luxor that Attiya met Antonio Beato, an Italian photographer who lived and owned a studio there. Working as Beato’s assistant, Attiya learned the ins and outs of photography and spent a great deal of time around the expats and tourists of the city.
When Beato passed away in 1906, Attiya bought the Italian photographer’s wooden box-camera, still on display at the shop until today, and opened his own photography studio the following year. Beato’s glass-plate negatives were apparently sold to the Egyptian Museum. Just a few years later, in 1912, Gaddis partnered up with Girguis Seif, a man about whom we actually know very little. But the partnership did not last long. By the 1930s, Seif had left Gaddis to open his own competing studio, which also did not last long. Seif’s studio quickly went out of business and his negatives were sold by his family and the glass was recycled; as far as we know nothing remains of them today.
Gaddis, however, went on to find great success, both as a photographer and as a shopkeeper selling valuable antiques and jewelry to the guests of the Winter Palace. He took photos of everything from the countless temples and tombs of Egypt, to the native tribes and farmers that lived along the Nile, to even the Kings and Queens who visited Luxor. He was there when Howard Carter made his infamous discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and he was there when the first Kodak cameras hit the market in Egypt, landing a deal to become one of the company’s first agents in the country.
Attiya Gaddis continued to run his incredibly successful business until his death in 1972. His son, Abdullah, who had already been working at the shop since the 40s, made the fortunate decision to take all his father’s glass-plate negatives and store them in a refrigerator. Had he not done this, they would have in all likelihood been lost forever, just as Seif’s were. The negatives remained in the darkness of cold storage for two decades, until an archaeologist in search of images by Gaddis and Seif visited the small shop and was shown the collection that had been preserved by Abdullah all these years.
Today, the more-than-hundred-year-old store is still run by the Gaddis family. Attiya’s grandson, Ehab, took on the mission of digitizing and preserving his grandfather’s legacy during the 1990s, publishing two books about his work. Prints and postcards can still be bought from the little shop in Luxor, as well as from Anni Z. right here in Maadi.
These photographs, preserved now for a full century, are an incredibly important part of our heritage. They show us an Egypt that had not yet been excavated, an Egypt that had not yet been developed in the way we know today. They show us a very different, very old yet very new Egypt. They serve as a valuable reference for modern archaeologists and historians, and in some cases, as the only record of sites and artifacts now long gone. They are pieces of both our tangible and intangible heritage, and they must be carefully preserved.