Gustave le gray biography of donald

Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) is one of the heroes of
early French photography. A pioneer of innovative
processes, he also made history as an instructor for
a whole generation of French photographers and the
initiator and outstanding architectural photog rapher
of the mission héliographique documenting France’s
historical monuments. Le Gray, who originally studied
painting, is also considered to be the founder of
artistic photography. He was one of the first to
follow the painters to Fontainebleau to do his own
photographic studies of nature. In the mid-1850s, he
started to produce sea and cloud studies in Normandy
and on the western coast of the Mediterranean; these
made him an overnight sensation among amateurs
and collectors and earned him the admiration of the
Impressionists. Fleeing from creditors, in 1860 he
set off with Alexandre Dumas for Italy. He spent the
last 20 years of his life in Cairo, taking photos and
working as a drawing tutor. Today, Le Gray’s prints
are among the most expensive in the world.

Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July, 2024

Curators: the exhibition is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant

At left, Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters 1872; and at right, Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) After Manet 2003

from the ‘Identity’ section of the exhibition

Magdalene Keaney, curator of the exhibition Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, observes that the exhibition “poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice…”

As does this exhibition:

~ Everything emerges from something. One must be “mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” (Moriyama)

~ History often repeats itself in different forms.

~ Memory often returns in fragmentary form.

~ The wisdom and spirit of the past speaks to the practitioners of the future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

NB: Transubstantiation, an un/explainable change in form, substance, or appearance (from the Latin roots trans, “across or beyond,” and substania, “substance”)

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the website. Please click on the photographs  for a larger version of the image.

The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the

A picturesque portrait of an Italian street musician or a startlingly modern view of French cavalry maneuvers might attract today’s audience to Gustave le Gray’s photographs, but in his day it was the skies that compelled attention.

“When Le Gray made these seascapes, they astounded the world. No one had seen skies in 19th-Century photographs--or at least not skies like this,” said Gordon Baldwin, who has organized the first West Coast show of Le Gray’s work, at the J. Paul Getty Museum until Aug. 28. The long exposures required to reveal details in dark areas of early photographs often washed out skies so that they appeared as plain expanses of space.

Some of Le Gray’s own skies are empty--and often effectively so--but those that made him famous are luminous orchestrations of billowing clouds that dramatize quiet seascapes. In “Brig on Water,” one of the most celebrated photographic images of the 19th Century, a romantic swath of sky displays itself in full regalia while a tiny boat glides through a crisp ribbon of water.

Le Gray accomplished this feat with a single negative, but he often needed two--one for the sky, another for the water. “We don’t know how he combined them. He may have masked over one area while printing another, or he may have sandwiched negatives,” Baldwin speculated.

There’s no question that Le Gray constructed landscapes of separate components to achieve artistic effects. A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York included three different photographs that all have the same sky, Baldwin noted. Le Gray also introduced waxed-paper negatives in 1850, improving the calotype process, and was among the first to use collodion emulsions. In addition to his technical achievements, he was author of “A Practical Treatise on Photography” and a founder of the first photography association.

In an exhibition brochure Baldwin likens the trajectory of Le Gray’s photographic career to a com