Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard

Blanquart-Évrard, Louis Désiré (1802-72), French printer and editor of photographic albums and books. He presented a paper-negative process nearly identical to Talbot's calotype process before the French Academy of Sciences, which accepted its originality and published it in its official journal in 1847. A workable paper process was thus made available in France. A skilled chemist and bold entrepreneur, he was the first successfully to apply industrial methods to photographic printmaking. His technique of chemical development of positive prints replaced slow printing out by sunlight, making mass production possible. From 1851 to 1855 he operated a photographic printing establishment near Lille where he produced salted-paper prints of lasting quality.

Blanquart-Évrard printed the photographs for several important books on archaeology. He also produced and edited 24 albums of photographs using c.550 negatives made by the most accomplished photographers of the day. Subjects included art, architecture, topography, and genre scenes. Total production of this pioneering venture was c.100, 000 prints. His overall goals were artistic. His luxurious presentation emphasized the parallels between photography and traditional fine-art printmaking. He was also the author of several books on the history and art of photography.

— Nancy B. Keeler

Bibliography

• Jammes, I., Blanquart-Évrard et les origines de l'édition photographique française (1981)

Albumen print on a carte de visite

Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (2 August 1802, Lille – 28 April 1872, Lille^[1]) was a French cloth merchant by trade, but in the 1840s became a student of photography. He studied the Calotype process, and in 1847 became the first person to publish the process in France. He developed a method of bathing the paper in solutions of potassium iodide and silver nitrate rather than brushing these chemical baths on the surface. In 1850 he developed and introduced the albumen paper printing technique which became the staple process of the soon to be popular Carte de visite.^[2] In 1851 in Lille, France, with Hippolyte Fockedey, he started the Imprimerie Photographique, which was the first large scale printing company to employ a large number of employees. In the 1850s he was known for publishing other artists works, including John Stewart's views of the Pyrenees and Auguste Saltzmann's views of Jeruselem. His process for the calotype had the disadvantage of leaving a blank white sky and dark foreground, which lead to artist manipulating and using multiple negatives to add clouds to the sky and make the foreground more distinct. The problem with these manipulations was that often the clouds were taken in the morning and the foreground was taken in the afternoon.

References

1. ^ Lance Day & Ian McNeil, eds., Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology, 1995
2. ^ Louis-desire Blanquart-evrard (1802 - 1872) Artwork Images, Exhibitions, Reviews

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