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tor of the Slums,’ esteemed by Theodore Roosevelt,
Riis proved that photography could be an active agent
of change. “I had a use for it, and beyond that I never
went” became the touch stone for many a campaigning
documentary photographer thereafter.
Alistair Crawford
RIVE, ROBERTO (active 1860s–1880s)
Italian photographer and studio owner
Roberto Rive worked as a photographer in Naples from
the beginning of the 1860s, with a studio in Palazzo
Serracapriola, Vico Carminello, 38, Riviera di Chiaja.
In 1865 he moved to Palazzo Lieti, Via Toledo, 317
and, from 1886 until 1889, he had a studio in Salita San
Filippo, Riviera di Chiaja, 15. In 1867 Rive took part
at the Exposition Universelle Paris. He became very
well-known for his portraits and views, some of which
were in stereoscopic size. He took photographs of all
the famous monuments in the South of Italy, in Naples,
Pompeii, Paestum, Sorrento, Capri, Amalfi , and of the
most important towns and archaeological sites in Sic-
ily, as well as other historical towns such as Florence,
Pisa, Siena, Rome, Genoa and Venice. He was also an
inventor and he patented a special photosensitive paper
which was used above all in Southern Italy. Outstanding
photographers, such as Luigi Borlinetto (1827–1904),
who was a very well—known scientist in Padua, used
the paper invented by Rive (Borlinetto used it in a
variant form, with the addition of potato fl our, water
and alcohol). Roberto Rive continued to practise as a
photographer until the end of the 1880s.
Silvia Paoli
RIVIÈRE, HENRI (1864–1951)
French
Benjamin Jean Pierre Henri Rivière is primarily known
as a printmaker. He was also an engraver, theatre direc-
tor, collector, painter, and writer, and in the late twentieth
century his skill in photography was acknowledged.
Rivière did not sign or mark his photographs. Yet
despite the obscurity surrounding his photographic
work, photography was integral to Rivière’s oeuvre.
The main collection in the public realm at the Musée
d’Orsay, Paris reveals that Rivière was one of the most
original amateur photographers in France at the end of
the nineteenth century.
Born in Montmartre, Paris in 1864, Henri Rivière
grew up in this artistic milieu, spending summers with
in Aix-les-Bains in the Pyrenees where he experimented
with watercolour and studied nature. These trips, along
with early travels to St Briac in Brittany where he would
return again and again, shaped his art. Rivière was taken
on by an academic and art teacher, Emile ‘Père’ Bin,
a period of formal training lasting only a year due to
Bin’s unforeseen death.
Rivière was inspired by the pull of modernity, en-
grossed in the journal La Vie Moderne, and the work of
Puvis de Chavannes and the Symbolists, the Impression-
ists, the Nabis and other contemporary artists. He was to
be self-taught for the rest of his life, and generally pro-
gressed through solid periods of time using a particular
medium. He produced etchings from 1881 to 1885 and
then again in 1906; photographs largely from 1887 to
1912; large format wood engravings from 1890 to 1894
and watercolours from 1910 to 1950. He was to be both
respected and criticised for making large format prints
in large editions, which were controversially destined as
much for the wall as for the collector’s portfolio.
Rivière leapt adeptly into the Paris art scene of the
1880s, strengthening friendships with his childhood
friend Paul Signac and other artists, including the painter
and entertainer Rudolphe Salis, who ran a cabaret,
the Chat Noir. The cabaret was a hotbed of political
mockery, creative fervour and fun, and as a result was
very popular with avant-garde artists. In 1882, Rivière
became the assistant secretary of the associated jour-
nal, Chat Noir. At this time he began to make etchings
of the countryside from the sketches he had made in
Brittany.
The Chat Noir produced spontaneous plays using
shadow puppets. Rivière, realising how popular it was,
formalised the production. By 1886 until the end in
1896 when Salis died, Rivière was stage director of
these unique performances, 43 in all, that pre-empted
cinema in their screen-like movement and light effects.
Rivière cut characters and images out of zinc, and cre-
ated a sense of perspective in the design. In 1890 he
introduced coloured lights to simulate day and night in
his production of La Marche à l’Etoile. He documented
his work at the Chat Noir with photographs, encour-
aged by his friend there, Charles Clos. Many of these
images are of his colleagues at work, taken close-up
from a range of perspectives, and often obscured by
fl ash or the surreal fl oating effect of electric lights.
The photographs never accompanied articles about the
Shadow Theatre—George Redon’s illustrations were
commissioned for magazines. Rivière used his images
to help him when designing new sets and to record
the complicated machinery involved. His photographs
sometimes preceded/inspired a theatrical story, such as
his 1887 show, “La Tentation de St Antoine.”
Rivière began to teach himself photography from
1887 and practised it for about twenty-fi ve years, by
which time photography was over popular in his eyes.
He used a wooden camera with bellows and a (print-
ing) frame, identical to the one Degas was to use a few
years later. His glass plates were far larger than the fi lm