THE ENCHANTMENT OF EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS – THE 19TH CENTURY INVENTS PHOTOGRAPHY

Two hundred years ago, the history of photography began—a medium that has influenced our perception, and indeed our lives, more than the written word. Galerie Bastian dedicates an exhibition to the beginnings of this medium of visual culture, featuring a selection of outstanding images.

In 1826, the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce experimented with exposure. Capturing the view from his studio in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Burgundy, with a camera obscura on a pewter plate coated with asphalt, his picture is today regarded as the oldest surviving photograph. Sunlight, acting over the course of several hours, left a permanent trace on an unspectacular motif of a heliograph (a term derived from the Greek: »drawn by the sun«).

Years later, Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype (1839), a direct-positive process that produced images of unprecedented detail on silver-coated copper plates. With William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype (1840), a paper treated with silver nitrate and organic acids, the first negative process was invented, allowing images to be reproduced. The following decades were marked by rapid change: new photographic techniques emerged, such as the wetcollodion (nitrated cellulose) process on glass, which had to be exposed while still wet, or albumen prints on paper coated with egg white and sodium. Photographers traveled with elaborate mobile darkrooms.

The magic of early photographs intertwines with the spirit of discovery. European photographers traveled the world, exploring landscapes, monuments, and natural phenomena, rendering them visible. At the same time, they experimented with the technical possibilities of the new medium—exposure time, materials, and processes that had not yet been standardized.

The warm browns, sepias, and gold tones of the prints are not accidental; they are not merely the result of chemical reactions. Rather, they unfold their own artistic quality, that reveals itself in their subtle nuances. From discovery and experimentation emerged an aesthetic medium that would only decades later be accepted as a form of art.

The images shown in our exhibition take us to Europe, Algeria, Egypt, Nubia, and the ice of the North—places that, in the 19th century, were measured, traveled, and imagined. Photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Fizeau, Gustave Le Gray, Francis Frith, and Eugène Piot show us a world now lost. Le Gray’s seascapes were created on the coast of Normandy and on the Mediterranean near Sète. They depict cloud formations above a sea that is at times calm, at times stormy, opening up infinitely to the viewer. By combining multiple negatives, Le Gray not only renders movement visible but also creates it.

The young John Beasley Greene, by contrast, photographed the landscapes and monuments of Algeria, Egypt, and Nubia. In Greene’s work, emptiness occupies its own space: the expanse of monotonous skies and landscapes devoid of human life. His gaze lingers on monuments and ruins, relics of a past civilization. All of his subjects appear to float from a distance. Space and time lose their fixed order; horizons slip into the unreal.