Fred Boissonnas’ photographs were “a calling card” for a newly independent Egypt -1843

Swiss photographer Fred Boissonnas was tasked with commissioning a book of photographs of Egypt by King Fuad I in 1929, after the end of the British protectorate, Fleur MacDonald writes for 1843. The aim was “to show the country in its best light and remind people that British rule was merely a blip in thousands of years of civilisation.” Boissonnas work, “L’Egypte,” was published in 1932 and currently a selection of the photos he took for the book and from a subsequent trip to Sinai, are on display in an exhibition at the Royal Geographic Society in London. “This was soft power at its most sophisticated,” MacDonald writes.