Fred Boissonnas and the Oasis of Siwa

A Swiss Perspective on the Western Desert (1929-1930)

In 1929, Geneva-born photographer François-Frédéric "Fred" Boissonnas (1858-1946), then seventy-one years old but already renowned for his reportage on Greece, was invited to Egypt by King Fuad I to produce a monumental photographic work meant to present the country to the world. The contract, signed on April 4, 1929 with Mohamed Zaki El-Ibrachi Pasha (director of the king's private bank) and publisher Paul Trembley, called for a luxury folio volume with 200 photogravure reproductions, including at least 40 individual plates, to be completed within 18 months.

Accompanied by Trembley, Boissonnas traveled across Egypt for eleven months, venturing well beyond the Nile: his itinerary included the oases of the Western Desert, among them the Fayoum, Dakhla, Kharga, and Siwa (Siouah) itself.

The catalog of the work indeed includes a plate dedicated to a spring in the oasis, titled "Une source. Oasis de Siouah," a sign of the attention the photographer gave to this remote and, at the time, still little-documented corner of the Western Desert.

The outcome of this campaign was the volume "Égypte", published in Geneva in 1932 under the high patronage of His Majesty Fuad I, with contributions from scholars such as Gustave Jéquier, Pierre Jouguet, and Henri Munier. The lithographs and decorative bandeaux were designed by his son Henri Boissonnas, while the printing was entrusted to the Parisian workshops Leblanc and Trautmann—the same ones that worked for Picasso.

Beyond its documentary value, scholars (such as Estelle Sohier and Oriana Baddeley) read Égypte as a genuine "photographic monument for the Egyptian nation": a cultural diplomacy project in post-colonial Egypt that echoes the tradition of Napoleon's Description de l'Égypte, yet with an aesthetic already tinged with modernism.

For scholars of Siwa, Boissonnas's images remain a valuable and still under-explored photographic record of how the oasis appeared in the late 1920s, before the great transformations of the twentieth century.