873
his mother remarried, his mother moved the family to
Mannheim in 1818. In 1829, Lorent graduated from the
secondary school in Mannheim and began attending the
University of Heidelberg. In 1837, Lorent completed
his scientifi c doctoral thesis, and thus graduated. Due to
his family’s affl uence, Lorent, a private and introverted
young man, was able to follow in the foot steps of his
role model, Alexander von Humboldts and travelled
to Egypt and Asia Minor, where he studied the natural
landscape. After the death of his stepfather, Lorent
received his estate which allowed him an absolute
fi nancial freedom.
During his travels to London in 1850, Lorent met W.
H. Fox Talbot who introduced Lorent to photography
and Talbot’s own calotype process. Due to Lorent’s
education in science, he was able to modify Talbot’s
process, enabling him to become one of the most
prominent photographers of his time. He understood
very quickly that photographs are very easy to copy and
therefore he’d only take a few photographs and focus
on their quality.
His original Venice photographs measured 38 × 47
cm, but by 1856 he was using the much larger 45 ×
55 cm format. These Venetian photographs increased
Lorent’s reputation in the European photographic com-
munity. In 1856, he exhibited these large-sized albumen
prints in Brussels during a critical time of photography.
Nevertheless, the editor of the photographic journal La
Lumière based in Paris, Ernest Lacan, was absolutely
enthusiastic about Lorent’s work. He named Lorent the
“Venetian Baldus,” because Lorent’s works echoed the
close-up photography of Le Louvre by Edouard Denis
Baldus.
Jakob August Lorent donated some of his large-for-
mat architectural photographs of Venice—worth about
fourteen guilder ($160)—to help in the restoration of a
church in Weimar. In the making of these large format
photographs, Lorent chose to use le Gray’s waxed paper
process, rather than the widely popular wet collodion
process on glass, greatly reducing the weight of mate-
rials he had to carry. Although the wax-paper process
was favoured because it supplied sharps results, it was
particularly favoured by touring photographers because
of an incident that happened to Louis Auguste Bisson
on his great photographic tour in 1858 through south
of France when all of his glass negatives broke during
a coach accident near Toulouse.
Lorent also developed the paper negative through
the use of beeswax in such a way that he achieved a
consistent transparency so that structure of the paper
fi bres, under the diffuseness of the beeswax, disappeared
nearly 100 per cent. This approach infl uenced William
Henry Fox Talbots photographs and led the French pho-
tographer Gustave Le Gray to develop a special paper
negative process, which he patented 1851.
During the revolution of 1848 Lorent left Mannheim
for London and married there in 1850. Lorent returned
to Mannheim in 1858, from where he travelled to Gra-
nada and then to Algeria, to document old Islamic art.
In 1859, Lorent took a second journey to Egypt, up
the Nile, and to Nubian in pursuit of old Egyptian art
that he intended to document. As was the case with his
Venetian photographs, Lorent’s work was also grand,
the negative format being 45 × 55 cm.
Lorent reproduced the photographs of the voyages
that he took between the years 1858 and 1860 in an
album, that he then dedicate and personally gave to the
duke of Baden, Friedrich II, entitling it, “Egypten, Al-
hambra, Tlemsen, Algerien” (Mannheim, 1861). Lorent
noted, “As far as I know, there is no photographic work
in Europe, that apprehends so completely the old manner
of Egyptian art and Eastern architecture.”
Lorent left for the country in November of 1860 due
to political instability caused by the Bavarian King Otto
I, whose reign was similar to the Osmanic Domination in
Greece. Initially, he travelled to Italy and then to Corfu
and Athens and in the summer 1862 he took a second
trip to Greece. That same year he produced an album
with “Pictures from Athens” in Mannheim.
These six years of tireless activity, both physical and
artistic, are accurately represented as the apogees of
his photographic career, which is evident as Lorent’s
large-sized photographs have no equal from 1850 to- His wax paper negatives possess the outlet an
hot components, that could be found, rarely through
the use of wet collodium process, and mostly only
through posterior tint by printing. The awards of the
World Exposition in London and the Exhibition in
Amsterdam in 1862 confi rmed his prominent position
and unrivalled talent.
In 1863 Lorent travelled to Turkey, Syria, and Egypt,
then some months later in April of 1864, he went to
Palestine and Egypt again. One fi nal journey in 1865 led
Lorent to Sicily. From this point on, he took photographs
mainly on his “choice land,” the Grand Duche of Bade,
and mostly of the memorials of the Middle Ages, which
he collected into three large-sized albums and produced
for the Court.
Lorent donated his books and photographs to the
Public Library in Mannheim. In June of 1873, Lorent
moved from Mannheim to Meran, Switzerland be-
cause of health problems. Although ill, he participated
in numerous international exhibitions, and occupied
himself with research on platinum prints and took
numerous photographs of Meran and its surroundings
areas. During this time he wrote descriptive texts that
accompanied his albums, giving evidence of his great
intelligence and his distinct aesthetic sense. There are
few documents, personal notices, and a relatively small
number of photographs of this private scholar, most of