387
its efforts to teach its student, the school inadvertently
produced an important reference collection of structural
photography. The School took trouble to integrate les-
sons derived from practical experience into its empirical
approach. Photography turned out to be an ideal teaching
aid for capturing the work of the engineers. In 1857,
following a suggestion by one of the Bissons brothers,
the School began teaching photography to its students,
which continued until 1911. Davanne was the teacher
from 1872 to 1886 , and the School published his ‘Lec-
tures on Photography’ in 1883.
In 1876–1901 Davanne became chairman of Société
française de photographie board.
In 1877 he wrote Impressions Photographiques aux
encres grasses analogues à la lithographie. In 1879 he
started teaching at the Sorbonne, Paris. In 1891 he gave
lectures at Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and in
1901 he became the honorary president of the Société
française de photographie. In 1904 he wrote “Protection
due aux oeuvres photographiques et leur assimilation
aux oeuvres artistiques” (Protection due to photographic
works and their assimilation in works of art). He used
Daguerreotype, calotype, salted paper, waxed, with wet
collodion, albumenized. He lived at 82 Rue Neuve-des-
Petits-Champs, Paris. Davanne produced photographs in
a number of media. His work, including views of France,
Germany, Italy, Spain, and North Africa, was frequently
shown throughout Europe. Davanne also wrote extensive-
ly, including an essay on the protection of photographic
works and their assimilation as works of art.
Davanne died on September 19, 1912 at St-Cloud.
Johan Swinnen
See also: Inventions; Société Française de
Photographie; Lithography; Société Héliographique
Française; Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore; Baldus,
Edouard; Régnault, Henri-Victor; Sutton, Thomas;
Robert, Louis-Rémy; Le Secq, Henri; and Fenton,
Roger.
Further Reading
Auer, Michel & Michèle, Encyclopédie internationale des pho-
tographes des débuts à nos jours, CD-Rom, Neuchâtel, Éd.
Ides et Calendes, diffusion Hazan, 1997.
Frizot, Michel (ed.), Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie,
Bordas, Paris, 1994.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison, The origins of photography,
Thames and Hudson, London, 1982.
L.-A. Davanne, De la Photographie appliquée aux Sciences,
1881.
DAVIDSON, THOMAS (1798–1878)
English camera manufacturer and photographer
Thomas Davidson was born in Deehunt, Northumber-
land in 1798, where his father was a road labourer. He
had minimal schooling and was apprenticed as a weaver.
Aged twenty, in 1818, he married, but by this time had
discovered his natural skills as a mechanic. In 1836,
he moved, with his family, to Edinburgh, and working
initially for an optician named John Davis, and subse-
quently for the rather more prominent horologist, Robert
Bryson, Davidson set up in business in 1839, just in time
to benefi t from the new mania for photography.
At least one of his daguerreotype cameras survives,
which, although unsigned, is as described by Davidson
in a paper which he read before the Society of Arts
for Scotland in 1841, and for which he was awarded
the Society’s Silver Medal. Davidson himself took da-
guerreotypes (some examples of which survive) out of
the high window of his premises in Edinburgh’s High
Street, which apparently sold so well that he had to take
on extra staff, while he continued to make improvements
to apparatus. Among his Scottish clients were James
Howie, the University of St. Andrews, James Good
Tunny (and his more than 200 amateur students), and Sir
David Brewster’s son, Captain Henry Brewster. South of
the Border, Henry Collen, Antoine Claudet and Calvert
Richard Jones all extolled the virtues of his lens-making.
The Davidson lens of the Edinburgh calotypists, D.O.
Hill and Robert Adamson, survives in the collection at
Bradford, and has been described as an ‘unsymmetrical
doublet lens of about 17" focal length and maximum
aperture of about f10.’
With the eager participation of amateurs, especially
in the Scottish capital, demand for Davidson’s lenses
remained high into the wet collodion period, and he
should have been a prosperous man. But it was not
to be; Davidson had poor commercial sense, and his
photographic business failed after about fi fteen years.
He retired to his native Northumberland, where he died
in June 1878.
A.D. Morrison-LowDAVISON, GEORGE (1854–1930)
George Davison was one of the most important fi gures
in the development of Pictorial photography at the end
of the nineteenth century. A founder member of The
Linked Ring, he was a highly infl uential fi gure, exhib-
iting widely and writing extensively. His position as
Managing Director of Kodak Ltd brought him affl uence
as well as infl uence.
George Davison was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in
September 1854. From a comparatively modest family
background—his father was a shipyard carpenter—he
alone of his siblings received a secondary education. In
his late teens he passed the entry examination for the
Civil Service and in 1874 he became a clerk in the Ex-
chequer and Audit Offi ce in Somerset House, London.
Davison fi rst took up photography in about 1885 and