Andrea Coffman, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
It was the fall of 2008, and as a 2nd year graduate student in Photographic Preservation and Collection Management at Ryerson University, it was time for me to choose a topic for my Master’s thesis. I wanted to research photographs available to me in the rich collection at The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. It was there that I came across the work of the Zangaki Brothers, 19th-century Greek photographers based in Port Said, Egypt. I am American of Greek ancestry and so their name intrigued me. I found it notable that their loose, unbound prints were not stored in boxes under their name, as is the most common method of organizing photograph collections when the photographer’s name is known; they were stored in boxes sorted by genres such as “Landscape” and “Egypt”. There were certainly enough photographs in the collection to warrant their own box. This is how I landed on my thesis topic, which aimed to trace the trajectory of the Zangaki Brothers’ prints, and allow me to understand how those archival boxes at the GEM came to be.
One of the main outcomes of my thesis was tracking down the institutions worldwide that house photographs by the Zangakis. I began what I now consider to be the catalogue raisonné of their work, which grows to this day. I was able to correlate negative number groups with the locations where photographs were taken, and I created a map tracing the sites. One of the more curious facts I learned was that the only known extant negatives by the Zangakis are held at the Palestine Exploration Fund. Traveling to London to view these precious and rare negatives has been a goal of mine ever since.
During my research in 2008, I contacted a scholar in the PEF community, Dr Nikos Kokkinos, who had published some details on the Zangakis and we had a short and fruitful email exchange. Time passed, when in the summer of 2019 Dr Kokkinos contacted me to inquire whether my thesis had been published, and whether I was interested in joining forces, with the aim of producing a lacking book on the brothers.
Dr Kokkinos and I have since been collaborating on the project and have published two papers regarding dates of certain 19th century photographs made in Port Said, Egypt.
It then became imperative that I visited London and the PEF to examine the extraordinary negatives and meet Dr Kokkinos! At this point I learned of the grant program at the PEF, and I applied accordingly. I was honoured to be awarded a grant, and thus I came this past September to the beautiful home of the PEF, and finally saw the rare negatives.
Andrea Coffman at the PEF with a negative by the Zangaki Brothers. September 2024
The negatives came to the PEF in 1979 by way of the British Museum. From the PEF minutes of 4 December 1979: “The group had come [to the PEF], as a presentation by a German to a Sussex Museum who had given them to the Ethnographic Department of the British Museum who had given them to the Egyptian Department who had now passed them onto the Fund.” I have been in touch with these departments at the British Museum, however no one has been able to determine who the “German” was who gave the negatives to a “Sussex Museum”, nor which Sussex Museum is referred to.
PEF-P-1005 – (Jerusalem) Jardin de Gethsemani, Zangaki c. 1892 PEF Collection
What I realised is that the negatives are in excellent condition; great care was taken in their creation and storage. They are large (24 x 30 cm) gelatin dry plate negatives, firmly dating them in the 1890s. I believe they were all made in one trip that the brothers made to document important sites in the Holy Land, to sell to travellers on the “Grand Tour”.
Detail of PEF-P-1039 – (Jerusalem) Porte de Jaffa, Zangaki c. 1892 PEF Collection
It was thrilling to see the beautiful script of the captions in person and to note the care taken in identifying each location, written in an opaque yellow or orange ink along the bottom of each negative. The script would have been written in reverse, so that it would read correctly once printed onto the photographic paper. I am amazed at the calligrapher’s skill. It is also apparent that a later attempt was made to erase the Zangaki signature on many of the negatives.
An example of the erased Zangaki signature on PEF-P-1282 – Couvent de Mar-Saba, Zangaki c. 1892 PEF Collection
Ownership of the image was being tested (this would have happened well before they were transferred to the PEF). Thankfully there were several exceptions where their signature is unharmed, as shown below.
Detail of Zangaki signature on PEF-P-1268 – Bethleem vue d’ensemble, Zangaki c. 1892 PEF Collection
It was fascinating to also see their technique of blocking out the sky, a common way that photographers at the time hid imperfections in a negative, since photographic emulsions could not yet record blue sky and white clouds, it all came out white. There were some interesting masking techniques they used with orange paint and black paper.
Painted sky on PEF-P-1129 – Vue de Jerusalem, Zangaki c. 1892 PEF Collection
I am pleased to offer the images I made of each negative to the PEF, so they can share with other researchers and the public who may be interested in seeing what these negatives look like.
Dr Kokkinos’ and my work continues, and is much more focused now that we have a fuller understanding of the Zangaki’s picture-making techniques and dates. I am grateful to the PEF for this exceptional opportunity, and I look forward to sharing more as we continue our research.
