Cabinet Expertise & Investigation
(Theophile Bouchet, Hommage à Alvarez de Velasco)
Est-ce le fait de se retrouver Gouverneur d’une foret vierge, avec pour seuls compagnons quelques milliers de travailleurs autochtones et de bien plus encore d’animaux sauvages ?
Francisco Álvarez de Velasco y Zorrilla (1647-1708). Rhytmica sacra, moral, y laudatoria, impresso por distintos impressores, en diferentes lugares y tiempos [Burgos-Madrid, 1700-1703]
PWT 34-2018 Alvarez de Velasco
Otto Wegener was born in the southern Swedish town of Helsingborgs in 1849. The Swedish photographer Hanna Forthmeijer (1827-1914) established the city’s first permanent studio in Otto’s parents’ home in the mid-1860s. (Cf. a local advertisement for this first studio of Helsingborgs published in 1867, the same year the young man left for Paris reproduced in Helsingborgs stadslexikon).
Because he had joined the Commune under the Garde Nationale uniform, Otto went in exile to London where his three sons were born]. He came back after 1875.
Nothing is known about his introduction to photography; all we know is that he opened his magnificient studio at the fashionable address 3, Place de la Madeleine in 1883, successfully competing with Nadar and Reutlinger for the elite audience.
Marcel Proust frequented Otto’s studio.
He also brought his favourite ladies from the nobility to Otto’s studio. Celebrated as the supreme beauty of her day, Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe (1860-1952) was the triumph of Parisian society when Marcel Proust made her acquaintance in 1892.
Proust pursued her with requests for a photograph, which she staunchly refused. Nonetheless, the countess would inspire Proust’s fiction, becoming a prototype for the glamorous Duchesse de Guermantes in A la recherche du temps perd (1913-27).
Acces au pdf : PWT 33-2018 Le Photographe Retrouvé (Otto Wegener)
Wegener had then already simplified his name to OTTO, a signature that shined in gold above the sixth floor on the building. He maintained contacts with the Swedish colony of artists and the writer August Strindberg dined in his house in 1894. The writers Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Victoria Benedictsson as well as the painter Albert Edelfelt are among the Scandinavians who had their photographs taken by Otto.
Continuer la lecture de « 30.08.2018 PWT “Le Photographe Retrouvé” Otto Wegener »
The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, formulated by Nicolaus Copernic some time before 1514 and refined until the publishing of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543.
Fifteen scores later, the Daguerreian Revolution was the paradigm shift from the classical representation of Nature and Human faces, formulated by Niépce some time before 1827 and refined by several gentlemen until the public announcement of 19 August 1839.
When the first photographic processes were invented and developped by Niépce and his followers in Europe, the photographic portrait was really born in America circa 1840. Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia and John Draper are the central figures.
We will present 17 early daguerrian portraits and an armil during Zonamaco Foto on stand B-316.
If you are in Mexico on Friday afternoon, do not hesitate to join the presentation on some famous daguerreotypes :
ACCESS TO THE CATALOGUE PWT 29-2018
Eugène Disdéri ou la photographie bourgeoise – quelques idées reçues
Continuer la lecture de « 16.08.2018 PWT 31-2018 CHILDREN IN THE TEMPLE OF PHOTOGRAPHY »
“For bibliographers the most disheartening feature of such studies is the nature of the evidence. Contrary to the rules of bibliography, any source but a complete copy of the book is used. Old descriptions in inventories or catalogues, advertisements of booksellers or printers, and copyright entries are often unreliable and easily misinterpreted. No careful scholar presents data from such sources without warning his readers or before seeking verification elsewhere. Some writers have been tempted to embroider and fill out the data, fictionalizing printing history while showing off their knowledge of it. Only if properly handled can such data yield useful results.”
