The Man Who Shot Tutankhamun

Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

The ancient burial place of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The discovery of his tomb in 1922

made the archaeologist Howard Carter a global celebrity.

But it was another member of Carter's team

who played the crucial role in telling his story to the world.

He doesn't appear in the excavation photographs,

because he was the man who took them.

His camera made the world fall in love with the boy king, Tutankhamun.

And helped fuel my own enduring fascination

with this remote and mysterious culture.

I wanted to find out more about this photographic pioneer

who created such wonderful pictures

in the most testing conditions imaginable.

To help me, I enlisted a photographer

who uses similar techniques.

-OK, hold still.

-CAMERA CLICKS

It's fine. Yes!

Together, we'll investigate the work

of an unsung hero of British photography,

and travel back to the site of his greatest assignment.

We'll discover how he pushed the limits of 1920s technology

in the grit and heat of the desert,

and created a remarkable treasure store of images.

This is a beautifully laid out picture.

Well thought out. It's like an old master, in a way.

We'll recreate his darkroom in the depths of an ancient tomb.

And to think we're right, literally,

exactly where Burton would have developed his own negatives.

And reveal the enduring legacy of his work.

They are one of the basic, go-to sources for us.

Anyone who's studying Tutankhamun uses those.

And we'll learn why his techniques are still used today

to unpack the secrets of Egypt's ancient past.

This is the story of the most famous photographer

you've probably never heard of.

His name was Harry Burton -

The Man Who Shot Tutankhamun.

BIRDS CHIRPING

3,000 years ago, a stately procession of priests and mourners

made their way through these desert hills,

a few miles west of the ancient city of Thebes,

or Luxor as it's called today.

They came to bury a young man who'd died suddenly and mysteriously,

nine years into his reign as Pharaoh.

Tutankhamun's body, and the precious artefacts buried with it,

lay undiscovered for centuries.

In the early years of the 20th century,

British archaeologist Howard Carter was determined to find them.

This dig-house in the Valley of the Kings

was headquarters for his long quest,

bankrolled by the wealthy aristocrat Lord Carnarvon.

They employed a small army of local workmen,

who shifted thousands of tonnes of sand and stones.

But, after eight years of searching,

they'd failed to find anything of significance.

And Carter's time was running out.

Lord Carnarvon was about to cut off Carter's funding.

But everything changed when one of the workmen brushed away the sand,

to reveal a hidden staircase leading to an underground tomb.

The date?

4th of November 1922.

Two weeks later, at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor,

Carter and Carnarvon announced the news to the world.

They'd solved one of archaeology's greatest mysteries -

they'd uncovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

And that was just the start of the story.

BIRDS CHIRPING

Carter knew that he needed a crack team to help him excavate the site,

and to tell the stories of the treasures it contained.

So he sent out a call for archaeology's brightest and best -

diggers, conservation experts, professors of hieroglyphics.

And a photographer called Harry Burton.

CAMERA CLICKS

For the next ten years, Burton had a front seat

as the greatest story in the history of archaeology

unfolded in the Egyptian desert.

His camera recorded in exquisite detail

the extraordinary artefacts from the tomb...

..and captured each chapter in this dramatic story of revelation.

He created images that gripped the world's imagination,

and played a crucial role in creating the legend of Tutankhamun.

The search for this master of British photography

begins a world away from the heat and dust of the desert.

Most of Carter's wonderful things are still in Egypt.

But for anyone with a passion for ancient history,

there's a store of other treasures from his excavation much to home.

This is the Griffith Institute in Oxford.

Tucked away in the basement are Howard Carter's meticulous archives

of his ten-year adventure in the Valley of the Kings.

Like so many great adventures,

it all began with a map.

This is Carter's original map of the Valley of the Kings.

-So there's a sort of grid system that he drew?

-That's right.

He divided the Valley of the Kings into a series of grid squares,

and he worked through them systematically

in the search for Tutankhamun's tomb

until there was just one grid square remaining,

close to the entrance of the tomb of King Ramses VI.

This is where they found Tutankhamun's tomb?

This is where they found the first steps leading to a tomb.

At this point, they didn't know that it was King Tutankhamun's tomb.

Well, he must have been terribly excited. Was he?

Yes. Certainly. This is Carter's original diary from 1922.

And if we turn to the page for Saturday the 4th of November,

we see he writes, across the page,

"First steps of tomb found."

This is quite unusual for Carter.

Normally, he stuck very tightly and neatly to the lines.

-But here he...

-This was just exciting!

Yes, just about as excited as Carter gets.

One of those pivotal moments, isn't it?

It's passed into popular folklore,

everyone knows Carter found wonderful things.

Carter was no mere treasure hunter.

He was a new breed of archaeologist

who wanted to excavate and record his finds with scientific rigour.

Within days of uncovering the stairway,

he began taking photographs,

but he wasn't happy with the results.

Carter was a trained artist, he was a great painter,

also a skilled photographer,

but I think he realised that he would need a real professional

in order to take photographs inside the tomb,

in what were going to be very, very difficult conditions.

It was very dark, packed with objects.

And so he needed a real professional to do the work.

And I suppose he had to do other things too, didn't he?

He had an awful lot on his plate, of course,

during the excavation of the tomb.

This was Carter's original team.

Including the man who stayed by his side

through every twist and turn of the excavation.

Which one's Burton?

So this is Howard Carter in the centre,

and just over his shoulder is the photographer, Harry Burton.

'Ancient Egypt has intrigued me for years.

'But I'd never heard Burton's story.

'He shunned the limelight, although his pictures made Carter a star.

