Aphrodisias. Chapiteau | Rue sous le petit champ des morts | Bosphore | Fontaine près Galata | Grande Mosquée ? | Hyppodrôme | Pavillon prés du Sérail : Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey 1842-1844
SOURCE [*]
-Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey was born in 1804 in Langres (Haute-Marne), in an aristocratic and wealthy environment. Bachelor in Letters in 1826, then in Law two years later, the young man also took drawing lessons in Langres and Paris. He made various trips to Italy, Spain and North Africa in the early 1830s, devoting himself to drawing and painting.Girault de Prangey studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and learned daguerreotypy[1] in 1841, the same year inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre publicly demonstrated the process. Girault de Prangey may have learned photography from Daguerre himself, or from Hippolyte Bayard, with whom he shared a mutual artist friend.
In 1842, he embarked on a
three-year photographic excursion (lugging custom photographic equipment that
weighed more than a fifty kilograms) throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and
he returned to France with more than one thousand daguerreotypes—an
unparalleled feat in the history of photography. After a stay in Rome, at the
Villa Médicis, Girault de Prangey went to Greece, then Cairo and Alexandria.
After that he visited Constantinople and the archaeological sites of Asia
Minor, while “keeping as far as possible away from the beaten track”. He
continued his trip, which was to last three years, by going to the Holy Land,
Baalbek, Damascus and Aleppo. Among the
images he created are the earliest surviving photographs of Greece, Egypt,
Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Jerusalem and among the first daguerreotypes depicting
Italy.
In 1846, his writings led to him being elected as a member and correspondent of the Royal Institute of British Architect. However, the commercial and editorial failure of his last two books, which were expensive and published at his own expense, put a stop to his long-distance travels and work on architecture. He withdrew to his property of Les Tuaires, in the Haute-Marne, while continuing to produce daguerreotypes until the 1850s, as can be seen in shots taken in Switzerland and in his splendid Oriental-style house. He devoted the rest of his life to growing exotic flowers and fruit in his greenhouse, having no problem about coming over as an eccentric and taciturn misanthropist.
About three decades after his death, the Comte Charles de Simony acquired this abandoned villa and discovered in a lumber room some boxes containing the daguerreotypes of its former owner. Ironically enough, over a hundred and fifty years after his travels in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Girault de Prangey, who saw drawing as the real summit of his art, became renowned as a pioneer of photography. Over the past fifteen years there have been constant publications, exhibitions and auctions (sometimes with record sales). His precise but also daring framing is admirable, as well as his pared-back shots, composed with power and simplicity.
On 30 January 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened "Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey". Approximately 120 photographs that the amateur archaeologist created in Greece, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and the Levant during a self-financed tour of the region in the early 1840s were presented.
Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839,[4][5][6] the daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1860 with new, less expensive processes, such as Ambrotype, that yield more readily viewable images. There was a revival of daguerreotype in the late 20th century by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes.[citation needed]
The image is on a mirror-like silver surface and will appear either positive or negative, depending on the angle at which it is viewed, how it is lit and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal. The darkest areas of the image are simply bare silver; lighter areas have a microscopically fine light-scattering texture. The surface is very delicate, and even the lightest wiping can permanently scuff it. Some tarnish around the edges is normal.
To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treated it with fumes that made its surface light sensitive; exposed it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting; made the resulting latent image on it visible by fuming it with mercury vapor; removed its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment; rinsed and dried it; and then sealed the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure.
Several types of antique photographs, most often ambrotypes and tintypes, but sometimes even old prints on paper, are commonly misidentified as daguerreotypes, especially if they are in the small, ornamented cases in which daguerreotypes made in the US and the UK were usually housed. The name "daguerreotype" correctly refers only to one very specific image type and medium, the product of a process that was in wide use only from the early 1840s to the late 1850s.
A HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHIC GRAND TOUR IMPORTANT DAGUERREOTYPES BY JOSEPH-PHILIBERT GIRAULT DE PRANGEY
Philippe Garner
Some of the finest architectural and landscape views of the early period
were taken by a French amateur, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey...an expert
in Arabian architecture [who] in 1842...undertook a long and arduous journey
through Italy, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Greece, arriving home two years
later with a thousand fine daguerreotypes.
