DescriptionIllustrated with 50 albumen prints, mounted one-per-page within printed border, printed titles and numbers on mounts, with the title page inscribed Richard Reesh, Lieutenant of the US Navy, August, 1877 in ink. Félix Bonfils (1831 - 1885) was a prolific French photographer, one of the first to have a commercial studio in the Middle East, arriving in Beirut with his family in 1867. The studio produced thousands of landscapes, architectural studies, portraits and posed scenes, largely for the tourist trade. In the 1870s, he began publishing a series of albums of original photographs and by 1877-78, he published his best known work, Souvenirs d'Orient, containing photographs from Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Greece. It could be argued that through the European photographic lens, landscape photography contributed towards erasure of human life in the world’s archives.