22
the Société Française de Photographie, which he joined
in 1854 as a founding member.
What has reached us of the photographic produc-
tion of the two Agaudo brothers is, as in many cases,
certainly quite less than all they produced. The diversity
of the results is, however, enough to measure the extent
of the subjects they confronted: deserted interiors,
studies of trees, pastoral scenes, dramatized portraits
and vibrant scenes, reproductions of works of art, and
lastly snapshots of sailboats. It is diffi cult to determine
chronologically the list of these images. It is believed
though, that they were taken simultaneously at meetings
and other places in one or around their many properties
throughout Frances territories. Regarding the diver-
sity of the subjects in these images, it is necessary to
emphasize the two brothers’ originality as undeniably
expressed in these images.
A series of portraits is for this reason exemplary.
From the years 1852–1853 the two brothers arranged
a workshop in their apartment in the Place Vendôme in
Paris where they carried out a series of portraits in front
of painted canvasses, anticipating the use of decorative
elements which would dawn on the Parisian commercial
studios under the Second Empire. In 1853, parallel to the
series of portraits, Olympe Aguado launched out in an
important series of scenes that he carried out for the most
part on his property of Grossouvre, located in the county
of Cher. Among them were images of farm animals, but
also of scenes of carts and cattle drivers copied on the
compositions of animals that can be found at the same
time in works by painters like Constant Troyon or Rosa
Bonheur. During this period, Aguado started his stud-
ies of trees, underbrush and edges of rivers which he
continued throughout the 1850s. On this occasion he
is revealed as one of the more enlightened landscape
photographers of his generation, drawing still from the
pictorial model the sources of its compositions. But the
originality which, without question, distinguishes the
Aguado brothers from the remainder of their contem-
poraries, appears in the few surviving images that they
created at the end of their photographic careers, at the
end of the 1860’s. By subtle staging the Aguado brothers
regulated all the details and they reconstituted, with the
assistance of characters, a series of fascinating images of
their family. Thus Admiration! [Musé d’Art moderne et
contemporain de Strasbourg] with aspects of La Lecture
[Musée d’Orsay], Jeu de Solitaire [private collection]
or even L’album de photographies [collection Maurice
Dussartre, Paris] form an elegant but bitter criticism of
the mores of the Second Empire which falls under the
tradition of the visual satires of middle-class problems
then in vogue in the French press, or the caricatures of
Honore Daumier.
The mid-1860s marks the end of the photographic
career of the two brothers. The Getty museum has pre-
served an album from 1866 in which appear a certain
number of small prints in albumen attributed to Olympe
and Onésipe and whose subjects—small pastoral scenes
carried out in the family circle—announce the formal
vocabulary of instantaneous photography. Undoubtedly
the multiplication of the regular commercial practices
of photography and the renewal of occasional photog-
raphers are not inconsistent with the gradual disinterest
of the two brothers in a practice that they approached
in an indifferent way and outside of any normative
prescriptive framework. The younger brother, Onésipe,
died in Paris on May 19, 1893, followed one year later
by Olympe who died in Compiegne on October 25,
1894.
Denis CanguilhemFurther Reading
Morand, Sylvain et al., Olympe Aguado photographe (1827–
1894), Strasbourg, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain,
1997 (exhibition catalogue).
Roubert, Paul-Louis, “1859. Exposer la photographie,” Etudes
Photographiques, no. 8, novembre 2000, 5–21.AHRENDTS, LEOPOLD (1825–1870)
German photographer
Leopold Ahrendts, born Friedrich Leopold in Dessau on
16 June 1825 to master plumber and subsequent factory
owner Leopold Friedrich Heinrich Ahrendts and his wife
Caroline, worked fi rst as a painter and lithographer in
Dessau, before moving to Berlin around 1850 where he
presented lithographs at the Academy of Arts Exhibi-
tions of 1850 and 1852. In 1856 he began work at the
portrait studio of court photographer Philipp Graff’s
widow, a studio later acquired by August Beer. Ahrendts
is best known for his photographs of Berlin views and ar-
chitecture. He also documented the urban transformation
in events like the laying of the foundation stone of Berlin’s
Town Hall on 10 June 1861. In 1865 he exhibited his
city views at the “Erste Internationale Photographische
Ausstellung” [First International Photographic Exhibi-
tion] under the name of the Graff Studio, for which he
continued to work until his death on 19 March 1870. His
photographic work is preserved in a portfolio “Berliner
Ansichten” [Berlin views] in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek,
in the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin and in the Berlinische
Galerie Photographic Collection.
Stephanie KlammALBUMEN PRINT
Albumen printing paper was the medium of choice for
the majority of photographic printers for more than
thirty years following its introduction in the mid 1850s.