The King Tut exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art...anyone go?

It was a neat exhibit and all, but they had a good amount of very large B&W prints, some of them quite stunning, obviously coming from large format and blown up to several feet by several feet. They were uncredited. They seemed to be either paper or plastic mounted to a black backing board. After leaving the exhibit I asked around trying to find out what kind of prints they were and who printed them. Somewhat surprisingly, they actually tried to answer my question and presented a long sequence of equally clueless officials. Besides the large prints in the exhibit, they had several dozen digital prints of the photographs taken during the pillage (er, "discovery") of the tomb in the '30s, originally taken on on glass plates.

I think the gallery is up and moving away from Dallas now, but if anyone went, and has some insight as to how the big prints were printed, I would be very interested. Possibly they were printed on one of those really big inkjet printers.

I wondered the same thing when we schlepped the family to downtown Dallas during our spring-break visit in March. The prints were very nice; amazing the detail and tonal range captured on those glass plates.

Seems like there was a blurb or a mini-display about the expedition photographer. He was evidently a very busy man.

Otherwise, I thought the exhibit itself was rather ho-hum. I saw the first (in the US) Tut exhibition back in the late '70's on a crisp fall day in New Orleans. THAT was something to behold. These artifacts seemed more mundane---almost as if the Egyptian government, needing a few bucks, decided to clean out the Tut attic and send some of the junk to America.

Indeed. The trademark golden burial mask wasn't even there.

I was also wondering if the prints were printed to a lighter tone than normal considering how dark the exhibit was.