Hippolyte Bayard
Hippolyte Bayard (* 20th January 1801 in Breteuil-sur-Noye , France ; † 14. May 1887 in Nemours ) was a French finance officer and general counsel , considered the inventor of the direct positive process and as one of the "founding fathers" of the photograph became known . He organized the world's first photo exhibition and is still considered a misunderstood pioneer of photo technology . With the staged photograph of his alleged suicide, he went down in the history of photography as the first “photo forger” .
Live and act
Hippolyte Bayard was the son of the Justice of the Peace Emmanuel Bayard and the Adélaïde Elisabette Vacousin from Breteuil-sur-Noye in the Oise department . The young Hippolyte was gifted in many ways: he painted, drew, was considered inventive and, in addition to artistic techniques, had soon acquired simple knowledge of physics and chemistry. He was drawn to the art metropolis of Paris at an early age, where he - following the tradition of his father - worked as a lawyer and as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance. Financially secure, he was able to devote himself entirely to his artistic experiments in his private life. He made friends with the painter Henri Grevedon (1776–1860) and other artists and artisans.
Little is known about Hippolyte Bayard's private life, he was considered a modest and withdrawn person who had been interested in the phenomenon of light since his youth , experimented with it and, independently of Joseph Nicéphore Nièpces or Louis Daguerre, spent years looking for a photographic process , images on light-sensitive to fix made paper. Biographers suspect that Bayard reported to the Paris optician Charles Louis Chevalier - from whom Daguerre also bought his optical lenses - of first attempts as early as 1830. By 1837 at the latest, he had made the first photograms on sensitized paper, which he collected chronologically in an album.
Bayard's direct positive method
In contrast to Daguerre, who only experimented with light-sensitive metal plates, Bayard found a method in which he coated ordinary writing paper with silver chloride (chlorine silver ) and then let the sunlight blacken it; He then dipped the blackened paper into an iodine-potassium iodide solution (Lugol's solution), positioned it in a camera and exposed it again. The paper faded , separating the iodine from the potassium iodide solution and bonding to the blackened silver, giving it a positive image. The developed image was then fixed in a potassium bromide solution or in sodium thiosulfate solution (fixing soda) and watered. Bayard had thus developed the first direct positive process. A disadvantage of the process is the lack of a negative , so that direct reproduction is not possible. This was one reason why Bayard's method was no longer used.
The lost race for recognition
On January 7, 1839, the physicist François Arago , who had great influence as the head of the Paris Observatory , had informed the Academy of Sciences in Paris about Louis Daguerre's new method, but presented only inadequate results. On May 20, 1839, Bayard first approached Arago to get his invention patented and published. But Arago was already busy with the exploitation of Daguerre's process and refused, although Bayard's process was more precisely documented and appeared more promising.
On June 24, 1839, Bayard finally exhibited 30 direct-positive paper images in the Salle des Commissaires-prisseurs in Paris - the world's first photo exhibition - one month before Daguerre had even provisionally certified his method (July 30, 1839). On August 19, 1839, François Arago finally published the patent specification of the daguerreotype in front of the Academy , which was translated into eight languages within a few months. Hippolyte Bayard's endeavors to publicize his invention accordingly or to market it effectively had failed.
Although Hippolyte Bayard was the fourth "forefather" in the history of photography, alongside Niepce, Daguerre and the British William Henry Fox Talbot , he had lost the race against the rapidly commercialized processes of the daguerreotype and the calotype and ended up as an independent "co-inventor" of photography on the sidelines.
The first fake photo
He visualized his failure as an inventor in 1840 with a picture entitled Autoportrait en noyé ("Self-portrait as drowned man"): With the help of his own photographic process, he produced a self-portrait , on the back of which he wrote a letter - from the afterlife, so to speak, in which he larmoyant-ironically laments his defeat against Louis Daguerre:
“The body of the man you see overleaf is that of Mr. Bayard… The academy, the king and all those who saw these pictures were filled with admiration, just as you are now admiring them, even though he himself found them defective . That earned him a lot of honor, but not a penny. The government, which had given far too much to Mr Daguerre, said it could not do anything for Mr Bayard. Then the unfortunate drowned himself. HB, October 18, 1840. "
It is one of the earliest photographic self-portraits that has a special place in the history of photography because of its staging. Hippolyte Bayard was then often referred to as the first “photo forger ”.