HELMUT AND ALISON GERNSHEIM
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) would appear to have led a life of exceptional privilege. Born into a wealthy, landed family he enjoyed throughout his years the means to live as his whim took him, to pursue single-mindedly his passions and his curiosity. Naturally gifted as an artist and with the further gifts of an enquiring mind and practical determination, he focused on specific cultural pursuits, notably the investigation of architectural history as a route to the greater understanding of civilisations separated by distance and by time from his own. But perhaps his singular good fortune was as the beneficiary of a favourable confluence of circumstances that allowed him to set out on a voyage of exploration through the eastern Mediterranean in the early 1840s equipped with a new technology capable of recording with dazzling and unprecedented fidelity the wondrous sights he beheld. It is quite impossible for us today -- spoilt children of the age of instant global transmission of photo-imagery -- to even begin to grasp how thrilling was such a journey, and how exciting such a technical prospect as that promised by the daguerreotype. By the time he undertook his long Mediterranean odyssey as a photographer, Girault de Prangey had already established his credentials as a pioneering architectural historian.
He had learned to draw and to paint, made casts from local antiquities, and in 1842 became a founding member of the Société Historique et Archéologique of his native Langres. Surviving artworks and other documents allow us to track his earliest exploratory travels. In 1831 he was in Venice, then Ravenna and Rome; the following year we find him in North Africa, in Algeria; then through 1832 and 1833 he travelled extensively in Spain where he made detailed pictorial records of significant architectural subjects. It was in 1836 that Girault de Prangey published the first part of his planned anthology of lithographs presenting in fine and meticulous detail the characteristics of the architecture that had so enthralled him, Souvenir de Grenade et de l'Alhambra introduced his projected series Monuments arabes et moresques de Cordoue, Séville et Grenade dessinés et mesurés en 1832 et 1833.
The second and third volumes were published in 1837 and 1839 -- the latter in the year of the historic announcement by François Arago of the invention by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre of a viable photographic process. The potential of Daguerre's process to make exact visual records was immediately recognised and exploited. On these silvered copper plates, suspended in the fine chemistry of the new photographic process, practitioners could capture with forensic precision the exact features of the physical world, natural or man-made. Scientific instrument maker Nicholas Marie Paymal Lerebours revealed his entrepreneurial vision when he announced his plan to send daguerreotypists far and wide, charged with bringing back photographic images that he would then publish as lithographs showing the world as it was rather than as interpreted through the eye and embellishments of the artist. The resulting Excursions Daguerriennes, published between 1841 and 1843, confirm the ambition and success of the project, with Lerebours able to select from submissions that embraced many of the lands of the Mediterranean as well as northern Europe and even North America and Moscow.
The disappointing reality, of course, is that only the lithographic transcriptions have survived. While the publication confirms that daguerreotype plates were made successfully in many territories in immediate response to Daguerre's gift of his process to France, we can only appreciate them second-hand, mediated through the hand of the lithographic plate makers. Girault de Prangey recognised how Daguerre's invention could very effectively serve his own programme of the scientific analysis and documentation of architecture; and so in 1841 he applied himself to mastering the necessary techniques.
At first he worked in familiar territory, very swiftly achieving command of the process with splendid plates made in Paris and around his villa in Tuaires, such as his exceptional sun-lit plant study dated 1841. His next step was to gather the necessary equipment and resources and to make the detailed plans and preparations for an extended journey that would become a truly historic photographic Grand Tour -- though more than a century and a half were to pass before the daguerreotype plates that he brought back from this epic journey were to become sufficiently well known to establish him as a seminal pioneering figure within the history of photography. Girault de Prangey's itinerary embraced both the traditional Grand Tour sites of the ancient classical civilizations of Rome and Greece that had long been regarded as the crucible of European culture and the more exotic territories of the Eastern Mediterranean that had more recently captivated the imaginations of the French -- in the wake of Napoleon's forays into Egypt and through the romantic writings of a generation of authors that included François-René de Chateaubriand, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval.
Girault de Prangey set off with exceptional qualifications, his
ambitions as a traveller supported by thorough preliminary research and by the
tools and the methodologies of an experienced historian. It should be no
surprise therefore that his photographs are so well considered in choice of
subject and so well executed -- the perfect alliance of art and of science, a
great technical accomplishment and one of exceptional cultural value. Girault
de Prangey's travels can be reconstructed through the internal evidence of his
dating and through a few surviving manuscript records. He set sail from
Marseille early in 1842, was in Rome between April and July, and then moved on
to Athens, where he spent five weeks. By the autumn he was in Alexandria. After
a winter spent in Egypt, in 1843 he visited Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Asia
Minor, returning to Egypt later in the year where he made plans to travel up
the Nile and to visit the historic sites of Upper Egypt. In 1844, he left a
record of his presence in Philae. He was in Jerusalem in May of 1844 and in
August we trace him to Beirut. Girault de Prangey returned to France later that
year. There survives no account of any endeavour on his part to exhibit or
promote the remarkable fruit of his photographic expedition; only the random
hand of fate permitted the miracle of his archive surviving, against all odds,
its abandonment and neglect through subsequent decades. Christie's is honoured
to present the present catalogue, our third dedicated to this important pioneer
of photography, and we take the opportunity to acknowledge and thank those who
have played their particular parts in preserving, investigating and
re-introducing to a wider audience the multiple achievements of
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey: notably the Comte de Simony and his heirs,
Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Sylvie Aubenas, Grant Romer, Christophe Mauron,
Christophe Dutoit, our former colleague Lindsey Stewart, and of course the
collectors whose active participation in the auctions has been crucial to the
rehabilitation of these historic photographs.