'I want to find out more about this elusive man.

'How did he create the wonderful photographs

'that Egyptologists still study today?

'And, like Carter, I've recruited a photographer to work with me.'

Just fantastic.

'Harry Cory Wright still shoots today with a large format camera,

'like the one Burton used to make pictures like these.'

What a beautiful thing.

'But there's one crucial difference between Harry's camera and Burton's.

'Harry shoots on film,

'whereas Burton used an earlier technology called glass plate.

'His original negatives are another treasure

'in the archive of the Griffith Institute.

'And they are full of clues to his photographic methods.'

Look, Margaret, look at these.

So these are the glass plates themselves,

that would have been in the camera at the time.

Why did he use glass plates? Wasn't there film?

Well, I think there was film around,

but I don't think it was in any way as stable.

The technology of film was just developing at the time,

but I think glass was that much more predictable, really.

Glass plate negatives had been used since the early days of photography.

A thin glass sheet was coated with silver nitrate emulsion,

which reacted to light when the shutter was released.

CAMERA CLICKS

The negatives were then developed to make prints.

Burton's expertise with this process is extraordinary.

How did he make these delicate masterpieces

in hostile desert terrain?

It's incredibly fragile.

Imagine you're developing this, and it's dusty, and also...

I can't tell you, when it's wet...

Wet emulsion, it just gathers dust, gathers everything.

It's just extraordinary how good nick these things are in.

What I think is so amazing about these

is that this tells the whole story of the excavation.

This is what photography at its best can do,

which is show high drama.

Then, also, it can be lyrical and sweet.

You know, his head coming through it,

and the gentleman at the back here. All these other incidental things.

I want to get down and have a look closely in here,

and see what cufflinks he was wearing.

-And his ring.

-His ring. Yeah, exactly.

And what do you feel, Cisco, when you're working with this material?

First of all, that you have to be very careful.

These are very important documents.

Very fragile.

But it's nice to see people at work.

We read about Carter, about the different members of the team,

so you get to know them better.

And there's something very, very exciting, I think,

about how what we are looking at, we're looking at the originals.

So they have the chemicals

that reacted to the light that was there.

And the extraordinary thing about photography is that light can just,

kind of, keep something charged and held for a long time.

And in this case, you know, for nearly 100 years.

I've asked Harry to come with me to Egypt and take photographs there

using Burton's methods and equipment.

Together, we'll investigate how he created such flawless images

using analogue technology that he must have pushed to its limits.

This is a beautifully laid out picture. Well thought out.

Very much about the people and the human side of it.

It's like an old master, in a way, the way he's kind of composed that.

I mean, this one here, this has a sort of journalistic quality to it,

which is very different to those others.

By the time Carter came calling,

Harry Burton had worked in Egypt for more than ten years.

It was a long way from his modest childhood in Stamford, Lincolnshire.

His father was a cabinet maker or a carpenter.

So a pretty humble beginning.

But Burton seems to have been clever,

he seems to have been going to school,

and at some point, as a teenager, we don't know how,

he came into contact with a man from a prominent local family,

a man named Robert Henry Hobart Cust.

Cust's patronage opened new doors for Burton.

He left Stamford to work as personal assistant

to this wealthy art enthusiast, who had a home in Italy.

He invites Burton, when Burton's about 17, to join him in Florence.

As a secretary, basically. A secretary and a companion.

And it's there that Burton enters a whole new world.

They wind up living in the centre of Florence,

right near the Ponte Vecchio, in a beautiful apartment,

and threw wonderful parties and knew all these Brits

who were flooding into Florence and soaking up the atmosphere

of Renaissance Italy, and a warmer climate.

We don't know exactly how Burton picked up photography,

or how he learned it.

But at this time, in the 1880s, 1890s,

it would have been really useful for him as Cust's assistant

to be able to take photographs when they were visiting museums,

visiting private collections,

visiting cathedrals for Cust's research.

It clearly becomes a real passion for him,

and he seems to start to get a reputation for it.

In Florence, Burton met an American called Theodore Davis,

a multimillionaire with a passion for Egypt.

He'd made a mint, and possibly some dodgy deals, in New York City,

he had a huge house that he'd built Newport, Rhode Island,

and he had retired and liked to spend his winters in Egypt

and in Italy.

Davis could afford to do

what the Egyptian government at that time couldn't.

The Egyptian government was flat broke after bankruptcy in the 1870s.

And so to have Davis's money was perfect.

And Davis was given the plum concession

of excavating in the Valley of the Kings.

Davis recruited Burton to his team -

he worked as an archaeologist at first,

but soon began to focus on photography instead.

When Davis retired home to America in 1914,

Burton stayed on to work for the New York Metropolitan Museum,

who had their own team in the Valley of the Kings.

By 1922, he was known as the best excavation photographer in Egypt.

But he was about to begin the assignment

that would earn him international recognition.

Because Howard Carter had just made the discovery of the century.

So this is the real entrance, and, in fact, right here,

Carter would have been coming down, and underneath -

you can't see because there are these metal stairs -

but that's the real step that he saw.

4th of November 1922.

This one step change the course of Egyptological history.

For Carter and Carnarvon, this was a time of triumphant vindication.

Day by day, step by step,

they dug their way down to the Pharaoh's tomb.

So this, you have to imagine, when Carter came here,

was actually filled with dust and limestone chipping and sand...

Why...why was it full of all that stuff?

Ah, because when you re-bury, you actually fill it all up,

so thieves don't get through.

