PARIS — In celebration of Paris Photo’s return to the Grand Palais, Hans P. Kraus Jr. is pleased to present Drawn with Light, with exceptional examples of iconic early British and French photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Hippolyte Bayard, Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Nadar. The installation, in part, pays tribute to Lacock Abbey, Talbot’s ancestral home, as the birthplace of photography on paper. The Abbey’s grounds, architectural elements and interiors figure in Talbot’s earliest experiments and his greatest achievements. Also featured, and rarely found, are some of the first photomechanical prints by Talbot, Hippolyte Fizeau, and Choiselat & Ratel.
The Ladder, an especially rich, untrimmed salt print from a calotype negative printed in 1844, is one of William Henry Fox Talbot's (1800-1877) most important images. It is his first published photograph to include people. Lengthy exposure times in the early days of the paper negative prevented the capture of people in motion. However, as Talbot explained, "when a group of persons has been artistically arranged, and trained by a little practice to maintain an absolute immobility for a few seconds of time, very delightful pictures are easily obtained." The Ladder was carefully composed by Talbot to simulate live action. In this finely executed work, originally from the celebrated collection of Arnold Crane, we see Talbot becoming one of the first photographic artists.
In La cuisine du photographe, a unique salt print dated May 1846 from a paper negative, also from Arnold Crane’s collection, early morning sunlight streams into Hippolyte Bayard's (1801-1887) rustic kitchen, illuminating everyday dishes, vessels and utensils between sharply delineated shadows. The composition draws from the tradition of Dutch still life painting and anticipates similar studies made in the 1850s by Victor Regnault, J. B. Greene, Henri Le Secq and others. Unlike these photographers, who arranged their compositions outside in bright daylight, Bayard made his still life indoors, a far more challenging location in which to harness sunlight.
Roger Fenton's (1819-1869) clouds are the defining core of his extraordinary landscapes, in much the same way as those of Constable, who in a letter described the sky as both "the keynote" and "the chief organ of sentiment" in landscape painting, adding that the “landscape painter who does not make skies a very material part of his composition neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids. The sky is the source of light in nature and governs everything." Deeply inspired by Constable's cloud studies and Turner's explorations of light and atmosphere, Fenton's rendition of clouds and sky in Afternoon is an intensely felt meditation on nature which seems to hover between the visible and the imagined while manifesting a reverence for the observable world. This 1856 salt print, boldly signed in ink, is on par with both renowned Fenton cloud studies from the Rubel Collection now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, like the other two, is unique.
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910) began using artificial light for photography in 1859. Presenting his experiments in the salons of the Cercle de la Presse Scientifique, Nadar obtained a patent for his lighting innovation in 1861 and was given exclusive access to the Paris catacombs and sewers. Exposure times, with spotlights or cables visible in some images, were long and in this albumen print of The Mannequin’s Siesta, a mannequin is modelled as a snoozing laborer. Nadar's series of photographs of the Paris catacombs are among his rarest and are the most striking images obtained using the then new technology. These were the first to be made underground.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is known for her portraits of Britain's most celebrated figures and for her allegorical tableaux drawn from literature, poetry and the Bible. This albumen print, dated 1869, from a collodion negative of The Kiss of Peace found its inspiration in a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The costume of Cameron's sitters, Florence Anson (?) and Mary Hillier, Cameron's maid from 1861-1875, though of the Victorian period, makes no explicit reference to a specific historical era. Cameron believed The Kiss of Peace to be "the most beautiful of all my photographs."