616
who photographed trees, Voigtlander with portraits,
Ross and Thompson.
Photography also played an important part as a means
of documenting the exhibition. In addition to individual
initiatives like that of the baron Gros already mentioned,
a report was made of the whole demonstration, and the
photographs were used to illustrate the Reports of the
Juries (each set of four volumes illustrated with 155 salt
prints from calotype negatives). On the whole, 20,000
prints were made and mounted; it was the most impor-
tant illustrated publication of photographs ever created,
but not without diffi culties. The photographers Nicolaas
Hennemann, assistant of Talbot; Frederic Martens; and
Claude-Marie Ferrier were in charge of the negatives,
Hennemann specifi cally for salted prints and the two
others for glass with albumen; Hennemann also made
photographic prints based on paper negative of Owen
(objets d’art applied). Jules Ziegler evoked the campaign
sights made by Ferrier in London (seen external and
interior of the exposure) in company of a Mulhousian
patron of photography (undoubtedly Dollfuss-Hausset,
Mulhousian industrialist and collector of photographs).
Certain sights of the exposure per Antoine Claudet and
John Mayall were sold to the visitors as souvenirs.
Guides of the exhibition were also illustrated with en-
gravings created based on photographs. Robert Hunt,
man of science, member of the Royal Society, author of
the fi rst paper on photography in England (1841), and a
member of the grouping usually referred to as the Calo-
type Club, published a summary review of the exhibited
products of industry; he noticed the many collections of
daguerreotypes there; calotypes of a remarkable beauty,
in particular the pictures of forests; works on negative
glass, and in particular portraits. The panel, anxious
to encourage the development of the “applied arts to
industry,” in accordance with the general orientation
of the exhibition, deplored the small number of scien-
tifi c applications (archaeological copies of inscriptions,
plants, animals, etc.) compared to the traditional kinds
of the portrait and landscape.
In the context of economic and industrial emulation
between the two principal nations of Europe, which had
been also translated into the fi eld of photography (simul-
taneous research on paper negative by Talbot and Ba-
yard, then on negative glass), this demonstration offered
an assessment of the work carried out since 1839. For
the scientifi c community of the photographers, England
had to acknowledge itself overcome in its own territory:
technical subtleties and the obstacles imposed by Talbot
on the distribution of his process (an obligation for any
person using it to pay a royalty) limited the spread of the
English calotype; whereas on the French side, the system
of patents and the support of the government allowed
the practice of photography to be much freer. Because
of the small number of calotypes presented, English
inferiority on the artistic level was all the more glaring.
To rectify this situation, in October 1851, Roger Fenton
went to Paris where he met Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le
Gray, Charles Nègre, his former fellow-members of the
studio, and Paul Delaroche at l’Ecole des beaux-arts;
on his return, he wrote a report on his stay, in which
he underlined the unifying role of the société heliogra-
phique and the newspaper La Lumière, the importance
attached to printing works of quality, as well as the
involvement of the French government. From this point
of view, the exhibition of 1851 stirred the community
of English photographers, who constituted themselves
thereafter in companies. After a fi rst exhibition entirely
devoted to photography, accommodated by Society of
Arts, during the winter 1852–1853, the Photographic
Society of London, founded in January 1853, become
the Royal Photographic Society, and organized an ex-
hibition every year.
The exhibition of the Crystal Palace was a great
public and economic success (six million visitors).
Prince Albert decided to donate the profi ts created to the
creation of an academy of arts and trades, an establish-
ment intended to record the level of quality of industry
connected with new aesthetic orientations. A plot was
acquired in the district of South-Kensington, the mu-
seum of South-Kensington was established, and opened
in 1856. At the end of the century it became the Victoria
and Albert Museum; this museum, reserved for the ap-
plied arts, preserved photographs from the beginning and
developed a photographic department of reproduction
with the service of arts. Other measures were taken in
the following years by the British government: creation
of exhibitions, educational establishments of design, in
order to familiarize the industrial class with the objets
d’art. After the closing of the exhibition, the building
was repurchased by the Crystal Palace Company, and
was dismantled and reassembled in Sydenham, in the
south of London, between August 1852 and 1854. The
photographer Philip Henry Delamotte chronicled the
construction through photography (a hundred pictures)
on the rebuilding of the building (London, British
Library); in 1855, he published it under the title Pho-
tographic Views of the progress of the Crystal Palace,
Sydenham, and showed some of them at the Exposition
Universelle, in Paris. Reopened in 1854, the Crystal
Palace was destroyed in 1936 in a fi re.
Helene BocardFurther Reading
Paper and Light. The Calotype in France and Great Britain,
1839–1870, David R. Godine Publisher Boston / Kudos et
Godine Ltd, London, in association with the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1984.
Aimone, Linda, et Carlo Olmo, Les exhibitions universelles,
1851–1900, Paris, Belin, 1993.