Except of course, the thieves did,

because there was a little passageway, a tunnel,

that the thieves had made through all of this limestone,

and so, of course, when Carter was looking at this,

he was probably...there was foreboding in his heart, thinking...

The thieves might have emptied it?

"What will happen when we get down?

"Will there be anything? Will there not be anything?"

This was where Carter peered into the darkness,

and saw a chamber packed to overflowing with wonderful things.

-So this is the antechamber.

-Yep. Here it is.

With, now, a false floor. Presumably it was lower down, wasn't it?

-Yes.

-And this, the mummy...

'Many things have changed here

'since the great Pharaoh was laid to rest all those centuries ago.

'His remains have been taken from the sarcophagus

'and placed in a climate-controlled glass case.

'And all the extraordinary objects buried with him

'were removed long ago for safekeeping in museums.

'It's hard to imagine what this empty space looked like

'when Carter discovered it full of the Pharaoh's treasures.

'But at least we have Burton's images to turn back time.'

So this is one of Burton's photographs of this end of the room.

-Mm-hm. Yeah.

-And there's the chariot wheels...

Right, these ones over there.

And these are very nice,

because you've got the little stools that Tutankhamun sat on.

He actually sat on?

Or they were there for him to sit on in the afterlife?

No, I think they were actually things that he used.

And what's nice is that, even in the Burton picture,

sometimes you get the sense of scale,

you get small things and big things.

When he was a child, when he was grown up.

And that's the back wall.

Yes, which had more chariotry and a little bit of...

you know, smaller boxes.

You can see nearly all of two couches. Can't you?

Yes, the hippo couch is there,

and then you've got the big curved tail on this one here.

-What are these things?

-These are the food boxes.

Ah, the picnic!

His picnic, so he could not be hungry in the afterlife.

And then some of the boats and coffers up there.

And you can see the walls are still the same, can't you?

Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Just, sort of, this big, blank, room.

But what gave it its sort of excitement

was all of the stuff in it.

It really was chock-a-block.

Right and then this is the other end of the room,

with those two guardian statues, so over there...

There's one here, this one here,

and then that one flush to that wall.

But not symmetrical to this one?

No. They're a little bit off centre.

Because the opening wasn't actually completely centred.

-But they are guarding the opening?

-Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And it wasn't as wide as this, either, was it?

No, no. Of course, this has been broken open,

because ultimately they had to extend it

so they could take the shrines apart and bring them out.

It's only because of this photograph

that we can actually see the wall back in position.

Yes. Sadly, with archaeology,

you have to destroy if you're going to discover anything,

but you'd need a meticulous record like Burton's photographs

if you're going to be successful.

This was an unparalleled discovery -

an almost completely intact royal burial.

It took months to record the tightly-packed treasures

in the antechamber.

First, Burton took establishing shots

to record the position of objects,

like the extraordinary animal-shaped couches.

Then he took close-ups of each carefully numbered artefact.

This is one of the great treasures of the tomb,

a throne made of timber overlaid with gold.

On the backrest, an image of the Pharaoh and his queen,

bathed in the sun's rays.

When Burton was working,

colour photography was still in its infancy.

His meticulous black-and-white images were supplemented

by Carter's detailed notes and drawings.

They record the colours Burton's camera couldn't capture.

It was only when the antechamber was fully recorded and emptied

that Carter could address the mystery

of what lay behind this sealed entrance.

Did this wall hide the Pharaoh's burial chamber?

Photographer Harry Cory Wright has arrived in Egypt,

and he's ready to start work.

He's taken some wonderful pictures

with his large format camera over the years,

but this will be his first attempt to shoot in desert conditions

using the same techniques Burton employed almost 100 years ago.

Medinet Habu is the mortuary temple of the Pharaoh Ramses III,

who ruled in Egypt around 150 years after Tutankhamun's death.

It's a location Burton also photographed

before he worked with Carter.

Gosh!

What a place!

So, here we are, just inside the defensive walls,

and just look at the way it's sort of crumbling away.

You can see every brick there, sort of made,

and now just tumbling down.

BIRDS CHIRPING

When Burton began work with Carter,

he'd already taken thousands of pictures in conditions like these.

It's a good place to begin my own experiments

using Burton's methods and equipment.

My Gandolfi camera is almost identical

to Burton's 1920s original,

apart from the addition of a modern lens and shutter.

I've adapted it to use glass plate negatives, like Burton did.

So here is the heart of the thing,

which is the glass negative that's in here.

This is just an extraordinarily intolerant environment

to have something as delicate as this.

How Burton did it, I can't understand it,

because he had boxes of these things.

Burton worked in an age before light meters were commercially available.

He knew from experience how to juggle the variables of aperture

and shutter speed to get good exposure in this intense light.

It's confusing to me, it feels so much brighter

than what I'm used to working with in our temperate climate at home.

About there. So a spot reading on here.

On the rock there.

And we're going to go one second at 45.

CAMERA CLICKS

I always find this amazing, this moment,

after that rather beautiful pause of one second,

which, sort of, drank in all of that scene that we've got out there.

Now all of that information is sitting in this sliver of emulsion

that sits on top of the glass slide.

So I'm going to tuck it away...

..and then, er... Can't wait.

But it's held in this sort of tension until it's developed.

Let's see what happens.

Glass plate photography is no job for the impatient.

Every shot must be carefully considered and executed.

Harry Burton went through the same rigmarole thousands of times.

Because Carter wanted a complete

photographic record of his excavation.

Once the antechamber was emptied, he moved on to other areas of the tomb.

This fearsome statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of mummification,

stood sentinel over the Pharaoh's treasury.

