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Photography

Photography is, first of all, an instantaneous testimony of life. It is a way to share this moment across time and generations. Some photos are real works of art. They can reach significant sums during the auction.

The photography value depends on the subject, the technique used, the quality, the state of the conservation, the date, the rarity of the subject, and the rating of the photographer.

The invention of photography

1839 is the official year of the invention of photography, but the idea of fixing an image is older. Mr. Joseph Niepce, a French engineer (1765–1833), made his first images in 1816. He was able to spontaneously reproduce, through the effects of the light, images made with a camera obscura. This process was heliography, and the sharpness of the image was not yet perfect.

In 1829, Mr. Daguerre and Mr. Joseph Niépce worked on improving this technique. Daguerreotype is a process that allows the fixing of an image on a metal plate. It was presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1839. It took 12 minutes to freeze the image of the monument on a cloudy day, and the exposure time was reduced by half in clear weather.

Camera obscura

Nadar, the portraitist

Felix Nadar was known for caricature; he liked to capture the personality traits of the known people of Paris, and photography allowed him to fix them in reality.

In 1854, he opened a photography workshop in Paris. In the space of only a few years, the technique progressed with the evolution of chemical immersions and the glass plate negative. The exposure time was reduced. All of Paris passed in front of the camera lens. The Nadar collection is estimated at around 200,000 negatives.

His son was responsible for organizing the photographic exhibition at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, and it was a great success. This event of 1900 made a lasting impression even in our villages, where we talked about this memorable event at the dawn of a new century, more than 50 million people visited it.

In this context, the radio was not essential, and newspapers were enough to get information. The first line of the Paris metro was opened on July 19, 1900, and the Petit Palais, built for this occasion, was inaugurated.

Daguerreotype

The Lumière brothers

The Lumière brothers developed the first process of color photography, autochrome. They registered a patent in December 1903. This invention required several years of development before industrialization in 1907.

The grains of potato starch placed on the glass plate allow the creation of color. (red, green, and blue).

Louis Lumière was the inventor of the cinematograph, with the help of his brother. He made several films.

View camera

The Albert Kahn collection

Albert Khan’s collection has 72,000 autochromes kept in the Albert Khan Museum in the Paris region. Several cultures influence this space, such as the French, Japanese, and English gardens, as well as trees of various species from different countries. It was the subject of restructuring work by architect Kengo Kuma based on the Japanese Engawa with a connection between interior and exteriors, and the reopening took place in 2022.

Albert Kahn's goal was to promote foreign cultures and develop peaceful relations between people. Jean Brunhes, a French geographer, joined him. Several operators were sent to different countries to take pictures between 1909 and 1931. These pictures show natives in traditional dress in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe.

The Albert Khan collection is kept in France in the Paris region.

The Eugène Atget collection

The Eugène Atget collection is a photographic inventory of several cities in France at the dawn of a new century, focused on the architectural details. Eugène Atget was born in Libourne in 1857 and died in Paris in 1927.

He was passionate about Paris, the monuments, streets, and hotels, and he widened its field of action to the shops, interiors, cars, and gardens like those of Versailles, Saint Cloud, Cluny, the Carnavalet museum, Saint-Riquier, La Rochelle city, Picquigny, and Abbeville.

Several cathedrals held his attention, such as that of Amiens, where he returned many times before and after the war. This photographic collection is kept at the Modern Art Museum in New York.

François I Hotel in Paris by Eugène Atget in 1899 - «Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF».
The Eugène Atget collection is kept in the United States at MOMA.

Mrs. Jessie Tarbox Beals’photographs

Jessie was the first woman photo journalist in the United States. The first shots she made were those of students; she was first a teacher. She was born in 1870 and grew up in the Canadian province of Ontario. She had moved to New York State to give her first lessons. After a few press articles with her photographs, she stopped her work as a teacher to focus entirely on her passion.

Unlike other photographers, she had a wider range of subjects, such as animals, ethnography, the World's Fair gardens, and streets. His photos had been published in various newspapers. Then she opened a photography studio with her husband in the New York district of Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1942.

Courtesy of Mrs. Diana Carey, Schlesinger Library
The collection of Beals photographs is preserved by the New York Historical Society.

Mrs. Julia Pirotte

Julia is known to have taken photos during the Second World War. Due to her activities as an activist, she fled Poland and immigrated to Belgium, where she married Jean Pirotte.

She crossed paths with Suzanne Spaak, a future resistance fighter, who encouraged her to study photography. During the German invasion of Belgium, she took refuge in the south of France and found a job in a factory. She took a few shots for the local press.

She then went back into hiding while carrying out resistance activities in parallel. Her photos bear witness to the precarious lives of the inhabitants. She photographed Marseille at the liberation. Back in Poland in 1946, she became a press photographer and produced some reports in Eastern countries and then in the Kibbutz of Israel.

An exhibition in Arles in 1980 brought her some notoriety. The photographs will then be exhibited in Europe, Sweden, and New York. These photos are kept at the Charleroi Photography Museum in Belgium.

The Louis Thuillier collection

This is a collection of 4000 glass-plate negatives from soldiers of different nationalities and French civilians. The quality of these photos taken during the First World War is amazing, to the point that it is possible to make enlargements until you read the date of a newspaper from this time.

The charm of black-and-white photographs is incomparable to that of those in color. These photographs provide a precious legacy and a source of information. The Louis Thuillier collection is kept safe by the War Memorial in Australia. It has benefited from the best technologies in terms of plate restoration for the identification of the portraits of these soldiers who came to the Somme.

Two books were published: "The Lost Diggers", and "The Lost Tommies" by Mr. Coulthart, Harper Collins Edition.

The Louis Thuillier collection is kept at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.