Bisson NotreDame

Nineteenth-century photographs

Notre Dame, from the rear. Albumen print dated c 1855, by Louis-Auguste (1814-1876) & Auguste-Rosalie (1826-1900) Bisson. The brothers' work is usually refered to as by Bisson Fréres because we are not sure who did what since they worked as a team from the 1850s through at least the 1870s.

Second view: Notre Dame from the front, also by Bisson Freres. (Move your cursor over the image to reveal.) This, too, is an albumen print, but we know it was taken in 1853 because the scaffolding for the restoration done that year is clearly visible.

The albumen process was a early one, requiring a long exposure, usually on a wet glass plate, although the earliest ones probably used a coated paper for the negative. The long exposure is the reason the sky is blank. Sometimes you can see “ghosts” in an albumen print, where a person or a horse paused for a few seconds and then moved on before a sharp image could be formed.

Photography is not simply a craft
or art, but a means of seeing and
thinking about our world.

By the middle of the nineteenth century there was a substantial market for "views," both for the tourist trade and for domestic purchase. Several successive French governments were interested in documenting the important monuments and architecture, and so commissioned photographers to record everything of possible significance. Obviously Notre Dame was going to attract a lot of attention, whether or not one had a commission. I believe this print was produced for the tourist trade and was sold much as postcards are today, to be pasted in an album of "views" from one's tour of Europe. There is a significance to that—the photographers were probably not trying to produce "art," but to make an image that would sell because it reproduced a scene the tourist remembered seeing. But that is not to say that photographers were not concerned with composition. Clearly, they were.

The Bisson brothers were careful about their composition—there is a foreground, a middle ground, and in the background one can see the twin towers and the spire mounted halfway back on the nave. Although the spire is in the very middle of the image, the two sides of the cathedral are not identical so the image is not static, as is often the case when there is a bilateral symmetry. Most photographers today would probably "burn in" the foreground, but that was not practical at the time.

Next image: Edouard Baldus