In New York, an exhibition of 19th century French pioneers
There she lies: a traditional reclining nude, very like Ingres's La Grande Odalisque, the body blandly composed, smooth, supernaturally white. But the feet are unclassically dirty from padding around a grimy atelier. The model's face, half turned toward the camera, wears an unsettling tigerish expression. In another picture, black-clad climbers struggle up the snowy folds of Mont Blanc looking like a necklace of chocolate chips dropped into a vanilla sundae. Meanwhile, journalistic history is displayed in a set of pictures and captions from the first interview ever recorded (in 1886) for both eye and ear. The cameramen-interviewers are Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who worked under the single professional name Nadar, and his son Paul. Their subject is Michel-Eugène Chevreul, an elderly scientist and expert on the theory of color mixing. Visible in some frames: a tubular machine that recorded Chevreul's words to be set alongside his facial expressions in the Paris weekly Journal Illustré. In one picture he is saying: "I must make you see. I want to make you see because it is when I see that I believe."
Chevreul's point is made splendidly and often in After Daguerre: Masterworks of French Photography, a show transplanted from the Petit Palais in Paris to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is still a tendency to think of photography mainly as a 20th century phenomenon, with only a handful of notable pioneers in the 19th—in France, Nadar himself; in England, Julia Margaret Cameron, master of brooding portraits and symbolic tableaux, Mathew Brady, engraving the Civil War on the mind of America. After Daguerre is a rich reminder that though photographers, still hobbled by glacially slow exposures, were dabbling with developing techniques like medieval alchemists, photography in France was about to flower by the early 1850s, as soon as it became possible to make many prints easily from a single negative.
The show's nearly 200 photographs, chosen from more than 100,000 that were deposited for copyright purposes in the Bibliothèque Nationale in the years from 1848 to 1900, reach out toward the world in familiar and often contemporary ways. They include the equivalents of snapshots and salon portraits, multiple exposures to analyze the flight of pigeons and the strides of men, romanticized landscapes and still lifes clearly derived from painting, as well as reportage on everything from war to travel and exploration, from Mont Blanc to the Crimea to the Nile. A photographic task force was even commissioned by the French government to rove the country photographing historic monuments (rather like Roy Stryker's famous teams in the U.S. during the 1930s Depression). One of the finest results is a highly abstract portrait of a row of flying buttresses at Rheims Cathedral, shot in diminishing perspective by Henri Le Secq.