Claude-Joseph-Désiré Charnay French, 1828-1915
Désiré Charnay was an explorer almost from the beginning. Born in Fleurieux, he finished his education at the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris before traveling to Germany and Britain, and in 1850 moved to New Orleans to teach. After reading John Lloyd Stephens' popular accounts of his travels in Central America, published a decade before, Charnay returned to France to plan a trip of his own. In 1857 he traveled from France first to Boston, through the United States, and finally to Mexico. From 1858–60 he visited Mitla, Palenque, Chichen-Itza, and Uxmal. He photographed the sites, but was unable to conduct further archaeological research.
Upon his return to France, Charnay published a portfolio of nearly 50 views; a smaller edition appeared shortly thereafter. His animated account of his travels was accompanied by an essay on the monuments themselves by architectural historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Through this success, he was appointed photographer and writer to an official expedition to Madagascar in 1863. He later returned to Mexico and in 1875 traveled as a journalist to Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. He was sent by the French government to Java and Australia (1878-79). In the early 1880s he finally made the full-fledged archaeological expedition to the Yucatan Peninsula that he had dreamed of some 30 years before. In later years he returned again to Mexico, visited the United States, where he saw the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and made a voyage to Yemen.
Charnay's photographs, made with negatives of both paper and glass, combined a reverence for the past with the artistic and documentary possibilities of the new medium of photography. They are valued today for both their archaeological and their aesthetic content. T.W.F.
