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that followed the advertisement of the discovery of
photography, Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre, the in-
ventor, signed on June 22, 1839 a franchise agreement
with company, “Giroux and Co” for the construction
and marketing of his photographic systems, including
cameras, plates, chemicals and ancillary equipment. At
the same time, André and Alphonse Giroux published
on August 20 the fi rst descriptive instructions of the
daguerreotype process.
This agreement created great interest in photogra-
phy for André Giroux; however nothing indicated that
he tried out the technique of the daguerreotype, and if
he did, none of those attempts have survived. It is not
certain if André Giroux’s artistic refl ections found in the
use of this new technique were prolonged and developed
throughout his career. He waited more than ten years
for the introduction of the negative-positive process on
paper in France, when his taste for photography became
apparent.
Compared with the production of his contemporaries
who, like him, practised photography as “amateurs”—
such as Olympe Aguado, Louis Robert, or Humbert de
Molard—the photographic oeuvre of André Giroux can
be regarded as modest. Hardly more than sixty prints
have been found, spread throughout many public and
private collections. This choice of paper negatives and
salted paper prints determined the character of André
Giroux’s photographs. This choice of negative paper and
the use of the positive prints on salted paper determined
the esthetics of the photographs of André Giroux. During
the four years of his activity—one can indeed reasonably
think that he ceased his production around 1857—he
used alternatively two formats of negative (22 × 28 cm
and 28 × 38 cm).
With two exceptions, André Giroux took landscape
and architectural pictures exclusively. Landscapes of
edges of rivers, interiors of courts, views of agrarian
buildings or ancient monuments constitute the main por-
tion of his images. In contrast to the photographers who
drew their inspiration from the forests in the neighbor-
hoods of Paris, in particular that of Fontainebleau, André
Giroux showed a clear predilection for more remote
places. One can, however, only partially reconstitute his
various voyages taken in various areas of France. In the
same way their chronology remains speculative. Thanks
to the titles of the works provided by the catalogues of
expositions in which he took part, as well as with the
indications reproduced on some of his photographs, one
is able to establish that André Giroux returned to areas of
Arles like the valley of the Rhone. But it is in Auvergne
that he carried out, it seems, a majority portion of his
captured images.
André Giroux had already experienced the tradition
of the Grand Tour during his years training as a painter in
Italy and later, while working in certain areas of France
and Europe. He followed in the vogue of the landscape
naturalist introduced in France at the beginning of the
century by the theories of Pierre-Henri Valencian and
relayed in 1817 by the publication Les nouveaux voyages
pittoresques en France. There is consequently nothing
astonishing to fi nd in the photographic work of Andre
Giroux in this evocation of the picturesque landscape
that one frequently fi nds in his paintings. Some of his
photographs, like Hangar au bout du chemin, testify to
this art of the setting in scenes of the picturesque and
whose audacity of composition, in particular the marked
presence of the foreground, announces the style charac-
teristic of the photographic work of Andre Giroux.
In what is known of this work, the images of Au-
vergne are fi rst rate, by their number as well as by their
formal diversity. The geographical situation of the re-
gions that he crossed—Lozere, Aveyron, and to combine
them at the border of Auvergne—offered to him varieties
of semi-mountainous landscapes with many villages
crossed by rivers. The edges of the gorges of Jonte, be-
tween Peyreleau and Meyrueis, at the border of Aveyron
and Lozere, particularly seem to have held his attention.
The damaged character of the landscape gave him the
opportunity to emphasize the picturesque aspects of the
places that he photographe: a path bordered with houses
with thatched roofs, a stone bridge spanning water, a hut
on the wooded and precipitous slopes of the mountains,
a line of houses on side of river. The quasi-systematic
reference to the painting that one can read in criticisms
from the time concerning the photographic oeuvre of
Andre Giroux does not show anything surprising. One
fi nds indeed marked stylistic similarities between some
of his paintings and some of his photographs.
If these landscapes were largely admired, some not
hesitating to compare them with those of Gustave le
Gray, no criticisms, however, failed to stress the impor-
tance of the fi nal improvement in the photographic work
of Andre Giroux. This artifi ce so violently attacked by
Eugene Durieu, president of the Société française de
photographie in 1855, for which “... to invite the brush
with the help of photography under pretext of introduc-
ing art there, it is precisely to exclude the photographic
art” (Bulletin of the Société française de photographie,
1855, t.1, p. 301). In spite of criticisms and like ma-
jority of the photographers of his time, André Giroux
frequently improved his negatives. A detailed examina-
tion of each one of his prints indeed makes it possible to
detect the subtle interventions to which it proceeded in a
systematic way, thus giving to each one of these prints a
particular character. This technique then enabled him to
approach the effects that he could obtain in his paintings
while creating artifi cially, by the means of the gouache
and the scraping directly applied to negative, an effect
of cloud as in Obtevoz, Rhône (J.Paul Getty Museum),
or the transparency of water in his many photos of edges