Inside, Carter discovered a gilded shrine

containing Tutankhamun's embalmed organs,

protected by four goddesses.

"It was," said Carter, "the most beautiful monument I have ever seen.

"It made one gasp with wonder and astonishment."

Burton's photographs are a wonderful record for us

of how the tomb was when they found it,

and they're beautiful to look at. But are they still any use?

-Do you still use them?

-Oh, absolutely.

I mean, they're one of the basic, go-to sources for us.

Anyone who's studying Tutankhamun uses those.

I'm working with a group of other people

on the sticks and staves of Tutankhamun.

The sticks and staves have two purposes, one of course is,

if you need it, but it is also very much a symbol of authority.

And it's part of your royal regalia.

Plus, certain sticks and staves have importance and significance

in the transition to the afterlife.

So the Medu staff, and the Dis staff et cetera,

and there are various spells associated with them.

And it was extraordinary, because with the Burton photographs,

some of his close-ups are so meticulous

you can see even the materials that things were made out of.

Could you take photographs like that today?

It's really difficult, because we've been trying,

even with our really hi-tech digital cameras, we do get the colour,

but the resolution is never quite as crisp, one feels,

as Harry Burton's glass plate negatives.

So, have you got any favourites?

-I like this one, with Carter...

-Working.

-Yeah.

With the lamp and the props and everything they had to put in,

cos they couldn't just work in the space, could they?

They had to make sure everything stayed in position.

And then move it one at a time.

And, I mean, in a way this is a great testament to Carter's work,

as an archaeologist.

The hours he must have spent, sort of sitting there,

in the hot...sort of swelteringness of the tomb,

meticulously recording every tiny piece of information.

And really, between Burton's photographs and Carter's notes,

this really does tell you how archaeology should be done.

In the ten years it took to excavate the tomb

Burton created an archive of more than 1,400 images.

And after each shot,

the exposed negative had to be removed from the camera

and swapped for a new glass plate.

Which is more complicated than you might imagine.

It's obviously a light, tight tent. I've got the glass negative,

and I've got to take it out of the dark slide and put it into a box,

and put a new one in.

And I'm not very good at doing two things at once,

so I've got to really concentrate.

I've done this in a few strange places,

but not quite with a view like that.

Harry's not the only photographer on site.

Archaeologists from the University of Chicago

have been studying this temple complex since the 1920s,

when Carter and Burton worked close by.

Like Burton, the Chicago House unit

pioneered the use of cameras in archaeology.

Yarko Kobylecky and Sue Lezon keep that tradition alive today.

-We'll measure that again.

-Yep.

-Sue.

-Hi.

-Hi. How you doing?

-Gosh, now, tell me, what are you doing?

Well, we're going to attempt to photograph

-this huge block of Nubians.

-Yes.

And the first thing we have to do is make sure

we have some reference,

-which is these scales.

-Right.

-So...

-Importantly, to me, you are using the 10x8 plate camera.

-That's right.

-Now, why?

Why? Because it's the largest resolution that's possible.

But even so, I mean, here we are in 2016, and we've got,

you know, all sorts of digital equipment available,

-but this is still...

-Still the best.

-And it's not just because you love it?

-No, no.

It still completely does the job better than anything else?

At some point, it will come, but as of yet, no.

So this does go right back...

-You know, you can put yourself in Burton's place very easily.

-Yeah.

The Chicago House team is driven by the same ideal

that motivated Burton and Carter.

..on the level. Yeah.

-OK.

-Got it? Great.

This is perfectionism with a purpose.

Now we're level.

The photographs they take today will be collated with hand-drawn plans

and other data to help create a completely accurate record

of an extraordinary and fragile historical site.

The vast majority of Burton's images record artefacts from the tomb.

But he also photographed the archaeologists at work.

In this image, Carter's colleagues examine one of six chariots

discovered in the tomb.

It was a symbol of Egyptian kingship, decorated with gold,

coloured glass and stone.

Harry hopes to create a similar picture today.

What I'm after here is a picture

that has some of the finesse and the elegance

of what Burton was able to do.

I'm looking at a photograph that, perhaps,

gives a little bit of that structure,

of where he's orchestrated the picture a little bit.

I want to try and find a picture that's got...

just some quiet process of everybody at work.

Hello.

Aha!

That's what we're after.

'Photographing people with a camera like this

'brings challenges that you don't come up against with digital.'

If we can get you into position.

Can I ask you to kind of, lean...? I'm thinking sort of just here.

Keep your shoulder...

'Because they're less sensitive to light,

'glass plates need a longer exposure.

'And a patient subject, like Badawi, who works with the Chicago team.'

For four seconds. We'll go for four seconds.

OK, fantastic. If you could just look at me, that's it.

Can you just, kind of,

get a little bit so you're facing me just a tiny bit more.

That's it, yeah.

'Recreating Burton's methods reveals an important secret

'about his pictures of people at work.'

A little more to your left, please. That's it, perfect.

Just kind of look a tiny bit more this way. That's it.

'They may look like the snapshot of a moment in time,

'but Burton must have stage-managed these images -

'asking the archaeologists to stop what they were doing,

'and hold a pose for the camera.'

OK, hold still.

Here we go.

'For a few brief moments, they were acting the part of archaeologists,

'rather than doing the job itself.'

One, two, three, four.

CAMERA CLICKS

Yes!

How exciting. That is so cool.

Thank you very much.

The Chicago House team have this place to themselves.

It was a different story for Burton and Carter in 1922.

Within days of the discovery,

crowds of tourists and journalists descended on the Valley,

eager to glimpse the Pharaoh's treasures.

