885
more sensitive. This included warming the emulsion
in a neutral medium for a few days at 32 degrees cen-
tigrade. Later, Bennett and few others like Désiré van
Monkhoven, in Ghent, and George Eastman patented
the process and sold readymade negatives plates.
The commercial development of the dry plate process
eventually revolutionized the practice of photography,
and the images produced by it. Amateur photographers
did not need knowledge of chemistry or physics as
this invention provided all that was needed, permitting
anyone to practice photography.
Richard Leach Maddox received medals from differ-
ent inventors exhibitions in Brussels, Antwerp, Belgium
and the prestigious Royal Photographic Society’s Prog-
ress Medal on February 12, 1901, for his research.
Maddox did not patent his various discoveries and
inventions and did not make money from them as his
motto was “if freely we have received, freely give” (Brit-
ish Journal of Photography, May 30, 1902, 427).
After his death on May 11, 1902, in Southampton, the
British Journal of Photography noted that the commu-
nity had lost the fi gure that changed photography from a
long process to a more convenient one and that the part
of photographic history, which had long been dominated
by lengthy processes would be, for the “younger genera-
tion of photographers...ignorant of the slow and labori-
ous manner in which gelatin photography was” (British
Journal of Photography, May 30, 1902, 426).
Marion Perceval
See also: Dry Plate Negatives; and van Monckhoven,
Désiré Charles Emanuel.
Further Reading
Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, Paris: Société
française de photographie, vol. 17, 1871, 271–274.
Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, Paris: Société
française de photographie, vol. 19, 1873, 267–269.
Sougez Emmanuel, La photographie, son histoire, Paris: Les
éditions de l’Illustration, 139–140.
British Journal of Photography, London: T. Benn, September
8, 1871.
British Journal of Photography, London: T. Benn, May 30,
1902.
MAES, JOSEPH (1838–1908)
Belgian photographer, collotype printer, and
publisher
Melchior Florimond Joseph Maes was born in Ghent
on June 10, 1838. His fi rst experiments in collodion
photography took place in 1852. His precocious talents
came to the attention of Désire Van Monckhoven, who
then employed him as an assistant. Together they set up
a studio for the production of stereo views which was
a commercial failure, and their stock of negatives was
sold to Gaudin in Paris.
Maes decided to open a portrait studio, while still har-
bouring ambitions in the nascent area of photographic
printing and publishing. His studio opened in Brussels,
at Rue des Fripiers 26, on November 22, 1858. He soon
began supplying photographs for book illustration, his
fi rst two commissions, for the Brussels publishing house
of A. Schnée, appearing in 1860—a deluxe edition of
Histoire populaire de la Belgique [Popular History of
Belgium] by Louis Hymans, containing eleven albumen
prints, and a study Exposition générale des beaux-arts à
Bruxelles. Le salon de 1860 [General Fine Art Exhibi-
tion in Brussels. The 1860 Salon] by the art critic Max
Sulzberger, containing four prints.
Maes formed a partnership with a certain Michaux
(possibly a romantic interest) from September 1862 to
August 1863 and moved premises to Rue Fossé aux
Loups 36 Place de la Monnaie. This partnership, the sole
example in Maes’ long career, was clearly meant to lay
the ground for a publishing initiative in the area of art
reproduction, but proved to be short-lived. Instead, Maes
went on to run the portrait studio alone, domiciled at the
address from 14 October 1863. In 1864 and 1865, he
published his fi rst major work, Album des objets d’art
religieux du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance exposés
à Malines en 1864 [Album of Religious Art Objects of
the Middle Ages and Renaissance exhibited in Malines
in 1864], a series of 57 albumen prints to commemorate
a landmark exhibition of sacred art organised by the
British historian W.H. James Weale.
Maes married Emma Strybos on 27 October 1863,
and they had two daughters, Augusta born in 1865 and
Julia in 1867. The family moved to Antwerp in 1866,
where Maes acquired a portrait studio from Auguste
Blanche (1818–1866) at Rue des Aveugles 1 / Place
du Musée on 15 April 1866. His interest in photome-
chanical processes, a natural outgrowth of his activities
in photographic publishing, dates from around this
period. The considerable economies of scale afforded
by the printing press were clearly demonstrated when
the Brussels fi rm of Simonau and Toovey published a
second edition of Maes’ Malines album in 1866. Using
their patented photolithographic process, it sold at 60
francs a copy, compared to the 200 francs which Maes
charged for the original print-run in albumen.
Maes recognised the especial potential of the col-
lotype process, using minimally adapted lithographic
presses in general use. Following the Paris universal
exhibition in 1867, at which Maes exhibited, he visited
the printing works run by Tessié du Motay and Arosa
in France, but was dissatisfi ed that the number of good
prints per plate rarely exceeded 75, insuffi cient for in-
dustrial-scale production. When Josef Albert advertised
his process in 1869, announcing print-runs of several