Taches & Traces - Premiers essais photosensibles

Presentation by Luce Lebart, director of the collections at Société Française de Photographie and curator of the exhibition Taches et Traces :     [translation L'Ascenseur Végétal]

"Made in 1840, a few months after the invention of photography being made official, Hippolyte Bayard's self-portrait as a drowned man (Le Noyé) is often considered « the first art photography ». Neglected by the scholars and politicians that officialised the invention of photography, the experimenter expressed his disappointment by staging himself as a drowned man. The « selfie » trend, of which Le noyé could be one of the oldest silver / film ancestors, recently amplified the success of this first staged image in the history of photography.

In the end, Bayard - after Le noyé - slowly abandonned his direct-positive process to use a salted-paper negative (...). But what about Bayard before Le noyé? Some of his experimental images were presented in the exhibition that took place at the Galerie nationale de la tapisserie de Beauvais, and are presented in this book. Fragility of the experiment, Bayard's direct-positive process was only stabilised, not fixed. At the edge of abstraction, the changing images that were generated waver between stains and traces (Taches et Traces), apparition and disparition."

Text in French and English by Luce Lebart.

The images appearing here come from the curator's website (Luce Lebart).

32 pages - Softcover

Diaphane Editions / SFP, 2015 (300 copies)

New - Mint condition