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as was the need to reproduce faithfully, if not the colors,
then at least the tones. Indeed if the collodion glass nega-
tive enabled blue tones to show, some colors such as red
and yellow would not as easily be seen. Robert Jefferson
Bingham—the British photographer of the 1851 Great
Exhibition in London—came to Paris in 1855 and settled
there. He became one of the most talented photographers
in France for fi ne arts reproduction. In 1858 he made
reproductions of Paul Delaroche paintings for the fi rst
catalogue raisonné ever illustrated by photographs,
which was published by Goupil. Once a lithograph and
engraving dealer, Adolphe Goupil started to print and
sell photographs at the beginning of the 1850s. One of
his fi rst publications was in 1853, and was Benjamin
Delessert’s photographs of Raimondi engravings. By
the end of 1884, Goupil’s Galerie photographique had
reached 1759 entries. Adolphe Braun, an Alsatian pho-
tographer who made photographs of fruits and fl owers
for his hometown’s textile industry, also turned to art
reproduction. At the end of the 1860s he successfully
used carbon prints to copy the huge Michel Angelo
paintings of the Sixtine. French museum curators’ at-
titude toward photographic reproductions was not keen.
Many of them were reluctant to move the works they
kept. They saw photographic products—glasses, wet
collodion—as dangerous and dirty for pictures sake. In
1866 Nieuwerkerke then Surintendant des Beaux-Arts
forbade the Louvre entrance to exhibit any photographs.
Charles Marville managed to escape the interdiction and
even took unoffi cially the title of Photographe du Musée
du Louvre. One had to wait until December 1883 to see
a contract signed between the Fine Arts administration
and the Braun company, who was given the project of
photographicly reproducing works of the Louvre col-
lections for thirty years.
There had been no formal aesthetic inventions during
the 1870s. Improvements had not been made in terms
of genre but to support photographic industrialization
and development. Among them fi nding a way of fi xing
images had been crucial for printers and publishers since
the 1850s. Photomechanical process had been mostly
chosen and used. Charles Nègre and Edouard Baldus
devised their own methods around 1850 and Nègre saw
in the photographic engraving “the essential comple-
ment for photography.” In 1857 the Duc de Luynes
set up a competition within the Société française de
photographie to fi nd the best way of fi xing photographs.
Alphonse Poitevin won with his carbon prints. Most
of the photomechanical processes designed after 1865
were modeled after his invention. The replacement
of photographic prints by photomechanical images
caused higher print numbers and reduced publication
costs. Goupil adapted the woodburytype designed in
1865 calling this photoglyptie and used it despite its
complexity. The collotype, invented by Albert in 1868
however was easier to handle and was mostly chosen
by photographers after 1870.
Reproducing colors had been one of the fi rst chal-
lenges for photographers since it was invented. Despite
their commercial success most critics were reluctant
toward hand-colored daguerreotypes or paper photo-
graphs. In 1862 Louis Ducos du Hauron started to work
on a camera which allowed color photography. Six years
later he licensed his invention, which positioned three
different images made from colored fi lters and papers.
At the same time Charles Cros conceived of a process
similar to Ducos du Hauron’s. Thanks to his theory
on color addition the fi nal image was made by super-
imposing three negatives of blue, orange, and green.
Both techniques did not fi nd at their time commercial
developments. Additionally years later, Lumière’s auto-
chromes had been found in color. In 1878, Dalloz pub-
lished the fi rst book illustrated with colored photographs
Le Trésor artistique de la France. Léon Vidal made
photographs of the works of art kept in the Gallery of
Apollo in the Louvre and used his photochromie, based
on chromolithography and woodburytype.
Reduction of time exposure enabled photographers
to reveal a still hidden world to human eyes. As the
astronomer Pierre Jules Janssen observed, photography
had then became a valuable asset to scientists. It became,
he wrote, “the scientist’s retina.” In 1874 he designed a
photographic revolver that allowed the reproduction of
the different stages of the transit of Venus’. Astonish-
ingly he used daguerreotypes and not collodion to do so.
He chose this then forgotten technique for the precise
images it took.
The main innovation of the end of the century was
not French but its use deeply changed photographic uses
and habits in France. In 1871, the Englishman Richard
Leach Maddox invented the gelatin dry plate silver bro-
mide process. Improved by Désiré Van Mockhoven in
Belgium, the new technique quickly took over in France
during the 1880s. The reduction of time exposure being
less than one tenth of a second, allowed photographers
to take on new subjects. Fixated on motion, photogra-
phers took images of waves, horses galloping, running
trains, and steaming ships. Charles Grassin made sev-
eral photographs of waves and ships in the Boulogne
harbor in 1882. It has been said that his photograph
of the steamer Folkestone leaving Boulogne had an
exposure below 1/82th of a second. Louis-Jean Delton
photographed horses races in Auteuil and Muybridge’s
work on animal locomotion drew high interest in France
when they were published in 1878 in La Nature. Jules-
Etienne Marey devoted his life to movement analysis
and gave up traditional anatomical studies of the dis-
section of dead bodies’ for research to help the living.
Inspired by Muybridge’s process he conceived his own
photographic device to observe movement, chronopho-