PRESERVING THE PAST Mission Héliographique: Origins Part One One of the major problems raised by the French Revolution was the status of the Catholic Church. With everything old swept away, including the monarchy, the nobility, and religion itself, the brave new...
PAPER: THE OTHER PHOTOGRAPHIC METHOD Artists and Photography The Directorial Mode From the beginning, paper and plate had vied for being the appropriate support for a photographic image. It was by a mere series of chances that the daguerreotype gained ascendancy over...
THE DAGUERROTYPE AND PORTRAITURE Daguerreotypomania “Readiness” for Photography, Part Two In 1989 the French photographer, Gisèle Freund wrote Photography and Society in which she attempted to explain the role of photography in mid-nineteenth century...
HIPPOLYTE BAYARD (1801-1887) Another Inventor, Another Process The First Fake Photograph Among the many oddities of the history of the invention of photography is that not only was photography invented by so many people at the same time, but also that few of these...
The Panoramas: Rewriting History Representing history in France had always been fraught with difficulty for centuries. Not until the Third Republic (1870-1940) was it possible to report, write or make art without the threatening overhang of censorship, but, after the...
WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT (1800-1877) The Pencil of Nature (1836) THE CALOTYPE By 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot, an English gentleman, prominent landowner, accomplished mathematician, and amateur experimenter in the photographic arts had produced the world’s...
