Skip to main content

Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884)

 Gustave Le Gray Self portrait, c. 1852



"Though he was trained as a painter, Gustave Le Gray made his mark in the emerging medium of photography. An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a waxed-paper negative that produced sharper-focus prints. In 1851 he began to use collodion on glass negatives, which further increased the clarity of his images. He became one of the first five photographers, along with Édouard-Denis Baldus and Hippolyte Bayard, to work for the missions héliographiques, a government-sponsored commission to document the state of repair of important French monuments and buildings.

Le Gray is credited with teaching photography to many important French photographers in the 1850s. In 1851 he became a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world, and later joined the Société Française de Photographie. In 1860 Le Gray started to tour the Mediterranean with the writer Alexandre Dumas, but they soon parted company. Le Gray went on to Lebanon and then to Egypt, where he became a professor of drawing and died in 1884."
source: GETTY Edu





The Great Wave, Sète, 1856–59
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884)
Albumen silver print from two glass negatives
13 1/4 x 16 5/16 in. (33.7 x 41.4 cm)





Mediterranean with Mount Agde, 1857
Gustave Le Gray
Albumen silver print from two glass negatives
  



 
Grand Mediterranean wave
      Gustave Le Gray, 1857          
Albumen print from two glass negatives
                323 x 412 mm 





Brick [called Brick au clair de lune]
                Gustave Le Gray, summer 1856 and1857 (?)               
Albumen print from collodion glass negative
   320 x 420 mm

source: BNF




 

Gustave Le Gray
Fontainebleau, 1849
Salt print, from a waxed calotype negative

source: GETTY Edu





Gnarled Oak Tree near the l'Épine Crossroads
Gustave Le Gray
1849 - 1852
Albumen print


source: GETTY Edu





Portrait of Victor Cousin
Gustave Le Gray,
1854-1859
Albumen print

source: GETTY Edu


link: Gustave Le Gray Seascapes at The Victoria and Albert Museum



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Group f/64 Manifesto (1932)

Ansel Adams by Dorothea Lange Group f/64 Manifesto The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group. The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group. Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group. Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those worke...
1 comment
Read more

Post-photography

"The job of the photographer in the 21st century has become increasingly challenging as the practice is an overwhelmingly populist business. Anyone who has access to a camera has the power to become an artist, leaving a plethora of cached evidence on the internet for public consumption. This “found” internet content serves as a vast laboratory for major experimentation, underpinning the concept of post-photography, with endless possibilities for artists to recreate original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras." Fiona Martin (short presentation of the book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera by Robert Shore) http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/post-photography / Perhaps there is less novelty here, regarding the context of photography transformed by the new image technologies developed in the late 20th century, in the particular sense that the early impact of photography itself transformed the regimes of vision and impact...
1 comment
Read more

Calotype process

"The calotype negative process was sometimes called the Talbotype , after its inventor. It was not Talbot's first photographic process (introduced in 1839), but it is the one for which he became most known. Henry Talbot devised the calotype in the autumn of 1840, perfected it by the time of its public introduction in mid-1841, and made it the subject of a patent (the patent did not extend to Scotland). The base of a calotype negative, rather than the glass or film to which we have become accustomed, was high quality writing paper. The sheet of paper was carefully selected to have a smooth and uniform texture and, wherever possible, to avoid the watermark. The first stage, conducted in candlelight, was to prepare what Talbot called his iodized paper. The paper was washed over with a solution of silver nitrate and dried by gentle heat. When nearly dr...
Post a Comment
Read more