Photo London has announced that it will be celebrating French photography with an exhibition The Magic Art of French Calotype. Paper Negative Photography 1846–1860, curated by Robert Hershkowitz. Its title references Francis Wey’s pronouncement in 1851 that “Photography has attained a magic feeling that neither painting nor drawing could have reached.”
Hershkowitz explains the appeal of these early images: “When the pursuit and acquisition of fine photographs became the common passion of a very mixed group of art savvy individuals and American and Canadian museums in the late 1970s, early French paper negative photography was considered the most desirable, the images the most intriguing intellectually, the prints the most delectable. This exhibition introduces this body of photographic work to a British audience; it is almost non-existent in British institutions with perhaps a few dozen examples buried among hundreds of thousands of British ones, and these never exhibited.”
The exhibition will be on show duering Photo London which will show at Somerset House, London from 16-19 May 2024
Details: https://photolondon.org/photo-london-2024-details-revealed/
Image: Charles Nègre, Street Vendor, c.1852. Courtesy of Robert Hershkowitz Ltd.
Comments