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Title:
All the mighty world : the photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860

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Summary:
Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England’s most celebrated and influential photographer during the 1850s, the “golden age” of this radically new medium. Fenton’s majestic pictures of cathedrals, country houses, and varied countryside were without peer in England--as were his views of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain’s power. But Fenton’s choice of subjects ranged more widely still: he was among the first to photograph the Kremlin and other landmarks of Moscow and Kiev; he was commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War, producing early war photographs; and he created theatrical Orientalist costume pictures and a startling series of lush still lifes. Fenton had first studied law and painting, but soon after he took up the camera he was making photographs that were technically superb and highly original in their handling of composition, perspective, atmosphere, and light. Always he strove to demonstrate that photography could equal the art of painting and even surpass it. He was the force behind the founding of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), which worked to advance the profession and encouraged the exhibition of members’ works throughout Britain. In a career of a single decade, Fenton did much to transform photography into a medium of powerful expression and visual delight. This exquisitely produced book--the first comprehensive publication on Fenton in almost twenty years--presents eighty-five of the artist’s finest photographs and discusses every aspect of his work and his remarkable career. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (October 17, 2004, to January 2, 2005); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (February 1 to April 25, 2005); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May 16 to August 14, 2005); and Tate Britain, London (September 25, 2005, to January 2, 2006).

Title:
Édouard Baldus, photographe

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Première étude détaillée de l'ensemble de l'oeuvre d'un pionnier de la photographie d'architecture. En effet, Baldus doit être considéré comme le plus grand photographe français d'architecture pour les années 1850. Si sa façon de concevoir et de rendre l'architecture, soit sous forme de monument isolé soit sous forme de panorama urbain, peut paraître relever d'une longue tradition, Baldus sait aussi se montrer extrêmement d'avant-garde non seulement par son sens du volume, mais aussi par sa façon d'aborder l'architecture des ingénieurs, ponts ou voies ferrées.

Title:
The photographs of Edouard Baldus

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The photographer Édouard Baldus (1813-1889), a central figure in the early development of French photography and acknowledged in his day as a pioneer in the still-experimental field, was widely acclaimed both for his aesthetic sensitivity and for his technical prowess. Establishing a new mode of representing architecture and describing the emerging modern landscape with magnificent authority, he enjoyed high patronage in the 1850s and 1860s. Yet, despite the artist's renown during his lifetime, his name is all but unknown today, his work savored only by connoisseurs. This book, the first to chronicle the life and career of this important artist, brings his work once more before the public. The superb quality of the reproductions captures the subtle tones and soft matte surfaces of the original prints, many of which are published here for the first time. Baldus made his reputation with views of the monuments of Paris and the south of France, with dramatic landscape of the Auvergne, with photographs of the New Louvre, and with a poignant record of the devastating floods of 1856. But it is his two railroad albums -- the first commissioned in 1855 by Baron James de Rothschild for presentation to Queen Victoria, the second in 1861 by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railroad company -- that are his greatest achievement. Here he brought together his earlier architectural and scenic images with bold geometric views of the modern landscape -- railroad tracks, stations, bridges, viaducts, and tunnels -- to address the influence of technology (of which both the railroad and the camera are prime examples). In so doing, Baldus anticipated the concerns of Impressionnist painters a decade later and those of many artists of our own day, meeting his task with a clarity and directness not since surpassed.