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811

LACAN, ERNEST (1828–1879)
French editor and critic

Although Ernest Lacan never practiced photography,
he was a central voice in the international photographic
community during the second half of the 19th century.
As editor and writer for the two leading French photog-
raphy journals, La Lumière [The Light] and Le Moniteur
de la Photographie [The Monitor of Photography], from
1851 to 1879 Lacan helped shape the terms of the debate
around photographic practice and theory as he strove to
articulate photography’s cultural signifi cance.
Lacan was born in Paris, France, in 1828, the son of
Auguste Théophile Lacan and Marie Josèphe Monodé
Devassaux. He studied painting under the artist Léon
Cogniet and apprenticed in his studio in the 1840s.
Cogniet was a highly regarded history painter with a
strong interest in photography and Lacan later credited
Cogniet’s enthusiasm for stirring his own interest in the
new medium. It was with Cogniet’s encouragement that
in 1849 Lacan fi rst envisioned creating a photography
journal, after having decided to give up painting for
writing.
In 1851 it was another painter and member of the
Société Héliographique, Jules-Claude Ziégler, who
helped Lacan start La Lumière, which fi rst appeared on
9 February under the photography society’s auspices.
When the society dissolved several months later, pho-
tography supplier Alexis Gaudin bought the weekly
and appointed Lacan secretary (i.e., manager), then
editor-in-chief.
As Europe’s fi rst photography journal, La Lumière
achieved a signifi cant readership in France and interna-
tionally, and throughout the 1850s Lacan used its pages
to cover technological advances and historical issues,
as well as to promote photography within the greater
intellectual and artistic community. Dedicated to “Fine

Arts, Heliography and Sciences,” it sought a broad au-

dience of artists, scientists and scholars as it centered

on photography but also encompassed other, carefully

chosen topics like the annual Paris Salon.

In his writings and editorial policy, Lacan fought

fi ercely to defend photography against what he saw

as a common misconception that “imagination and

artistic feeling play no part in the results.” While he

exalted photography’s many applications, he sought

to downplay its commercial reputation, taking pains

to distinguish the medium’s “amateurs,” “artists,” and

“savants” from the legions of “simple photographers”

who toiled in the portrait trade.

Throughout the fi rst half of the 1850s, Lacan wrote

regular photography reviews for the journal, addressing

the work of some of the most important photographers

of the epoch, including Charles Nègre, Roger Fenton,

Edouard Baldus, and Olympe Aguado. While Lacan’s

colleague, the critic Francis Wey, wrote more generally

for the journal on the aesthetics of photography and

art, Lacan’s reviews mapped out photography’s artistic

terrain by analyzing specifi c works with a scrutiny of

form and a depth of commentary previously reserved

for the other arts. He was among the fi rst to claim

that photography had its own schools and styles, and

although he believed these initially derived from the

different photographic processes, he was convinced

that photography “permits each [artist] to take—ac-

cording to his tastes and the nature of his talent— a

different path.”

Lacan was reluctant to situate photography squarely

within the fi ne arts, but he saw it as closely related to

them rather than an inferior substitute, and his reviews

would contribute to securing the photograph’s place as

an aesthetic object. Even if he never ventured to incor-

porate its most obvious characteristics— like its repro-

ducibility or mechanical means—into his assessments,