Maison Bonfils produced studio portraits, staged biblical scenes, landscapes, and panoramic photographs.

The couple, together with their son Adrien, moved to Beirut in 1867 where they opened a photographic studio called "Maison Bonfils", on what later became rue Georges-Picot.

They photographed landscapes, portraits, posed scenes with subjects dressed up in Middle Eastern regalia, and also stories from the Bible.

In 1878, when the name of the studio was changed to "F. Bonfils et Cie", Adrien was back in Beirut after completing his studies in France and took more responsibility for photography, including landscape.

When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, Lydie was evacuated with her family to Cairo, where she later died.

As single owner, starting from 1918, he continued to work both as a photographer, and as a publisher of albums and postcards using the classical old Bonfils images.

He ran the business at least until the end of 1932, perhaps even until 1938, which places the Bonfils-Guiragossian photographic company among the longest surviving ones in the area of the former Ottoman Empire.

He was one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale and amongst the first to employ a new method of colour photography, developed in 1880.

When his son, Adrien, fell ill, Bonfils remembered the green hills around Beirut and sent him there to recover, accompanied by his mother.

They photographed landscapes, portraits, posed scenes with subjects dressed up in Middle Eastern regalia, and also stories from the Bible.

[2] Adrien became more involved in the landscape photography at age 17, when Félix returned to Alès to have compiled collections of their photographs published and then to open a collotype printing factory.

In 1872 he published the album Architecture antique (by Ducher press) after presenting some of his pictures to the Société française de photographie.

Félix was originally a bookbinder but, when France intervened in the 1860 civil war between Christians and Druze in the Middle East, he was a part of the military expedition.

[14] Lydie was heavily involved in administrative duties, which expanded when the business opened studios in Cairo and Alexandria, with connections to a New York agency.

According to Adrien's son, Roger Bonfils, when she was boarding the evacuation ship to leave Beirut in 1916, Lydie exclaimed, "I don't want to smell another egg again!".

[3][15] Although the early photographs from Maison Bonfils have been generally attributed to Félix alone, the involvement of Lydie and Adrien in the photography side of the business is now recognised.

In 1907, Lydie published a collection of photographs from the studio in the Catalogue général des vues photographiques de l’Orient.

"[3][12] On 11 May 2017, the heirs of the Bonfils-Saalmüller family donated a number of archives with historical photographs by Félix, Marie-Lydie and Adrien Bonfils to the library of Egyptology at the Collège de France in Paris.

In addition to the commercial print version of 865 pages with 461 black-and-white or colorized photographs, this book was also made available for free download as a contribution to Digital Humanities and for wide consultation on the Internet.