774
caused by the Johnstown Flood of 1889. In 1893 Jen-
nings successfully shot the fi rst four panoramic, aerial
photographs of Philadelphia from a free fl oating bal-
loon. In 1896 he assisted inventor and photographer,
Frederick E. Ives, with the development of Kromskop
color photography and opened a Kromskop sales studio
in Philadelphia in 1899. After the failure of the business
in the early 1900s, Jennings operated a commercial
studio taking post card pictures and high-angle progress
photographs of Philadelphia buildings. In the 1910s Jen-
nings was appointed offi cial photographer during World
War I by the U.S. government to document military
camps and railroad construction. Actively working as a
photographer until retirement from his studio in 1936,
Jennings died on 9 September 1946.
Linda Wisniewski
JEUFFRAIN, PAUL (1809–1896)
French photographer
One knows few things about Paul Jeuffrain, and the
biographical material available to draw a clear portrait
of him is very short.
Paul Jeuffrain, son of Augustin Jean Jeuffrain and of
Marie Crémière, was born in Tours (France) on 5 March
- He was 9 years old when his family settled in
Louviers. In 1818, Jeuffrain mad his début in the local
textile industry. Indeed, the father immediately began to
work as a cloth’s manufacturer and mill owner for the
Poitevin et Thévin factory, which took later, in 1828, the
name of Viollet-Jeuffrain, and later on, in 1858, became
Jeuffrain and Co. In 1829, Paul had not joined the family
industry yet, as the military archives prove it, mentio-
ning his presence in Paris as a proofreader. Though
many sources allocate to him a career of naval offi cer,
some others maintain on the contrary that he would
have been exempted from military service for frailty of
constitution. As Michel Nattier has noted, Jeuffrain has
probably travelled for a while in the merchant navy. This
is particularly interesting in that it reveals already the
young man’s taste for exotism and travelling, taste that
has not failed afterwards, and was closely connected in
his practising of photography.
But, in 1834, Paul Jeuffrain, aged 25, had come back
to Louviers, as mentionned in the trade register, where
he is marked as being a cloth manufacturer. Associated
to his own brother Augustin and married to his cousin
Aurélie Crélière, he took the family business over,
which, quite fl ourishing, ensured a comfortable life
for him.
One does not know much more about his professional
or private life, because remarkably little information
about this period has survived. On the other hand, he
has passed on to posterity some splendid calotypes,
realised during two journeys, one in Italy in 1852, the
other in Algeria in 1856.
But how did he arrive to calotype? In spite of any
certainty, it is possible however to make some assump-
tions, for instance in concern with the role played by his
career in the textile industry. Because the fact of being
part of this milieu, in full expansion, in full technical
revolution, has for an evidence made him sensitive to the
notions of progress, invention, to the world’s unfolding
industrialization, and particularly to the increasing part
of machines and modern technical devices.The nascent
photography was completely in such dynamics; during
those fi rst years, it was still especially of the concern
of inventors keen on science and art, rich enough to
engage in the long and expensive operations required
by the photographic protocol. Jeuffrain is one of those,
bourgeois half artist, half inventor, his comfortable
social position seeming to have allowed him to venture
to the pleasures and experimentations of the new born
invention. New born indeed, since Jeuffrain’s fi rst photos
date back to 1849, as revealed by the album conserved
in Paris by the Société française de photographie (all the
images, that is to say this album and the travel negatives
had been given to the Société by Jeuffrain’s son. The
only genuine positives are those of the album), album
he made all by himself, combining his own images with
those of others great users of the new medium: prints
from Hippolyte Bayard, among which some of Louviers
dated 1851, proofs of a probable meeting between the
two men before 1855; also prints from Roger Fenton,
member of the Photographic Society (1853). This al-
bum, like those realized at the same period by Hippolyte
Bayard or Victor Regnault, clearly attests the climate of
emulation, of exchanges, of friendly and fruitful mee-
tings between photographers. It is all the same diffi cult
to understand the kind of relationships Jeuffrain might
have had with others amateur calotypists before 1855,
even if this album’s existence tends to prove he had
already met or been in touch with some of them, french
and british (Fenton, who was a student in the painter
Delaroche’s studio between 1841 and 1843, by the
side of Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq and Gustave Le
Gray, could have met Jeuffrain during his stay in Paris
in winter 1851–1852). In 1852 he took his fi rst travel-
ling photographs, in Naples (his second “photographic
journey,” in Algeria, dates, as for it, from 1856), but
he was not a member of the Société Héliographique at
that time. It is only in 1855 that he became a member
of the Société française de photographie, created on
15 november 1854 after the dissolution of the Société
héliographique, and remained untill he died in 1896.
However, he joined on the invitation of the new society
itself, since it proposed him in 1855 becoming a foun-
der member, which testifi es that his works were known
and appreciated in the closed circle of photography’s