408
DELESSERT, BENJAMIN FRANÇOIS
MARIE (1817–1868) AND ALEXANDRE
HENRI EDOUARD (1828–1898)
French photographers, writers, and businessmen
Two cousins, members of an influential family of
bankers, politicians, civil servants, and philanthropists,
Benjamin and Edouard Delessert studied photography
with Gustave Le Gray. Both exhibited at the Exposition
universelle in 1855.
In 1853–1854, Goupil and Colnaghi co-published
Benjamin’s Notice sur la vie de Marc Antoine Raimondi
(67 salt paper prints from paper negatives, mounted on
59 plates). This was among the fi rst signifi cant uses of
photography for art history. Delessert selected the best
Raimondi prints he could fi nd in public and private
collections, photographed them, and contributed an
essay. His scientifi c ambition manifested itself in the
size of the photographs, which replicated the size of the
originals. Goupil reprinted copies of the photographs in
- Benjamin was a founding member of the Société
française de photographie (SFP).
A nephew of Léon de Laborde and a friend of Olympe
Aguado (with whom he made several portraits), Edouard
Delessert traveled to Sardinia in 1854 and there photo-
graphed architectures and landscapes. Goupil published
40 of these pictures. Involved in the beginnings of the
SFP, Edouard left quickly in disagreement but re-en-
listed in 1859. In 1861 and 1863, he exhibited at the
Société the dramatic enlargements he obtained with a
device of his own called a porte-lumière.
Pierre-Lin Renié
DEMACHY, (LEON) ROBERT
(1859–1936)
French photographer
(Leon) Robert Demachy was active from the late 1870s
until 1914; he was one of the best known and most
infl uential photographers of those times. He was one
of the most important European pictorialist photogra-
phers known by the use of new techniques and for his
artistic skills.
Robert Demachy was born in Saint-German en
Laye the 7th. July 1859, he was the youngest child
of a wealthy bankers family, and, like many amateur
photographer of its time, was able to lead his life and
art without any major fi nancial problems. His childhood
was marked by his family’s stay in Brussels, during
the Franco-Prussian war. This fact allowed Demachy
to concentrate on his art, as he never showed ability to
the family’s banking activity.
His friends were to be found among the artists, the
bohemian Paris cafes were his favourite spot.
In 1893 he married Julia Adelia Delano, an American
he had met at the 1889 Universal Exhibition; it was not
a happy marriage, as both were too independent. Robert
Demachy hated the high society life that Julia Adelia
valued. The couple divorced in 1909.
He died the December 29th, 1936, and was buried
in the Père Lachaise cemetery, like many of the most
illustrious Frenchman.
Maybe he got the passion for photography by infl u-
ence of his painter friends, all we know is that he started
photographing, using the wet collodiom process, during
the 1870s. However, it was in the early 1880s that his
work started being known and recognized.
In 1882 he was elected to the Societè francaise de
photographie, he was also a member of Royal Photo-
graphic Society, Linked Ring and Photo Secession. Soon
he became the undisputed leader of French, and even of
European, pictorialist photography.
At the time there was a strong opposition between
pictorialist and naturalist photography and he attacked
naturalist photography’s main ideologist, Peter Henry
Emerson, accusing him of artistic contradictions and
falsities.
His English language skills helped him to a series of
contribution to the British and American photographic
press including the British Journal of Photography and
Camera Work, in addition to many writings he published
in French magazines. In an article published in 1898 in
the Paris Photo-Club magazine he asks whether photog-
raphy can be considered as an art. A rhetorical question,
of course, as he had the answer, and in words, as well
as in pictures he tried to prove photography was, indeed
an art form. In a Camera Notes 1899 article he would
question the difference between a good photograph and
an artistic photograph. As for other pictorialist photog-
raphers the print was the key to artistic photography.
His exhibited work had great success, since the Ex-
position Universelle, Paris 1889, where he won a bronze
medal. He was to participate in several exhibitions, not
only in France, but also in Belgium, Germany, Great
Britain, Italy, Switzerland and United States, where he
was a participant in the Photo Secession exhibition in
Philadelphia, and at the New York Little Galleries Ex-
hibition in 1906. He was one of the few photographers
of his time to have their own personal exhibitions, some
were held in his personal studio, but others crossed
the channel and were held in the Royal Photographic
Society (1901, 1904, 1907).
His technique, the use of new processes and his
themes, along with his artist mastery were the keys to
his success. The search for new processes was one of
the pictorialists’ main reasons of being, they tried to
produce photographs closer to other art forms, and the
“conventional” photographic processes were unfi t to
this role. Pictorialists were searching for the individual-