Photography, Travel, and Travel Photography

The career of archaeologist and photographer John Henry Haynes (1849-1910) is all but unknown today. An orphaned farm boy from upstate Massachusetts, Haynes studied classics at Williams College and subsequently worked briefly as a high school principal. A chance encounter in 1880 led him to join the first American archaeological expedition to the eastern Mediterranean. He was apparently recruited on behalf of the recently founded Archaeological Institute of America by its president, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, with whom he maintained a lengthy correspondence. When his team was unable to obtain a permit to excavate on Crete, Haynes went to Athens, where he learned photography by working as the assistant to William J. Stillman, the erstwhile leader of the failed Cretan mission. Haynes’s engagement as an archaeological photographer began almost immediately thereafter, at the Assos excavations of 1881-83, the first American venture into classical archaeology. Rather than return to the United States at the end of the season, Haynes found employment at American mission schools in the Ottoman Empire, first at Robert College in Constantinople, where he taught Latin and English, and subsequently at Central Turkey College in Aintab (Gaziantep). Through the 1880s, Haynes traveled with a camera, documenting his journeys through Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia.  He joined the Wolfe Expedition of 1884-85, an archaeological reconnaissance mission to Mesopotamia, out of which grew the University of Pennsylvania excavations at Nippur (now in southern Iraq), which Haynes oversaw, first as business manager, later as field director. He also served as the first U.S. Consul in Baghdad (1888-92).