The media scrum that surrounded the tomb every day

must have come as a real shock to the system

to men more accustomed to dusty anonymity.

In fact, according to Arthur Mace, one of Carter's colleagues,

"The archaeologist usually spends his time

"quietly and unobtrusively enough -

"half the year burrowing, mole-like, in the ground,

"and the other half writing dull papers for scientific journals.

"And now, suddenly,

"he finds himself in the full glare of limelight,

"with newspaper reporters lying in wait for him at every corner

"and snapshotters recording his every movement."

The excitement of the discovery also resonated with Egyptians.

This was, after all, THEIR story.

The discovery of the tomb is international news.

Europeans are quite excited by this piece of news,

Egyptians are very excited by this piece of news as well,

because the discovery of this almost unknown boy king,

who was going to be brought back to life through archaeology,

really echoes with Egyptian politicians

and writers and artists at the time, with what their hope is for Egypt

now that it's earned its independence -

that Egypt itself is reawakening.

One of the Egyptians excited by the discovery was a young photographer

from Luxor, just across the river from the Valley of the Kings.

Attaya Gaddis made a living

by selling his photographs to tourists.

His grandson still owns the premises where Attaya worked in the 1920s.

Thank you for letting us come into this wonderful place.

How long have you been in business here?

More than 100 years.

And, of course, your grandfather was a photographer,

-and these are some of his cameras.

-Yes, it is.

Attaya was apprenticed to an Italian photographer

called Felix Beato.

When Beato died in 1909, Attaya took over the business.

I'd love to see some of the photographs he took with these,

-especially of the Tutankhamun excavation.

-Yes, we have it.

Right, so this is outside the...

Carrying on a stretcher.

Oh, so they built a special...?

Look at all the people involved.

-You realise what a big operation it was, don't you?

-Yeah.

What have we got here? More things.

-Oh, look, that must be a chariot wheel.

-Yes.

Carter's actually in this photograph, I think, isn't he?

With these wonderful Edwardian gentleman

-in their English suits!

-Yes.

Oh, look, that's one of the coffins.

They're really good, aren't they?

And this is what the Valley of the Kings was like then.

Yes. Guards even then, of course.

Wonderful photographs.

Lord Carnarvon soon grew tired of the media free-for-all.

In January 1923, he sold exclusive rights to the story to The Times

for £5,000 - a small fortune in today's money.

The deal alienated rival newspapers, and many Egyptians who felt,

understandably, that their history had been hijacked by foreigners.

But it was big news for Burton.

This was a watershed moment in his career.

He was no longer simply an archaeological photographer.

His images made front-page news.

The spotlight fell on Carter,

but Burton's pictures reveal other characters

who were crucial to the work.

When we look at them now, we can see that those photographs fill a gap,

an absence, that in the written record -

both the newspaper coverage of the time,

the accounts that Carter wrote - and also in the archives,

those sort of records and diaries.

Because what we see in the photographs

are the Egyptians who worked at the site.

Who are never named in the press,

and I think the photographs are all the more important for that.

Burton's images fuelled a fascination for all things Egyptian.

We don't know if Tutankhamun's golden funeral mask

is an accurate likeness, but the iconography of treasures

like this inspired designers and artists.

Meanwhile, audiences flocked to theatres

to hear Carter tell the story of their discovery.

And whenever Carter travelled, Burton's pictures came too.

Here we have his original glass lantern slides, in his wooden chest.

-Cor, he took all that with him?

-Yes, this is his travelling set.

And if we open the drawers,

you can see there are hundreds of glass lantern slides inside here.

They don't make them like that any more, do they?

No and here we have some of Harry Burton's photographs

of the road leading to the Valley of the Kings.

And are these all from Burton's original plates?

They are, yes. These are all based upon

Harry Burton's original glass plate negatives.

Here we have Carter and others peering inside the golden shrines.

So they must have become stars, almost, did they?

-Yes, they were celebrities in their own right.

-Oh.

We also have some hand-tinted glass lantern slides.

Again, you get the sense that Carter's really trying to convey

the sense of the original colours of the objects to his audiences.

So these were painted onto Burton's original black and white?

-Yes.

-The colour is amazing.

So this is one of the arms of the throne

that we were looking at earlier.

Where we saw that Carter had actually made a note

of what the different materials were, and the different colours.

So I suppose they'd have used that as a guide.

Yes. And this is obviously a much more effective way

of conveying those colours to the audience.

That's terribly detailed work, to paint on something that size.

It's incredible. And, of course,

you have to imagine these being projected in a darkened auditorium,

and really recreating that sense of discovery

that the original excavators must have felt.

-State-of-the-art.

-For the time, for sure.

And described by the man who'd actually made them.

So the world-famous Carter,

who'd been on the front page of The Times with his discovery,

and there he is, and you see all this in colour.

Wow!

This must have caused a sensation.

I remember, when the Tutankhamun exhibition came around in the 1970s,

queueing all day outside the British Museum and not getting in.

Presumably this had the same impact.

Carter must have been a real celebrity by this point.

And the discovery had made its way around the world,

and so I think we should imagine people queueing around the block

to hear Carter give his lectures.

And to see Burton's photographs, because without the photographs,

the lecture wouldn't have been remotely as interesting, would it?

No, Burton's photographs are really at the centre of Carter's lectures.

This, I suppose, is what inspired that genre

for having Egyptian-ised things - some our buildings,

and in the States as well.

They've got Egyptian pillars and heads, and all the rest of it.

Yeah, these types of images must have really inspired

that craze for Tut-mania that ensued following the discovery.

