Hippolyte Bayard

(b Breteuil-sur-Noye, Oise, 20 Jan 1801; d Nemours, Seine-et-Marne, 14 May 1887). French photographer and civil servant. His invention in early 1839 of direct positive photography on paper, by using silver chloride and potassium iodide, upon which light acted as a bleach, was totally original. It differed from the daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre in producing a positive image on paper rather than on a metal plate, and it differed from the invention of William Henry Fox Talbot in that it produced a positive image without the use of a negative (see PHOTOGRAPHY,

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Bayard, Hippolyte (1801-87), French photographer and inventor, in 1839, of direct-positive photography, a process that produced a unique positive image on paper. The method rivalled the contemporaneous inventions of the daguerreotype and photogenic drawing. Bayard was well connected in the art world of his time. His invention was acclaimed by the Academy of Fine Arts, which saw the advantages of a process on paper for artistic practice. However, he never received support from the Academy of Sciences or the French government. His famous Self-Portrait as a Suicide (1840) satirized his plight as neglected inventor.

Bayard practised all photographic procedures with skill, but essentially converted to negative-positive photography (the calotype) by 1845. During the 1840s, he was a technical and aesthetic pioneer, defining photography's possibilities as both a documentary and an expressive medium. Paris, then undergoing phenomenal growth, was one of his preferred subjects, and his photographs express a positive view of change and progress that seems inspired by a Saint-Simonist philosophy. Staged photographs, portraiture, and still life were other favoured genres. In an extensive garden series of this period, his many self-portraits comprise a vision of himself as creator of the garden, and can be understood as a metaphor for his role in the invention of photography.

Always at the forefront of technical innovation, Bayard developed a method for the mass production of positive prints before Blanquart-Évrard, but lacked the entrepreneurial vision to implement his ideas. He was one of the first to work with glass negatives, using the albumen-on-glass procedure by 1847, at a time when others in France were only just beginning to use paper negatives. Bayard was an unsurpassed master of this difficult technique, and used it well into the 1850s.

In 1851 he was one of five photographers chosen for the Mission Héliographique, a government project of primary importance for photography in France. He also became a specialist in photographic reproduction of works of art, and contributed many such images to the publications of Blanquart-Évrard. Bayard was a founding member of both the Société Héliographique (1851) and the Société Française de Photographie (1854), now the largest repository of his work. The photographer's craft was a fundamental interest of these societies, and his personality and technical gifts coincided perfectly with this concern. Within the societies he was an effective administrator and a respected, generous colleague. Many accomplished photographers considered him their master. He also contributed to the journal La Lumière. Bayard participated as well in the commercial current of photography that developed after 1851 with the perfection of the collodion-on-glass technique, operating a carte de visite studio 1860-6 in partnership with the illustrator Bertall. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1864, belated recognition of this original figure who was a notable presence during the first quarter-century of photography in France.

— Nancy B. Keeler

Bibliography

• Gautrand, J.-C., and Frizot, M., Hippolyte Bayard: naissance de l'image photographique (1987).
• Keeler, N., ‘Hippolyte Bayard aux origines de la photographie et de la ville moderne’, La Recherche photographique, 2 (1987)

Bayard's Self Portrait as a Drowned Man

Hippolyte Bayard (January 20, 1807 – May 14, 1887) was one of the earliest photographers in the history of photography, inventing his own photography process known as direct positive printing and presenting the world's first public exhibition of photographs on June 24, 1839.

The direct positive process involved exposing silver chloride paper to light, which turned the paper completely black. It was then soaked in potassium iodide before being exposed in a camera. After the exposure, it was washed in a bath of hyposulfite of soda and dried. The resulting image was a unique photograph that could not be reproduced. Due to the paper's poor light sensitivity, an exposure of approximately twelve minutes was required. Using this method of photography, still subject matter, such as buildings, were favored. When used for photographing people, sitters were told to close their eyes so as to eliminate the eerie, "dead" quality produced due to blinking and moving one's eyes during such a long exposure.

Bayard was persuaded to postpone announcing his process to the French Academy of Sciences by François Arago, a friend of Louis Daguerre, who invented the rival daguerreotype process. Arago's conflict of interest cost Bayard the recognition as one of the principal inventors of photography. He eventually gave details of the process to the French Academy of Sciences on February 24, 1840 in return for money to buy better equipment.

As a reaction to the injustice he felt he had been subjected to, Bayard created the first staged photograph entitled, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man. In the image, he pretends to have committed suicide, sitting and leaning to the right. Bayard wrote on the back of his most notable photograph:

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the

process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable

experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery.

The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said

it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself.

Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several

days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you'd

better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can

observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.

Despite his initial hardships in photography, Bayard continued to be a productive member of the photographic society. He was a founding member of the French Society of Photography. Bayard was also one of the first photographers to be commissioned to document and preserve architecture and historical sites in France for the Missions Héliographiques in 1851 by the Historic Monument Commission. He used a paper photographic process similar to the one he developed to take pictures for the Commission. Additionally, he suggested combining two negatives to properly expose the sky and then the landscape or building, an idea known as combination printing which began being used in the 1850s.

Famous Photographs

• Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840.
• Specimens, 1842.
• Construction Worker, Paris, 1845-1847.
• Self Portrait in the Garden, 1847.

External links

• Hippolyte Bayard and Photogenic Drawing

Bibliography

• Gautrand, Jean-Claude and Frizot, Michel, Hippolyte Bayard. Naissance de l'image photographique, Éd. Trois cailloux, 1986.
• Keeler, Nancy, "Hippolyte Bayard aux origines de la photographie et de la ville moderne", in: La Recherche photographique Nr. 2, Univ. Paris VIII, May 1987.
• Lavin, Amélie, Hippolyte Bayard. Fictions photographiques: effet d'image et jeu idéal, DEA Thesis, Univ. Paris I, 2001.
• Poivert, Michel and Lavin, Amélie, Hippolyte Bayard, Photopoche Nr. 91, Paris: Nathan 2001.
• Rosen, Margit, Hippolyte Bayard. Fotografie und die Fiktion des Todes, MA Thesis, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG), 2002.
• Hippolyte Bayard: chevalier de l'ombre (Proceedings of the collquy in Breteuil-sur-Noye, 16-17 November 2001), Breteuil-sur-Noye: Société historique de Breteuil-sur-Noye, 2005.

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