SFMOMA, Part 25: Floor 3, Pritzker Center for Photography.
On Floor 3, in the Pritzker Center for Photography, there is a pyramid photographed in 1858, and it is lying.
Not about being a pyramid. Francis Frith's The Second Pyramid from the Southeast gets the geometry right — the limestone courses, the desert floor, the 19th-century sky with nothing in it but weather. What it lies about is time. The photograph presents the pyramid as eternal, empty, waiting — a monument outside history, photographed by a man who arrived with a wagon full of glass plates and a business plan. But the pyramid in 1858 was not outside history. Egypt was being carved up by European powers, the Suez Canal was under construction, and Frith's camera was part of the carving. The photograph is beautiful. The photograph is also a claim: this place is ancient, this place is empty, this place is available.
Picturing North Africa is on view on Floor 3 at SFMOMA, February 21 through November 2026, drawn from the Paul Sack Photographic Trust, included with general admission. The exhibition gathers nineteenth-century photographs of North Africa — Egypt, the pyramids at Giza, the temples at Philae, and the 1868 British expedition to Abyssinia — and asks what the camera was doing there.
The easy reading is that these are marvelous early photographs — some of the first ever made of these places, technically astonishing, historically precious. And they are. But the subject is sharper than that. Picturing North Africa is a show about the imperial camera: how photography, from its first decades, served as the advance guard of empire, and how the pictures it made still shape what the West thinks North Africa looks like. The show names its framework outright — Orientalism, Edward Said's 1978 thesis that the West invented "the Orient" as a stage for its own fantasies — and then makes you feel the thesis working, print by print.
1809–1858: The fantasy comes first
The show starts before photography does, and that is the point.
In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte's savants began publishing the Description de l'Égypte — twenty-three volumes of engravings, maps, and measurements from the French expedition of 1798–1801. It codified the European fantasy of North Africa: monumental, ancient, exotic, empty of any present worth noticing. By the time photography arrived in 1839, the fantasy was already fully formed. The early photographers did not discover North Africa. They illustrated a story Europe had already written.
Francis Frith understood the assignment better than anyone. A former grocer turned photographer-entrepreneur, he made three expeditions to the Middle East between 1856 and 1860, hauling a darkroom wagon through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, producing mammoth-plate albumen prints — enormous, impossibly detailed — that he published as Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described and sold by subscription to armchair travelers back in England. The Second Pyramid from the Southeast (1858) and The Hypaethral Temple, Philae (1858), both in the show, are the masterpieces of the genre: sharp as engravings, composed like paintings, utterly convincing as records of a timeless Orient.
The trick is in what the photographs leave out. No crowds. No contemporary life. No evidence that anyone in 1858 actually lived next to these monuments, worked around them, had opinions about the Englishman with the wagon. The emptiness is the argument: a land of monuments is a land without people, and a land without people is a land that can be claimed. Frith was not a soldier. But his photographs did the cultural work that made soldiers possible.
1868: The camera goes to war
The show's coldest room belongs to Sergeant Harrold and the Royal Corps of Engineers.
In 1868, Britain sent a military expedition to Abyssinia — now Ethiopia — after Emperor Tewodros II imprisoned a group of Europeans, including the British consul. The response was absurdly disproportionate: 13,000 British and Indian troops, 40,000 camp followers, elephants hauling Armstrong guns over mountain passes, all to storm a single fortress at Magdala. Tewodros freed the hostages, then shot himself rather than surrender. The British looted the fortress — manuscripts, crosses, the emperor's own crown, much of it still in British museums — and marched home. It was one of the first campaigns in history to be systematically photographed, and the images in Picturing North Africa, like Abyssinian Dwellings (1868), are among the earliest photographic records of British military operations abroad. They are also the show's thesis in miniature.
Look at them carefully. Dwellings without dwellers, landscapes without armies — abstract, suspended in time. The Royal Engineers were not making art. They were making intelligence: terrain surveys, route documentation, the visual infrastructure of invasion. But the photographs borrow the aesthetic of Frith's picturesque views — the same emptiness, the same monumentality — and the borrowing reveals the continuity. The tourist's camera and the soldier's camera were pointed at the same thing, for the same reason. The exhibition argues, quietly and devastatingly, that these images "anticipated the subsequent 'scramble for Africa'" — the carve-up of the continent by European powers in the 1880s and after. The camera arrived first. The flags followed.
This is the part of the show that rearranges your understanding of photography itself. We are used to thinking of the camera as a witness — it was there, it saw, it recorded. Picturing North Africa proposes the opposite: the camera was a scout. It went ahead of empire, mapped the terrain visually, and taught the folks back home to see foreign land as picture — beautiful, ancient, and essentially unoccupied.
1987–2026: The collector who only bought buildings
The photographs come from the Paul Sack Photographic Trust, and Sack's story is the show's strangest footnote.
Paul Sack is a San Francisco real estate investor who started collecting photography in 1987 with a single rule: every photograph had to depict a building that could ostensibly be bought or leased. It is the most literal-minded collecting criterion in the history of connoisseurship, and it produced one of the great American photography collections — more than a thousand images, spanning 1840 to the mid-1970s, now promised to SFMOMA through an innovative charitable trust. His first purchase was Walker Evans's South Street, New York City (1934). From there he built deep holdings in nineteenth-century pioneers — William Henry Fox Talbot, Édouard Baldus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Frith — in Eugène Atget, in American modernism (Sheeler, Bourke-White, Cunningham), in the European avant-garde (Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Umbo).
The building rule sounds like a joke until you see Picturing North Africa, and then it stops being funny. Sack collected buildings. The nineteenth-century photographers photographed buildings — temples, pyramids, dwellings. And the empire those photographs served was, at bottom, a real estate transaction: the transfer of land from the people who lived on it to the people who photographed it. Sack's criterion, applied innocently to a century of pictures, accidentally describes the whole colonial project. Every building in the show could ostensibly be bought or leased. That was the idea.
The show, again
Back on Floor 3, back to the pyramid. What makes Picturing North Africa essential — and what separates it from a hundred other exhibitions of beautiful old photographs — is that it refuses to let the beauty do the talking. The photographs are presented not as windows onto North Africa but as mirrors held up to Europe — evidence of what the West wanted to see, and what it needed the camera to prove.
Go before November. Stand in front of Frith's pyramid and notice how empty it is, and then notice that the emptiness was a choice — a darkroom choice, a compositional choice, a political choice. The pyramid is still there. The photograph's lie is still working. The show's achievement is that, for the length of a gallery visit, you can see both at once: the monument, and the claim. 🌁
Timeline — the camera and the colony
1798–1801 — Napoleon's expedition to Egypt; the Description de l'Égypte (1809–29) codifies the Orientalist fantasy
1839 — photography is announced; within years, practitioners turn their cameras toward North Africa
1856–60 — Francis Frith's three expeditions; mammoth-plate views of Egypt, Palestine, Syria
1858 — The Second Pyramid from the Southeast; The Hypaethral Temple, Philae
1868 — British expedition to Abyssinia; Sergeant Harrold and the Royal Engineers make some of the first war photographs
1880s — the "scramble for Africa"; the camera's work bears fruit
1987 — Paul Sack buys his first photograph (Walker Evans); the building rule begins
2026 — Picturing North Africa, Floor 3, SFMOMA, February 21–November
Today — the show on view, drawn from the Sack Photographic Trust, 151 Third Street