GIRAULT DE PRANGEY -- AN INDEPENDENT SPIRIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Christophe Dutoit
In the decade that has passed since the daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey first started to become known in some detail and to a wider international audience, it has been possible to reach an ever fuller understanding of the exceptional place that this French practitioner occupies within the history of photography. Helmut Gernsheim had described succinctly in his 1955 History of Photography how the oeuvre of Girault de Prangey was largely the fruit of a three-year journey in the Mediterranean -- from which he returned with the earliest surviving images of Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine.... This Grand Tour was undertaken with the principal objective of constituting an archive of visual documents that would serve his scholarly investigations into aspects of the history of architecture; that said, Girault de Prangey returned in 1844 with a substantial number of daguerreotypes that might be justly characterised as aesthetically ground-breaking. A true pioneer, he explored a hitherto unknown visual language, developing ideas with the freedom of the amateur bound by no preconceptions, and with the sensitivity of an experienced artist. The Frenchman should rightly be acknowledged as the inventor of truly new ways of making pictures. From his very first engagement with the medium in 1841 -- making images of considerable accomplishment in France -- he experimented with innovative and diverse formats. These included such triumphs as the perfect square of his plant still life (lot 3) and the panoramic views -- both horizontal and vertical -- that were without precedent in photography. He had large-format plates specially made to a bespoke size, exceeding the standard whole-plate dimensions, and he used these to make images that were at the edges of abstraction. He regularly constructed pictures that were dramatised by bold and surprising cropping; or would take an opposite approach and depict his subject with a direct frontality that few of his contemporaries would dare. No other photographer before him had shown such a special fondness for radical close-ups and few succeeded in capturing figures so naturalistically. … Even more surprising were his juxtapositions of two images side-by-side on a single plate. Well before the Surrealists, he achieved a kind of photo-collage. We have no account of his motivation -- whether purely aesthetic or in response to practical dictates. Yet such instances as his twin studies of windows in Cornéto, Italy remain intact, suggesting today the deliberate intent of Girault de Prangey's original and inspired vision. Girault de Prangey set out, in common with a number of contemporary early daguerreotypists -- notably Joly de Lotbinière, Goupil-Fesquet and Jules Itier -- to fulfil the potential suggested by François Arago to exploit this new process 'as a means for one man to copy the millions of hieroglyphs that cover the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis and Karnak'. Though numerous unresolved mysteries still surround Girault de Prangey's images, we can make one claim with confidence, namely that this man showed exceptional artistic daring in the way he used his daguerreotype equipment, becoming a true and impassioned inventor of hitherto unimagined photographic possibilities -- and all this before 1845. Christophe Dutoit, to whom we are most grateful for this insightful introduction, is a historian whose researches on Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey -- published in Miroirs d'Argent, Musée Gruérien, 2008 -- have shed considerable light on the photographer's life and oeuvre and established his crucial importance as a pioneer figure in the early history of photography.
Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey is curated by Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by The Metropolitan.
“No other photographer of the period embarked on such a long excursion and successfully made a quantity of [photographic] plates anywhere near Girault’s production,” writes Stephen Pinson, curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum, in the Monumental Journey catalog. “His photographic campaign remains a feat without analogy.”
by Stephen C. Pinson (Author), Sylvie Aubenas (Contributor), Olivier Caumont (Contributor), Nora Kennedy (Contributor), Silvia Centeno (Contributor), Thomas Galifot (Contributor), Grant B. Romer (Contributor), Martina Rugiadi (Contributor), Andrea E. Schlather (Contributor), Lindsey S. Stewart (Contributor), Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Contributor), Ariadna Cervera Xicotencatl (Contributor)Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 19, 2019)
Language : English
Hardcover : 252 pages
ISBN-10 : 1588396630
ISBN-13 : 978-1588396631
No comments:
Post a Comment