-Did they actually call it Tut-mania?

-They did, yes.

-Oof.

MUSIC: Old King Tut by Stephen DeRosa

# 3,000 years ago, in history we know

# King Tutankhamen ruled a mighty land

# Why, they opened up his tomb the other day and jumped with glee

# They learned a lot of ancient history

# In old King Tut's... #

While the West danced along to the tune of Tut-mania,

Harry Burton was continuing his work in Egypt.

Capturing his images took immense skill and patience.

But that was just part of the challenge.

He also had to develop them, and fast...

..because Carter would only move onto the next stage of excavation

once he'd approved the pictures.

The closest proper darkroom was several miles down the Valley,

at Carter's house.

So Burton had to improvise instead.

One of the things that strikes you first you about this place

is just how many tombs there are.

The hills are absolutely full of them.

And they're so close together - there, behind me, over there,

just absolutely everywhere.

And, of course, for Carter and his team working around here,

that had unexpected benefits,

because there's another tomb right over there.

This subterranean chamber

is the place Burton chose for his makeshift darkroom.

And Harry has persuaded the authorities

to let him develop his negatives in exactly the same place.

He'll be working with Sue Lezon from the Chicago House team...

-Sue.

-Harry.

..who's agreed to lend him some equipment.

Welcome.

-So we can set you up with well-used trays.

-Well-used, yes.

I find it extraordinary

that the pristine glass plates we admired in Oxford

weren't developed in a well-equipped darkroom like this.

And we'll get you some beakers, and we'll bring a lot of water.

That looks like it goes back to 1920.

Instead, Burton worked in a hot and dusty desert tomb,

just a few metres from the excavation site.

A walk he must have made hundreds of times.

OK. So I'm imagining I've got

one of these exposed glass negatives in my hand, and I'm...

-It's just there.

-It's right... It's a few feet away.

God, isn't that mad? I kind of imagined it was much further away,

but that's literally just a kind of stone's throw, isn't it?

-Look at this.

-That is steep.

And, you know, there's not been anybody

in this tomb for years and years.

-Is that right?

-Yeah.

-Come on, let's go and have a look.

So which tomb is this one?

-This is number 55.

-Yeah, OK.

This is called the Amarna cache.

-HE GASPS

-That is steep! Heavens above.

Yes, it is. Imagine him carrying these things down there.

-Yeah, exactly.

-Take care.

And he would have been in a rush too, wouldn't he?

Yeah. Everybody's waiting for him to get that film processed.

-OK, so I'm carrying slides...

-Easy to slip.

He'd have slowed down a little bit as he got down to this bit.

-Whoa. Look, here we go.

-Whoa.

This is a unique privilege for Harry and Sue.

It's the first time anyone's been given permission

to develop photographs here since Burton did it in the '20s.

It's a big step.

That's a hard act to follow.

It looks like there's some water that's comes through these cracks.

When this tomb was surveyed in the 1990s,

archaeologists discovered fragments of glass in the sand.

They were the remains of negatives

that must have slipped from Burton's grasp

as he worked here nearly 100 years ago.

Here's the tomb itself.

Boy, look, Sue.

I've been in smaller darkrooms,

but I've never seen any with pots in it before, look down to the right.

-No, no.

-Can you make this work, do you think?

Well, I think so. You know, all we need is a table that we set up.

That's what he had to do, after all.

-Yeah, we can make this work.

-Yeah, definitely.

-No, no, absolutely. Come on, let's go and get our stuff.

-All right.

This is where Harry will discover if his experiments have worked.

With analogue photography, you only find out in the darkroom

if you've taken the picture you planned.

Three baths - dev, wash, fix.

-The familiar smell of fix.

-In Harry Burton's tomb.

-Extraordinary.

Well, not Harry Burton's TOMB, but you know what I'm saying.

-Yeah.

-His darkroom.

Just water. I need that.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

Gosh!

Here, listen.

(Nothing.)

-That is really quiet, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Extraordinary.

And to think, you know...

we're right, literally, exactly where Burton

would have developed his own negatives.

That's an extraordinary idea, isn't it?

All the nonsense going upstairs, all of...

Carter going, "Come on, hurry up! We need to get on.

"We need to start going to the next stage."

And pacing, and all the government officials here waiting.

-Yeah, of course.

-I bet he was down here by himself.

I bet he didn't want to know anything else up there.

-That's very true. Right, we better get on with it.

-Yep. Let's go.

-I'm going to shut...

-Turn the lights off.

There it is.

OK. Are we ready for this?

Ready as we're going to be.

Please, please, now. That's going in.

-This is it. This is what he did.

-I know.

Yes, something. Yes, definitely.

-Ha-ha!

-Oh, yes.

-Have you got that little wandy torch thing?

-Yes.

-SHE GASPS

-There it is.

-Oh, my God!

-I might just turn this around for the camera, like that.

-Perfect.

So that's the right way.

So this is all the foreground here, and that's the sky up here.

-That's the sky.

-OK.

-So shall we put that in the wash?

-Yeah, let's...

Right, little bit of wash.

OK. So let's have a look, shall we?

Hey.

Go on, give it a yank.

-There you go.

-Yeah.

-Wow!

-Ooh, look here we go.

-But this is all fine.

-Look at that detail.

Look at that detail. So, let's think about Burton.

Burton would have been looking at his negatives right here,

under a light pretty much the same as this, and he must have...

Before he said, "OK, let's move to the next one."

I mean, he could have taken it outside,

but let's not forget - this is a wet negative

-that is absolutely at its most susceptible to dust.

