140
stopped there: to be convinced, you need only consider
the number of photographic establishments founded in
Brussels alone in the past few years; this is the best proof
of vitality in this industrial branch.” (L’Etoile belge,
16–17 May 1864). A monthly periodical, Bulletin belge
de la Photographie, appeared from 1862 to 1880, until
1872 with the support of the photographic supply house
of Léon Deltenre-Walker (1819–?) in Brussels.
The advent of the fourth phase was made possible by
the huge and virtually instantaneous popularity of the
carte-de-visite, introduced as a novelty in the autumn of
1859, which, only a year later, had achieved universal
acceptance in portrait studios throughout the country.
The card portrait, aimed at the middle-class consumer,
proved to be an extraordinary marketing phenomenon
in Belgium as elsewhere, the motor which would secure
for photography its position as an autonomous economic
activity. The bread-and-butter work of the portrait studio
allowed a small number of fi rms, some with a strong
regional identity, to expand their operations and sustain
a reputation over several decades. They include Louis
Ghémar in Brussels, Joseph Maes in Antwerp, and Ar-
mand Dandoy in Namur, young men dynamic enough to
seize the opportunities which the new medium offered
in other areas, and suffi ciently affable to fl atter and re-
tain the bourgeois clientele of their bedrock portraiture
business.
A phenomenon typical of professional photography
during this phase in Belgium is geographic clustering.
Brussels, as capital city, was the pole of attraction.
During the period 1860 to 1890, about a third of all
portrait photographers in Belgium were to be found in a
relatively small area of Brussels. Data aggregated from
trade directories emphasises the level of concentration.
In 1860, Brussels had 23 out of 36 studios in the whole
of Belgium. By 1868, this had risen to 49 out of 127.
While there was a shake-out in the 1870s in Brussels,
due to economic downturn, the major cities of Liège,
Antwerp and Ghent came nowhere near to catching up.
By 1888, Brussels still had three times as many studios
as Antwerp—72 to 25. Seen per head of population,
the position of Brussels is just as predominant: in 1866,
there was one photographer for every 6000 inhabitants in
the capital (the average for the country as a whole was 1
in 19,000). The density ratio of 1:6000 was not reached
in Liège and Antwerp until the mid-1890s, and by the
country as a whole only after the turn of the century.
Brussels, with its concentration of wealth, was therefore
the natural environment for what was still very much a
luxury commodity.
Concerning the social and professional origins of
19th-century practitioners, professionals were the
most diverse—a good minority claimed to be artists
and painters, or had previous experience in an allied
graphic trade such as lithography or engraving. Many
of the daguerreotypists had a solid grounding in optics
and mechanics. But the majority of men entering the
profession during the period covered were artisans,
skilled craftsmen with previous experience in a quite
unrelated fi eld. Their continued presence in the domain
depended not just on their manual skill, but on an abil-
ity to run a small business. For many, photography was
only one activity within a lifetime of varying activities,
and the average life of a studio in Brussels up until 1900
was little more than fi ve years. Success was also partly
a function of geographic distribution: the best known
and most successful establishments tended to be situated
along the central and more fashionable streets in the
main towns, while photographers in other locations lived
a more precarious existence. The profession was over-
whelmingly male, with some widows or single women
(often daughters of photographers) active as studio head,
while others worked as colourists and retouchers.
The fi fth phase of photography’s socialisation was a
quantitative leap. The technology experienced a wide so-
cial and geographic dissemination, and was incorporated
into everyday life. In Belgium, this point was reached
around 1890, as professional photographers began to
open studios in working-class suburbs and in country
areas. The number of patents registered rose from 251
in the 1880s to 592 over the following decade. In paral-
lel, the penetration of the medium as a leisure activity
reached new levels, thanks to the successful marketing
of Kodak cameras and fi lm. The early 1890s saw the
formation of local amateur groups, but also led to a
fragmentation of attitudes. The last unifi ed photographic
exhibition in Belgium, covering equipment and images
of all sorts, was organised by the Association belge de
Photographie in 1891. Thereafter equipment could only
be seen at industrial fairs, and exhibitions were either
for all-comers or the pictorialist elite.
In fact, pictorialist trends developed rapidly in Bel-
gium, as leading amateurs (and a few professionals)
broke with artistic conformity, asserting a recognisably
individual aesthetic vision in image-making. A promi-
nent presence in the fi rst wave of pictorialism, Léonard
Misonne acquired a lasting reputation for landscapes,
bucolic and timeless. His images are characterised by
a masterly treatment of light and atmospheric condi-
tions, as summed up in the credo “Le sujet n’est rien,
la lumière est tout” [The subject is naught, light is all].
Also typical of the new movement was Gustave Ma-
rissiaux, whose images of mine workers in the Liège
region express a social concern previously absent from
Belgium photography.
A main characteristic of the fi fth phase of the so-
cialisation process was the broadening of applications,
when photography began to be applied to completely
fresh areas of human endeavour. When the two major
inventions to incorporate photographic technology—