The tomb’s pristine condition was a key factor in capturing the public imagination, said Riggs, as were its many splendors. But the discovery, she added, “also came at a crucial moment in time.”

Many felt that the tomb of King Tut, whose reign dates to the 14th century B.C., represented some of the first good news to emerge from Egypt in generations. The country had long struggled to free itself from control by the Ottoman and British empires, and the boy king, part of a long line of pharaohs who had ruled for 3,000 years, became an important symbol of Egyptian self-government. Egyptian writers took up the topic; teachers taught Tut in schools.

Helping fuel interest were Burton’s images of Tut’s golden death mask “in just about every different angle,” said Riggs. The photographs “arguably helped make [the mask] iconic. Burton helped create and perpetuate these interpretations.”

A further inspection of the camera work, said Riggs, reveals much about the realities of colonialism. Photos by Burton that depicted Carter working alone in the tomb were often staged, she said, and failed to capture the scope of the effort. In particular, the important contributions of four Egyptian workers who helped Burton carry equipment, set up shoots, mix chemicals, and develop negatives went largely unnoticed by the wider world. These workers occasionally appear in pictures showing Burton at work or posing with his camera, but they are uncredited, unnamed. The grown men were simply referred to as the “camera boys,” said Riggs, a label that highlighted “what assumptions and attitudes lay at the core of colonial-era archaeology.”

Yet without their help, Burton may not have achieved such stunning results. The assignment required that he capture images of objects before they were moved, after they had been cleaned, and in the intervening stages. Burton’s technique, including his choice to shoot the cleaned objects in front of a fabric screen and his use of glass-plate negatives, enabled him to eliminate shadows and capture the artifacts in the sharpest detail.

By 1933, the dig was over, and interest from newspapers had begun to wane. “Tutankhamun was no longer the top story,” said Riggs. In the end, the Metropolitan Museum received no artifacts from the dig despite Burton’s photographs having been the “star attractions” in the press. Still, as agreed, the institution was given a set of his images.

Today, copies of Burton’s archive, a record of more than 3,000 negatives and prints, are housed at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, where they remain important sources of scholarship, exhibitions, and public fascination.

That enduring legacy might have surprised Burton. The self-critical, self-effacing photographer didn’t consider himself an artist or a scientist, as many of those working on the dig saw themselves, said Riggs. He was just a man from a modest background, she said, and “the guy with the camera.”

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