Société Héliographique , later years
In the following years he turned himself to the daguerreotype and the calotype , and from 1847 onwards he photographed monuments and views of Paris, including the famous windmills of Montmartre . His numerous self-portraits and group shots testify to the skillful handling of the photographic device; his precisely arranged still lifes of gardening tools have an innovative originality that the painterly compositions of the time leave far behind.
Hippolyte Bayard:
Montmartre , Paris, ca.1842
Hippolyte Bayard:
Windmills, Montmartre , Paris, ca.1842
Hippolyte Bayard:
La Madeleine , Paris, ca.1845
In 1851 Bayard became a founding member of the Société Héliographique . In the same year he and the four photographers Édouard Baldus , Gustave Le Gray , Henri Le Secq and Auguste Mestral (1812-1884) were commissioned by the Commission for the Preservation of Monuments to take photographs of historic buildings for the purpose of recording them as Monument historique . For this so-called Mission Héliographique , Bayard traveled to Normandy . In 1854 the Société Héliographique became the Société française de photographie (SFP), which still exists today . Bayard was long-time general secretary and legal advisor to the company that still manages his estate today.
On January 24, 1863, Bayard was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor . He did not receive the cross for his achievements in the field of photography, but for his services in a state office. In old age, Hippolyte Bayard retired to Nemours, where he died on May 14, 1887 at the age of 86. He was buried in the Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours cemetery. The Bayard Islands in Antarctica are named in his honor .
In 1977 photo works by Hippolyte Bayard were shown at the documenta 6 in Kassel in the famous photography department , which presented the connection to contemporary art in the context of " 150 years of photography ".
literature
- Lo Duca: Bayard, the first photography artist . Prisma, Paris 1943; 1590 copies in French, of which 1400 on wove paper, 150 on ribbed paper, 40 not on sale with original engraving by Bayard, 1500 copies in German, all numbered; Reprinted by Ayer Publishing, New York 1979, ISBN 0-405-09634-8 . Excerpts in Google Book Search
- André Jammes: Hippolyte Bayard: a misunderstood inventor and master of photography . From the Frz. by Gertrud Strub, Bucher, Frankfurt / Main, Lucerne 1980, ISBN 3-7658-0204-2 .
- Walter Koschatzky: The art of photography . Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna, 1984, ISBN 3-7017-0386-8 .
- Catalog for documenta 6: Volume 1: Painting, sculpture / environment, performance; Volume 2: photography, film, video; Volume 3: Hand drawings, utopian design, books; Kassel 1977, ISBN 3-920453-00-X
- Honnef, Klaus: 150 years of photography (extended special edition of Kunstforum International: 150 years of photography III / photography at documenta 6 , volume 22); Mainz, Frankfurt am Main (two thousand and one) 1977
- Hannavy, John (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography ; New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-415-97235-2
Web links
- Literature by and about Hippolyte Bayard in the catalog of the German National Library
- Search for Hippolyte Bayard in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
- Hippolyte Bayard at photography-now.com
- Hippolyte Bayard at artfacts.net
- Entries in Arthistoricum.net
Notes and individual references
- ↑ a b Pierre G. Harmant: Hippolyte Bayard . (accessed: January 27, 2008) ...
- ↑ a b Walter Koschatzky: The art of photography . Residenz Verlag, Salzburg and Vienna, 1984, p. 47ff.
- ↑ Floris M. Neusüss: The photogram in the art of the 20th century . DuMont, Cologne, 1990, pp. 341, 438.
- ^ Photographic process by Valerie Lloyd from: Bruce Bernard: Photo discoveries 1840-1940 . DuMont, Cologne, 1981, p. 251, ISBN 3-7701-1293-8 .
- ↑ in the original: Liard , a French coin from 1792–1856
- ↑ Michel Frizot: New History of Photography , Könemann, 1998, p. 67.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bayard, Hippolyte |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French civil servant and photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 20, 1801 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Breteuil-sur-Noye , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 14, 1887 |
| Place of death | Nemours |