The Musée d’Orsay is exhibiting a rare album of photographs taken by Louis Robert Cuvier in 1866 and 1867, a valuable record of the extreme worksite that was the construction of the Suez Canal. This collection offers a good example of how photography, the quintessential medium of the industrial age, was very early used to address technological, financial, commercial, and diplomatic issues.
Carried out between 1859 and 1869 under the direction of Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, the construction of a canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea across the Isthmus of Suez was one of the most significant civil engineering ventures of the 19th century. In 1863, a turning point occurred in the management of this project located in the middle of the desert, when the forced labor of Egyptian peasants was abandoned, giving way to a mechanization effort unprecedented in the field of public works. That same year, Louis Robert Cuvier was among the French executives recruited as conductors by the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez.
Three years later, he was found as a photographer at the camp on the rocky threshold of El Guisr, the highest point halfway along the canal route. From this strategic position, Cuvier carried out several expeditions that took him as far as Port Said in the north and Suez Harbour in the south. Often dated the day they were taken, his photographs constitute some of the first reports on the canal. From 1867, two years before the canal’s inauguration, some of them were collected in the Album de l’Isthme de Suez, a copy of which is kept at the Musée d’Orsay.
As the digging of the canal reached its final phase, the photographer’s aim was no longer to explain through images the innovative organization of work around steam engines, nor even to represent the evolution of the infrastructure in a sequential manner. Cuvier’s approach oscillated rather between the descriptive precision of the informed eye he cast on the machines implemented by the Company’s partner companies, and the restitution of the grandiose amplitude of the main theaters of operations orchestrated by the latter. By attesting to the smooth running of the work and the quality of the equipment installed on an Egyptian territory undergoing profound change, the results of this campaign were likely to satisfy the needs of the various stakeholders involved, whether in terms of documentation or communication. The medium par excellence of the industrial age, photography is here used to serve technological, financial, commercial and diplomatic issues, all exacerbated by the holding of the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Against the backdrop of Franco-British rivalry for control of the route to India, the prints delivered by Cuvier perpetuated the image of a pharaonic construction site, a spectacle of Western modernity in the East.
Louis Robert Cuvier : The Construction of the Suez Canal
Until August 31, 2025
Musée d’Orsay
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
75007 Paris, France
www.musee-orsay.fr
