831
January 1847. Despite a few allegations, no connection
between the two characters can be traced as they had
quite different ambitions.
Le Blondel was attentive to the technical develop-
ment and ingenious improvements of the already-exist-
ing processes. Therefore, he managed to conserve his
local pre-eminence by providing constantly renewed
services. In 1853 he adopted the process of collodion
glass-plate photography, which he used with remark-
able expertise in his urban views. He also worked on
ambrotypes (1854), stereoscopic photography (1859),
photographic enamels (1872) and specialized in en-
largements (1874). Last of all, not long before his
death, the studio turned to aristotypes and snapshots,
showing an interest in the new permanent printing
processes—lambertypes, ‘encre-grasse’ printing and
carbon photography. Over the course of his career, Le
Blondel had tackled many photographic genres: portrait
in all its forms, studies, genre scenes, topographic, and
architectural views.
In the second half of nineteenth century, town plan-
ning was deeply transformed. Four cities, among the
most important Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, and Lille, hired
photographers to bear witness to that upheaval—Mar-
ville in Paris, Terris in Marseilles, Froissart in Lyons,
and Le Blondel in Lille.
In 1870, he was commissioned by the city of Lille
to capture shots of the building of Rue de la Gare. The
death of their founder in 1875 did not prevent the studio
from carrying on with this task and they continued to
take part in professional shows. The critic Ernest La-
can admires their ‘beautiful reproductions of historical
monuments’ at the photographic show of Le Havre
in 1877. In 1878, under Théodore’s management, Le
Blondel’s studio carried out a prestigious order from
the city of Lille for Paris’s World Fair: an album en-
titled “Photographic Views of the Major Works Made
in the Enlarged City from 1860 to 1878” displays an
outstanding survey of Lille’s transformation in forty-
three large-sized albumen prints: the building of thor-
oughfares, administrative edifi ces, schools, hospitals,
religious buildings, industries, shops, public gardens,
and stately gates. In 1882, the studio was to fulfi ll an
important order from the city of Roubaix to take shots
of the recently-built school buildings.
From 1842 onwards Le Blondel regularly displayed
his works in the best-known downtown shops in order
to keep his fame alive. True recognition however, came
from the capital’s professional photographers. In 1853
he exhibited framed portraits in Dunkirk. In 1854 he
sent daguerreotypes and paper prints to Paris’s news-
paper Le Propagateur, which were then highly praised.
He was awarded medals and distinctions as appreciation
for his participation in Paris’s World Fairs (1855, 1867,
and 1878), in the shows organized by the French Society
of Photography (1857, 1859, and 1861), in Le Havre’s
exhibition (1877), in Brussels and Courtrai’s interna-
tional exhibitions (1856, 1857, and 1865). Le Blondel
thus gained recognition from critics (Ernest Lacan in
the reviews called La Lumière and Le Moniteur de la
photographie, Paul Périer in Bulletin de la SFP).
The technical and aesthetic quality of his work
particularly asserted itself in the urban views on albu-
men paper. In these works, horizontal centring was
favoured over wide foregrounds, which caught the
subject either frontally or obliquely. Sobriety in lines,LE BLONDEL, ALPHONSE
Le Blondel, Alphonse Bon.
Postmortem.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundatoin
Gift, 2005 (2005.100.31) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.