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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. Within a few years, the method advanced with the development of glass plate negatives and chemical immersions. The exposure time has been shortened. All of Paris passed in front of the camera lens. The Nadar collection is estimated at around 200,000 negatives.
His son planned a photographic exhibit at the Universal Display in Paris, which 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).
With his brother's assistance, Louis Lumière created the cinematograph. He made several films.
View camera
The Albert Kahn collection
Albert Kahn’s collection has 72,000 autochromes kept in the Albert Kahn 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 interiors and exteriors, and the reopening took place in 2022.
Albert Kahn aimed to promote foreign cultures and foster peaceful relations among people. Jean Brunhes, a French geographer, joined him. Jean Brunhes, a French geographer, joined him. Between 1909 and 1931, many operators were dispatched to various nations to capture photographs. These pictures show natives in traditional dress in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe.
The Albert Kahn 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 have 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 she died 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. She left Poland because of her activism and moved 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 collection features 4,000 glass-plate negatives taken by soldiers of various 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 have been released: "The Lost Diggers" and "The Lost Tommies" by Mr. Coulthart, Harpercollins Edition.
The Louis Thuillier collection is kept at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.