-Mm-hm.

He wouldn't have been charging out there going,

"Look, I've got it! It's fine, carry on."

He would have kept them waiting for a lot longer.

Yeah, had that little moment where he would have gone,

-"Oh, that's a very beautiful thing."

-Yes. Yes.

Congratulations.

-Yeah, we've done it, haven't we?

-Yes.

-It's OK.

-Yes.

-It's OK. Yes. It really is. Right, come on then.

-Wow, OK.

All the darkrooms, you know, any photographer in the past,

you'd love to go and look in their darkroom,

whether Ansel Adams's darkroom would be a thing.

Cartier-Bresson's darkroom in Paris, what a thing.

But I don't think anything beats Harry Burton's darkroom in a tomb.

Right, let's put that in the box.

Carter and Burton must have done this quite often, mustn't they?

-Standing somewhere like this?

-Side-by-side.

-So, come on, let me see it. I'm Carter, remember.

-OK.

-Give me your prints!

-So this one's wet.

So we've just develop this,

and, er...so this is Brett,

who is the Egyptologist at Chicago House,

and he's inside the temple here,

and there's a rather ghostly image.

-It's a negative, so it's the wrong way around.

-Yes.

OK, so I've done this quite crudely, this one.

Excuses?

I'll give you loads of excuses. Oh, um, all you know...

First one and all that, but what it throws up is,

you know, this is a fat piece of glass. Look at that.

-The others were very thin, weren't they?

-Tiny.

They were wafer thin. Have a feel.

That's a big chunk. It still feels quite...

It is, is it.

I slightly underexposed this.

But he would have, you know,

they'd have come out of the thing every time,

sit there like you and I are now, assessed it.

-Had a look.

-"Is this good enough?"

-"Is that OK?"

"Can I now move the object? Can we get on with our work?"

A lot of that would have been not just...

Here, we're looking at a picture, kind of assessing it,

because I'm telling you that that's Brett and that's somebody else

and whatever, but he would have been looking, obviously,

you know, in the hieroglyphics, that everything showed.

In an archiving...sense...

Yeah, because it was important that that particular object

was in that particular place.

-Absolutely, it was a record, wasn't it?

-So had a distinguishing feature?

Exactly. But, anyway, let me show you another one here.

-So this is one we did earlier...

-Careful with that.

..which has dried.

-This has got a couple of spots of water on it.

-From the other one.

-So this is quite fun.

-Oh, look at that!

So this is the landscape in the temple,

and this is the, kind of, the wall.

It looks like it's taken at night, but that's dust spots,

cos actually negative sky would be white.

-What, those little spots are dust?

-They are dust.

-You know, and...

-Burton managed not to get dust on his.

I don't understand that. I really, really don't understand that.

-I'll have to send you back down there tomorrow.

-I'm so sorry.

It's just a kind of madness how exquisite his things were.

Yeah, but that's pretty good.

It's pretty good, it's all right isn't it?

-I'll give you five out of ten for that.

-Thank you. I'll take it.

The thing is, I've never seen one of Burton's negatives

that was badly exposed, either overexposed or underexposed.

-I mean, it's extraordinary.

-Now, we may not have seen all of them,

there may have been a few duds that got thrown away.

Well, and the ones he probably dropped on the way back,

or someone dropped, you know, they're fragile things.

The technical perfection of Burton's images inspires Egyptologists today.

Including the team based here,

who use hi-tech imaging to record ancient sites.

What an incredible image.

Where's this from?

This is from the tomb of Sethi I, in the Valley of the Kings.

It is the west wall of the Hall of Beauties.

Burton took photographs in Sethi I's tomb, as well, didn't he?

Yes, he has taken amazing photographs.

Actually, I was scanning his entire...

the book that had his photographs for the tomb,

to help us in planning which part we're going to do first,

and which part includes what.

So we decide which kind of technology we use for what.

I can show you how detailed it is.

Some ignorant people have written their names.

I think that's shocking.

Yes, that's graffiti that was found there.

And as you can see here, it says 1876.

But would you see that with the naked eye?

No. You can't see it. It's impossible.

Tell me how you've achieved this clarity.

Well, this image has been achieved by Lucida,

a 3D scanner that we developed in Factum Arte.

It's basically based out of two cameras and a laser diode.

As the laser reflects and moved over the surface,

these two cameras capture its motion.

It's just so real.

It is, and let me show you something even...you might like more.

Here you can see a 3D of the tomb, the Hall of Beauties.

How do you do that?

It is a collage of so many photographs with a lot of overlap,

it's called photogrammetry.

'The Factum Arte team plan to use these 3D images

'to create a life-size replica of the site.'

So tourists wouldn't have to actually go in to the original?

They could go into a replica.

Exactly, and know that they are not harming it.

Burton's aim was to produce a very clear record of what was there.

He'd have been amazed by this. He'd have been envious, I should think.

I know, looking at his pictures, I would assume,

if he had the technology and the means,

he would have definitely done this at the time.

Burton's lens captured every stage of Carter's excavation.

None was more dramatic than the gradual revelation

of the Pharaoh's burial chamber itself.

When he was laid to rest 3,000 years ago,

Tutankhamun's remains were enclosed by ornate wooden shrines,

packed one inside the other, like Russian dolls.

Burton's striking close-up of the sealed door

was proof that the shrines had not been touched

by ancient tomb raiders.

Uncovering what lay within took months of painstaking labour

in cramped conditions.

According to Carter, they had to squeeze in and out like weasels,

and work in all kinds of embarrassing positions.

