288
Further Reading
Falconer, John, Regeneration. A reappraisal of photography in
Ceylon (British Council, London, 2000).
Raheem, Ismeth and Percy Colin Thomè. Images of British Cey-
lon. 19th-century photography of Sri Lanka (Times Editions,
Singapore, 2000).
Wright, Arnold (ed.), Twentieth century impressions of Ceylon
(London, 1907).
CHARCOT, JEAN-MARTIN (1825–1893)
French physician and patron
Jean-Martin Charcot was born in Paris on November 29,
1825 and grew up in a middle-class home as the son of
an artisan. He completed his secondary schooling at the
Lycée Bonaparte and began his medical training in 1844,
completing his doctorate at the Faculty of Medicine in
Paris in 1853. His primary interest was in disorders of
the brain and spinal cord. He became senior physician
at the Salpêtrière Hospital for women in 1862, where
he began to employ medical photography as a visual aid
and diagnostic tool. In 1882 he became the fi rst Chair of
Diseases of the Nervous System at the Paris School of
Medicine. During the fi nal period of his career, Charcot
became interested in hysterias and used photography to
further his research. Charcot did not take photographs
himself, but employed professional photographers to run
the Salpêtrière’s photographic studio. The photographs
taken at the hospital under Charcot’s direction were
published in three volumes under the title Iconographie
photographique de la Salpêtrière in the years 1877, 1878
and 1879. Charcot married Madame Augustine Victoire
Durvis in 1864, with whom he had two children. He died
in Paris on August 15, 1893.
Andrea Korda
CHARNAY, CLAUDE-JOSEPH-DÉSIRÉ
(1828–1915)
French itinerant photographer
Claude-Joseph-Désiré Charnay was born near Lyon,
France, in 1828 and died in Paris in 1915. After com-
pleting his education in Paris and travelling in Europe
he moved to the United States, where he started teaching
in 1850, in New Orleans, though yearning to become an
explorer. Fascinated by John Lloyd Stephens’s accounts
of travels in Central America, he embarked on his own
expedition in 1857, with a commission of the French
government, to visit and photograph ruins in the Yucatán.
This Mexican trip, which lasted until 1861, was the fi rst
of a long series of travels that took him to Madagascar
(1863), Chile and Argentina (1875), Java and Australia
(1878–79), and back to Mexico in 1880–82 and 1886.
On all of these various expeditions he took photographs,
most of them large-size glass negatives. Although on his
fi rst Mexican trip he concentrated on pre-Columbian ar-
chitecture, the subject of his superb and widely acclaimed
book Cités et ruines américaines (1863), in later travels
Charnay turned to a rather cold and even voyeuristic
anthropological photography of native populations
(especially in Java and Australia, and then in Mexico in
the 1880s). His many illustrated books and publications,
translated into English and Spanish, made him, in his
lifetime, one of the day’s famous explorers.
François BrunetCHAUFFOURIER, GUSTAVO EUGENIO
(1845–1919)
French photographerBefore 1869, Chauffourier, born Paris, turned up in
Palermo taking photographs along with Perron as Pho-
tographie Parisienne and published an album of views,
monuments and works of art with a text in French and
Italian. In 1870 he obtained a permit to photograph from
the collections of Naples Museum. In 1871 moved to
Rome (although there is still reference to a studio in
Palermo). He then became, along with his wife, Filom-
ena Foschi, a travelling photographer and visited Aus-
tria, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia while
changing his business address in Rome several times.
After his death in 1919, his sons, Pietro and Emilio,
continued to expand the business by the Spanish Steps,
becoming ‘Pietro—Emilio Chauffourier, photographer
editors.’ He is noted for documenting (including taking
offi cial buildings) the last years of the decline of Papal
Rome before the Unifi cation of Italy 1870. In 1953, 300
glass plate negatives of Rome and some positives were
acquired by the Museo di Roma, 5,000 others passed
to Alinari in Florence in 1960 but in the fl ood of 1969
were partly destroyed. Only a few images of his Italian
views have ever been published. Yet his work can often
be identifi ed by strong characteristics: his love of an
empty foreground, a nondescript street, an apparently
lesser viewpoint in the cityscape, a personal angle of
view, all of which contemporary trade photographers
(and no doubt his sons or others the business might have
used) would not have seen. All the more remarkable then
that he still awaits the study he deserves.
Alistair CrawfordCHEVALIER, VINCENT (1770–1841)
& CHARLES LOUIS (1804–1859)
Companies
Jacques Louis-Vincent Chevalier and his son Charles
Louis Chevalier were Parisian opticians descended