[PHOTOGRAPHY - SUEZ CANAL]. ARNOUX, Hippolyte (fl. 1860-1890), photographer. A rare uncut sheet of 10 carte-de-visite albumen photographs. Paris/Port Said, ca. 1869.
Unmounted sheet, 10 ¾ x 5”. The photographs depict Port Said taken around the time of the opening of the Suez Canal. The highlight of one of the photographs, which aids to date the images, is captioned “Fare de Port Saïd” and shows the iconic lighthouse designed by François Coignet at the request of the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, Ismail the Magnificent.
Construction was completed in the first week of November 1869, one week prior to the inauguration of the Suez Canal, therefore, these images were not taken before 1869. In the foreground and beginning its trajectory towards the lighthouse, a jetty of the port is under construction, being made up of blocks of cement each ten cubic metres in volume. The jetty was completed circa end of 1869 or beginning of 1870, and is here in its early stages of construction. Incidentally, the lighthouse, too, was built in reinforced concrete. The use of these two materials was unparalleled in France and these two unprecedented were ground-breaking feats in the history of port construction.
[With:] a carte-de-visite portrait photograph of Ferdinand de Lesseps (Paris, 1863), taken by Charles Reutlinger (1816-1888). Lesseps was a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869 joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia.