Nineteenth century photographs

Edouard-Denis Baldus [1813-1882] was the best known and most successful photographer in France by the middle 1850s. He was commissioned to photograph major buildings and monuments in France, and later to document several of the important railroad systems and depots. He is not well-known by the public, but his prints sell for many thousands of dollars today.

This view of the Maison Carreé, a first century Roman temple in Nimes in the south of France, was heavily manipulated by Baldus. He blacked out (in the negative) all the surrounding buildings in the square to give emphasis to the temple itself. Baldus used an albumen-based process, as did many early photographers, but this image does not have the yellowish tone that many albumen prints do. It was shot about midday, sometime between 1851 and 1855.

         
         No. 0 January 2006

This image raises the question of how tightly to crop the image of a building, a question that, in general, cannot be answered. Each situation is different— sometimes one crops very tightly in order to exclude distracting elements. Baldus solved that problem by "painting" them out of his negative. But sometimes we want a sense of the surroundings— signs, telephone lines, traffic markings on the street, even automobiles. Our advice is to take lots of shots—from a distance, closer, very tight, and certainly take some of the architectural details.

A lot of the surviving photographs from the 1850s are of major architectural structures--some ancient but many of more or less contemporary buildings, including major railroads in France, in Baldus' case. They were in demand by tourists as well as by the general public.The manipulation and the tight cropping Baldus practiced here has pretty much gone out of fashion, but the detail in the sharply-focused image is exceptional, even by today’s standards. The reason is that his prints were contact prints made from very large paper negatives.