![Boston Review | J Kozlowski/Bibliothèque nationale de France](https://ifp.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/1-116.png)
Boston Review | J Kozlowski/Bibliothèque nationale de France
Beginning in the late 1860s, the decade that it took to construct the Suez Canal, photographs depicting its feats of engineering circulated across the world (see above). Sold to travelers as souvenirs, featured in Le Monde, and later exhibited at the 1889 Paris world fair, they enshrined on paper the industrial monumentality of the dredgers that excavated earth into sea.