Nineteenth century photographs

An English photographer named Alfred Capel-Cure (1826-1896) took this early photograph of a cathedral in Nantes. It is a salt print from a paper negative, which accounts for the rough, fibrous texture of the print. It was taken in 1860. One authority says he produced an album of 232 views of architecture and landscapes in England, Scotland, Wales, and France around 1850, but this is from a later date.

         
         No. 1 April 2006

In 1981 the New York Times published a review of an exhibition of Alfred Capel-Cure's works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here's what reviewer Gene Thornton had to say:

"Alfred Capel-Cure' flourished in the third quarter of the 19th Century, and approximately 40 of his photographs are on view . . .they include a handful of informal portraits and genre subjects, but most of them are pictures of buildings, either houses that the photographer himself owned, or buildings of the sort that a well educated young man of romantic tastes would have sought out on his travels: medieval castles, monasteries and churches that had been abandoned and were falling into ruin. In Capel-Cure's day, pictures like these were carefully labeled and pasted into albums, replacing the pencil drawings and watercolor sketches of pre-photographic days.

"Most of Capel-Cure's pictures were made by the calotype process, a process using paper negatives that was already technically obsolete when he began using it in 1852. In detail, tonal range and translation of color into black and white, they are greatly inferior to comparable pictures produced by modern processes. Nevertheless, with their sepia tones, soft outlines and romantic subjects . . . they have an old-fashioned charm that is refreshing."