Grand Palais, á Mitla, grande salle, from the series Cités et ruines Américaines: Mitla… Atlas

Désiré Charnay was determined to follow in the footsteps of the early 19th-century travel writer John Lloyd Stephens as he explored and photographed ruins in Mexico. Despite civil war, extreme humidity, lost equipment, and menacing tropical insects, Charnay succeeded in exposing and developing his large, wet-collodion-coated glass plates on site. Upon returning to France, Charnay published the results of his four-year expedition to Mexico. Forty-nine photographic plates accompany a volume of text. The highly detailed photographs were the first to be made of the ruins and have informed archaeologists, historians, and photographers ever since. The Library owns two copies of the Atlas, one stemming from the Astor Library and the other from the Lenox Library.