Édouard Baldus | |
|---|---|
 Édouard Baldus,Self-portrait (c. 1853). | |
| Born | 5 June 1813  |
| Died | 22 December 1889 (aged 76) |
| Occupation | Photographer |
Édouard Baldus (5 June 1813, Grünebach,Prussia – 1889,Arcueil) was a Frenchlandscape,architectural and railway photographer.
Édouard-Denis Baldus was born on 5 June 1813 in Grünebach,Prussia. He was originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman andlithographer before switching to photography in 1849.
In 1851, he was commissioned for theMissions Héliographiques by theHistoric Monuments Commission of France to photograph historic buildings, bridges and monuments, many of which were being razed to make way for the grand boulevards of Paris, being carried out under the direction ofNapoleon III'sprefectBaron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The high quality of his work won him government support for a project entitledLes Villes de France Photographiées, an extended series of architectural views in Paris and the provinces designed to feed a resurgent interest in the nation's Roman and medieval past.
In 1855,Baron James de Rothschild, President ofChemin de Fer du Nord, commissioned Baldus to do a series of photographs to be used as part of an album that was to be a gift toQueen Victoria andPrince Albert as a souvenir of their visit to France that year. The lavishly bound album is still among the treasures of the Royal Library atWindsor Castle. In 1856, he set out on a brief assignment to photograph the destruction caused by torrential rains and overflowing rivers in Lyon, Avignon, and Tarascon. He created a moving record of the flood without explicitly depicting the human suffering left in its wake.
Baldus was well known throughout France for his efforts in photography. One of his greatest assignments was to document the construction of theLouvre museum. He used wet and dry paper negatives as large as 10x14 inches in size. From these negatives, he madecontact prints. To create a larger image, he put contact prints side by side to create apanoramic effect. He was renowned for the sheer size of his pictures, which ranged up to eight feet long for one panorama from around 1855, made from several negatives.
Despite the documentary nature of many of his assignments, Baldus was inventive in overcoming the limitations of thecalotype process(described here). He often retouched his negatives to blank out buildings and trees, or to put clouds in white skies; in his composite print of the medieval cloister ofSt. Trophime, inArles (1851), he pieced together fragments of 10 different negatives to capture focus in depth in a panoramic view of the interior space and also render detail in the brightly lit courtyard outside.
He died in 1889 in Arcueil, France.
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