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single day, which was really exceptional in those years.
Sometimes, there were only minor differences among
several shots, but as the journey progressed, more dif-
ferent views and fragments of a building were taken.
Their collaboration resulted in some true masterpieces
of nineteenth century architectural photography, such as
their view of the Grand staircase of the castle in Blois,
which was exhibited in London in 1854, their pictures
of the Cloister of Moissac, or their photographs of the
fortifi cations of Carcasonne.
After his participation to the Mission, Mestral con-
tinued photographing monuments. Without receiving an
offi cial commission, he explored Normandy and Brit-
tany—both regions ignored by the Mission—in 1852.
Henri de Lacretelle wrote lyrically about these pictures
in La Lumière in 1853 and he praised in particular
Mestral’s talent to render both details and a general view.
In addition, Mestral directed his gaze at the restoration
of the Notre Dame of Paris, where he photographed the
sculptures of Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume in 1854.
Steven Jacobs
Biography
After a long period of obscurity about essential bio-
graphical data, it recently turned out that he was born in
Rans (Jura) on March 20, 1812, as Thérèse Jean-Baptiste
Augustin, aka Auguste Mestral. He is the son of Pierre
and Jeanne Françoise Poux, the latter was a widow of
a certain Claude Etienne Mestral. After fi nishing law
studies in Dijon in 1833, he becomes a clerk in Paris
and Ecouen successively. It is possible that already here,
around 1840, he meets Le Gray, who was an assistant
of Mestral’s predecessor. In 1844 he establishes him-
self in Paris, where he gains reputation as a portraitist.
A founding member of the Société héliographique, he
contributes to the Mission Héliographique in 1851,
photographing monuments together with Le Gray.
All that time, he has his studio in the Rue Vivienne
in Paris. In 1856 he leaves the capital and, probably,
photography as well. Many of his negatives are left
to his friend Ernest Moutrille, a Besançon banker and
amateur photographer. He turns up in Rans, where he
marries in 1858 and lives from his fortune. He dies the
fi rst of March 1884.
See also: Mission Héliographique; Le Gray,
Gustave; Société héliographique; Société française
de photographie; Wey, Francis; Baldus, Édouard;
Bayard, Hippolyte; and Le Secq, Henri.
Further Reading
De Mondenard, Anne, La mission héliographique: Cinq pho-
tographes parcourent la France en 1851, Paris: Editions du
patrimoine, 2002.
Voignier, Jean-Marie, “Mestral,” Etudes Photographiques, 14,
January 2004, 144–46.MEXICO
The fi rst photographs taken in Mexico were made
by Jean François Prélier, a French engraver living in
Mexico City, who returned from a trip to France with
two cameras in December of 1839. He demonstrated
the new daguerreotype process when he debarked in
Veracruz, and shortly after his return to the capitol
he took the fi rst photograph of Mexico City—a view
of the cathedral—on January 26, 1840. Thus, the fi rst
photographs made in Mexico were taken barely six
months after the invention of the daguerreotype had
been announced in the Mexican press (June 1839). The
fact that they were made by a foreigner foreshadowed
the development of photography in Mexico in the
nineteenth century that resulted in a history as we now
know it dominated by foreign names, particularly those
of French, German, and American photographers. The
reasons for this were twofold: fi rst, from an economic
perspective cameras were costly and bore high import
taxes, and Mexican society lacked the well-educated
middle class from which photography initially drew its
ranks in England, Europe, and America. Second, for
most of the nineteenth century Mexicans used photo-
graphs primarily as a private celebration of family and
community, whereas foreigners were keenly interested
in photographing Mexico’s monuments, landscape,
indigenous peoples, and political events. In fact, in
the nineteenth century, only Egypt attracted as many
photographers as did Mexico. Because these images
by foreigners tended to be made for public consump-
tion—they appeared in a wide range of publications
and were often readily available for purchase—they
gained a worldwide currency that photographs made
by and for Mexicans did not.
Within two years after Prélier’s fi rst photographs,
photography had become a business in Mexico. Al-
though itinerate photographers, who traveled the tra-
ditional commercial routes were plentiful, professional
studios were beginning to open in the larger cities. In
1842 Randall W. Hoit was the fi rst photographer to es-
tablish a studio in Mexico City. He was followed shortly
thereafter by fellow New Yorkers Francisco Doistua,
Andrew J. Halsey, and Richard Carr. Joaquín María
Díaz González, the fi rst native Mexican daguerreotyp-
ist, opened a studio on the Calle de Santo Domingo in- In 1856 there were seven photographic studios
operating in Mexico City, in 1860 there were over
twenty studios, and by 1870 seventy-four studios were
in existence.
The years of the French Intervention (1864–1867)
saw the burgeoning of photography in Mexico. Tied to