On the first of three trips to Egypt, John Beasley Greene created some 200 photographs. His work rarely documented favorite tourist sites in a conventionally descriptive manner; rather, he concentrated on poetic landscapes and archaeologically significant monuments. In this haunting photograph of Luxor, Greene's ability to depict expansive pictorial space is clearly evident. By surrounding the low, blocklike forms of the site's architecture with large vistas of vacant desert and sky, he emphasized a feeling of isolation and abandonment.
![[The Nile in front of the Theban Hills], John Beasley Greene, 1853–54](https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ph/web-large/DP-17115-001.jpg)
