Friday, June 9, 2017

Early Machine-Made Pictures

Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot
Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
1844
daguerreotype
George Eastman House Rochester, New York

L. Wright
Train-wreck on the Providence Worcester Railroad
near Pawtucket, Rhode Island
 1853
daguerreotype
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

"On Saturday 23 February, he taught his eleventh class of the year and had lunch with his group in the Chinese restaurant.  He went for a walk in Montmartre in the afternoon.  He had dinner at the home of Youssef Baccouche and dropped into a party organized by François Flahault.  On Sunday, he went to the market in the morning, spent part of the day reading theses and then went to Orly Airport to meet Michel Salzedo who was just back from Tel Aviv.  He took him to Bofinger's and a few friends joined them.  On Monday 25 February, he got up late.  He typed the text on Stendhal before going to the lunch in the rue des Blancs-Manteaux. That afternoon, he was knocked down by a van in the rue des Écoles."

"It was a 'cold, yellow' day he had noted in his desk diary before leaving.  He survived for another month.  He received visits, but he could no longer relate to anyone.  He did nothing, wrote nothing.  He died on 26 March 1980, at 1:40 p.m., in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital."

 closing sentences of Tiphaine Samoyault's large authoritative new biography of Roland Barthes, profoundest of all twentieth-century writers on the vexed subject of photography. The original French edition was nominated for the Prix Goncourt in 2015  now translated by Andrew Brown and published by Polity as Barthes: a biography.

Southworth & Hawes
Portrait of a Woman in Nine Oval Views
ca. 1845-61
daguerreotype
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Southworth & Hawes
Portrait of Rollin Heber Neal
ca. 1845-61
daguerreotype
George Eastman House Rochester, New York

David Octavius Hill
Mrs Bell of Madras
ca. 1849
daguerreotype
Cincinnati Art Museum

Auguste Vacquerie
The hand of Madame Hugo
1853-54
salted paper print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

Louis-Rémy Robert
Tree study at Saint Cloud
1851
salted paper print
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Charles Nègre
Women in Courtyard
ca. 1847-57
salted paper print
Cantor Center, Stanford University

Benjamin Brecknell Turner
Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire - North Transept
ca. 1854
albumen print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Charles Marville
Hôtel de Ville, Paris
ca. 1865-75
albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

Delmaet & Durandelle
Sculptor Amié Millet with full-size plaster model
of Apollo statue-group for roof of Paris Opéra

1868-69
albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

Édouard Baldus
Cloister, St Trophime, Arles - North Gallery
ca. 1855-65
albumen print
George Eastman House Rochester, New York

Julia Margaret Cameron
Ophelia Study, No. 2
1867
albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

Mathew Brady
Edwin Booth and his daughter Edwina
ca. 1863-65
albumen print
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

"I am only the imaginary contemporary of my own present; contemporary of its languages, its utopias, its systems (i.e., of its fictions), in short, of its mythology or of its philosophy, but not of its history, of which I inhabit only the shimmering reflection: the phantasmagoria."  

– from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (1977)