Le Yucatán est ailleurs, expéditions photographiques de Désiré Charnay 

When an exhibition invites one to travel, the catalogue is an additional reason to escape reality. Especially when it draws up the portrait of an adventurer, a constant traveler, with a biography full of obscure corners such as Désiré Charnay, a photographer and explorer of the XIXth century. Though he is not as familiar to us as he is to the North Americans, we knew a little about his epic photography campaigns in the Maya jungle, at the time of the rediscovery of the great temples (Palenque, Uxmal, Yaxchilán). Would he have liked digital cameras, instead of the heavy plates of collodion he carried around? He who was forced, when his luggage did not arrive in time, to make his own cellulose nitrate…During his career, that was as long as that of Lalique’s (see above), he taught in New-Orleans in 1850, photographed Yucatan in 1858, Madagascar in 1863, Indonesia in 1878, Yemen in 1896, Algeria in 1897. All this traveling was before the invention of low-cost flights… And in 1910, at the age of 82, he was still a lecturer at the museum of the Trocadero! This little catalogue combines reproductions, technical remarks and thoughts about traveling (the title, « Yucatán is elsewhere», is taken from a work by the artist Robert Smithson), and can be read like an adventure novel. What a shame it is a little expensive…

• Le Yucatán est ailleurs, photographic expeditions by Désiré Charnay, museum of Quai Branly/Actes Sud, 2007, ISBN : 2-7427-6527-0, 96 p., 29 €