Gustave Le Gray

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Gustave Le Gray (self-portrait around 1859)

Gustave Le Gray (born August 30, 1820 in Villiers-le-Bel , Val-d'Oise , † July 30, 1884 in Cairo ) was a pioneer of photography, especially artistic.

Live and act

Born in the early days as the son of a haberdashery. After finishing school, he studied painting in Paul Delaroche's studio . Together with Frederick Scott Archer, he invented the negative process with the collodion wet plate in 1850 . His photographic work documented his time with captivating realism and impressed citizens and nobility all over Europe. In 1854 he co-founded the Société française de photographie . He fled to Egypt in 1860 because of his debts. At auction, his photographs are among the most expensive in the world.

Le Gray invented the sandwich negative method, in which a positive (photograph) is exposed through two negatives. As a photographer for the French court, he was supposed to take pictures of the fleet. Given the state of photochemistry at the time, it took a long time to take pictures of cloud formations. On the other hand, the illumination of the waves and the surf required a very short exposure time . With the help of the combination of two negatives that were taken with different exposure times, Le Gray achieved dramatic photographs that are reminiscent of the maritime painting of seascapes .

literature

  • Sylvie Aubenas: Gustave Le Gray. Phaidon-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 0-7148-4234-6
  • Sylvie Aubenas: Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884). Gallimard, PAris 2002, ISBN 2-07-011718-9
  • Eugenia P. Janis: The Photography of Gustave Le Gray. University of Chicago, Press and Art Institute, Chicago, Ill. 1987
  • Nils W. Ramstedt: The photographs of Gustave Le Gray. University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif. 1977
  • Margret Stuffmann (Ed.): Pioneers of landscape photography . Gustave Le Gray, Carleton E. Watkins. Schmidt, Mainz 1993, ISBN 0-89236-299-5

Web links

Commons : Gustave Le Gray  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Le Gray, Gustave
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Gray, Jean-Baptiste-Gustave
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Photographer
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH Villiers-le-Bel , Val-d'Oise
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1884
Place of death Cairo