Until, finally,

the coffin could be hoisted carefully

from inside the stone sarcophagus,

and Carter came face-to-face with the Pharaoh.

I've got an idea, Margaret.

And what I'd like to do, there's a really beautiful picture

that Burton took of Carter,

where he is looking across the coffin and is lit by a single light.

I mean, it's a beautiful picture.

It's got this fantastic sort of moment of...

where the two are looking at each other, almost.

It's a really, really cool picture.

Just here. And I would love to move you

just into the same sort of place,

and try to take a picture that was similar.

It's going to be a long exposure.

And we'll move a light into the same sort of place. Are you up for that?

-I'll have a go.

-Great, let's give it a try.

You're leaning over a bit, and hand out,

cos obviously he was painting it, or brushing it with a brush,

but we can't do that. I think it's more fun...

Cos, in fact, I see the reflection of your...

-Like that?

-That's it, yes. Just lovely.

Hang on, let's just check that.

'They tell me that Carter was a difficult man to work with.

'He was single-minded and stubborn,

'and fought many battles as the excavation unfolded.'

Hold very still.

'He even called the whole thing off for almost a year

'after a row with the Egyptian authorities.'

-Oof.

-Ugh...

And when you're ready.

'Though he did eventually patch things up

'and return to finish the job.'

So I've got you...F8, two seconds, please.

Basically, the same position.

'Harry Burton was a perfectionist too.

'But, in person, he was easy-going and diplomatic.'

OK, hold very still from...

'A good man to have by your side when the going gets tough.'

Brilliant, Margaret, thank you so much.

-I wouldn't have thought that would be so difficult!

-Great.

There must have been a bond between them,

and great mutual respect.

Because Burton was one of only two members of Carter's original team

who stuck with him to the end.

Burton took his last photographs for the tomb at New Year 1933.

He'd seen Carter at Christmas dinner at Metropolitan House,

and Carter had clearly said,

"Oh, you know, we forgot to photograph the sarcophagus."

Um, so Carter goes...

So Burton and Carter go back into the tomb

and Burton takes some beautifully lit, very crisp

and evocative shots of the sarcophagus.

with the wonderful winged goddesses at the four corners.

And, afterwards, Burton writes to a colleague back in New York,

he writes a letter saying,

"Today, I finished the Tut work, and dashed glad I am!

"I began to think I never should finish it.

"And it seems too good to be true."

His greatest assignment was over.

But he wasn't ready to pack away his camera.

Harry Burton continued to work in Egypt for the New York Met

until his death in 1940.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

Before I stopped to look closer,

I suppose I'd always taken Harry Burton for granted.

Like most people intrigued by the story of Tutankhamun,

I'd seen many of his photographs over the years,

without ever thinking about the man behind the camera.

I won't make that mistake again.

Harry, I recognise these two plates, I've seen them before.

But what else have you got? Show me the prints you've made.

OK, so, this one is the landscape one that I took.

That's the one I saw of the temple, with the dust specks.

Lots of dust specks. But I think there's something quite fun

about the...all these dust specks,

they make it feel like an old picture,

even though it was taken yesterday.

It could almost have been one of Burton's rejects!

Well, thank you, Margaret.

And then we have, um...

this one, which is quite fun, so this is Brett up the ladder.

And if you remember,

I was quite worried that it was rather underexposed.

But, in fact, it works really well.

You can see the hieroglyphics up here,

and then here, this rather ghostly figure, as well, of Brett.

Yeah, I mean, that could be Carter, couldn't it?

-Yes, if you put a little moustache in.

-Exactly.

Looks to me like a photograph from that era, from the 1920s.

That's understandable, in that it was taken with a big camera,

with the same kind of negative,

processed in pretty much the same sort of way.

What do you think of the Burton-Carter relationship?

I mean, Burton could be described as a hired hand,

brought in by Carter to photograph this, that, the other,

as he was directed.

Wasn't he, in a way?

Yeah, but I think that his skill was that he was able to transcend that.

After all, Burton had had training in Florence,

photographing the old masters.

So he clearly had an eye for the aesthetic and also his...

all the training he did here with the Americans.

And I suppose he'd been an archaeologist too, hadn't he?

-So he had that.

-Of course. Yeah, exactly.

And then all of these things culminating in this moment

when Carter says, you know, "I need you.

"I need you to come and help me reveal this event to the world.

"To make it into something very, very special."

I think any good photographer, that's what they do.

-Well, it's certainly what he did.

-He did it in spades.

How have you found it, working here, following the master's footsteps,

if I can put it like that?

Yeah, I think one of the main things to me

is being absolutely in the place.

My camera is now set up in probably exactly the same place

as Burton's was when he took that picture or this picture,

whether it's in the landscape or whether it's in the tomb itself,

I've got something to show you.

-Oh, the one of me!

-The one of you, Margaret.

Now, to me,

this is the culmination of all the things that we've been doing.

This whole project has been summed up by this picture,

where it's Carter and Burton,

and you and me.

If I'd been taking this with my baby camera,

I would have been on top of the railings,

but you've actually incorporated them in the photograph.

When you look at Burton's picture,

it has all of the paraphernalia around.

You can see the props, you can see all the straps,

-and the ropes and the things.

-And the lights.

-Exactly.

And I was trying to get in exactly the same position as Burton was in,

but in the modern situation that the tomb is in now,

the railings are a factor.

Yes, this is a record of what's there now,

just as Burton's were a record of what was there then.

But it's also, like his, a very beautiful picture.

Thank you, Margaret.

That's...that's very good, that one.

I'm not just saying that because it's got me in it!