Access to the first article : PWT 30-2018 Long Lost Clyde Daguerreotype
CONFERENCE AND PUBLIC DEBATE :
FRIDAY 23 AUGUST 2018 AT 3 PM
ZONAMACO FOTO - LOMAS DE SOTELO – MEXICO CITY
https://zsonamaco.com/september/foto
Copernican Armillary Sphere (France, circa 1840)
This Daguerrian portrait (circle of Robert Cornelius, Philadelphia, circa 1840)
Quarter plate daguerreotype (circle of Johhn Draper, New York, circa 1840)
La Galerie du Palace invited French artist Lyes Hammadouche. Please come and visit his installation. The conjonction of rare daguerrian portraits from Europe and the Americas meet with the conjonction of planets of a vintage armil.
Planétaire copernicien (Copernican Armillary Sphere), France, circa 1840
The portrait session was a real adventure and often a unique event in each period of life (with the notable exception of the artists’ families). Some models have dramatically thwarted the operator’s efforts to capture the decisive moment.
Early daguerreian portrait of three children (Philadelphia, circa 1843)
Sixth plate daguerreotype (W. V. Prentice, Savannah, Georgia, circa 1855)
PWT 29-2018 COPERNICAN ARMILLARY SPHERE – CONJONCTION OF PORTRAITS
Avant Thomas d’Aquin, Evagre le Pontique énumère les idées concupiscibles et irascibles qui donneront les intitulés des sept péchés capitaux :
Gourmandise, criminels identifiés par des morsures gourmandes
Avarice, les accumulations de Landru
Luxure, 20 000 femmes tondues lors de l’épuration à la Libération
Paresse, jarretelles tatouées sur des mollets poilus
Colère, affaire Secula, couteau de vannier
Envie, une bande de dévaliseurs de boutiques
Orgueil, Paul Ferdonnet, autoportrait ithyphallique
(Paul Ferdonnet, rédacteur des bulletins de Radio Humanité, 1939)
Giacomo Caneva was born at Padua on the 4th of July 1813 of Giuseppe Caneva and Anna Pavan. There were four other children, Antonio, Giovanni, Camillo and Teresa, who died as a child. The father was well-to-do, and was the owner of the “Albergo al Principe Carlo” in Prato della Valle. Caneva left Padua on the 12th of November 1834 to register at the Regia Accademia di Belle Arti at Venice (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) where, in particular, he followed the School of the Perspective of Tranquillo Orsi. Here he qualified as a “perspective painter” and widened his knowledge of the camera obscura, which he used in his paintings.
In 1840, Caneva moved to Rome with Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1851), called by Prince Alessandro Torlonia for the arrangement of greenery in the southern area of Villa Torlonia in Rome…
The 1907 Tiflis Bank Robbery, also known as the Yerevan Square Expropriation was an armed robbery on 26 June 1907 in the city of Tiflis in the Tiflis Governorate in the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire (now Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi). A bank cash shipment was stolen by Bolsheviks to fund their revolutionary activities. The robbers attacked a bank stagecoach and surrounding police and military using bombs and guns while the stagecoach was transporting money through Yerevan Square (now Freedom Square) between the post office and the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire. The attack killed forty people and injured fifty others, according to official archive documents. The robbers escaped with 341,000 rubles (equivalent to around US 3.86 million in 2017).
The robbery was organized by a number of top-level Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin, and Alexander Bogdanov, and executed by a party of revolutionaries led by Stalin’s early associate Ter-Petrosian (Kamo).
The RSDLP, the predecessor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was formed in 1898. The goal of the RSDLP was to carry out a Marxist proletarian revolution against the Russian Empire. As part of their revolutionary activity, the RSDLP and other revolutionary groups (such as anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries) practised a range of militant operations, including “expropriations”, a euphemism for armed robberies of government or private funds to support revolutionary activities.
Mysterious Marshall Milton Miller
“Miller is becoming increasingly recognised as one of the key figures in early Chinese photography, even though almost nothing is known about him or his career. Although little of his landscape work has yet been identified. the genre portraits he took are celebrated for their often jarring intensity and also for the apparent empathy he felt for his Chinese sitters …” (Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography)
“Thanks to Terry Bennett’s archival research, we now know that Milton Miller, also known as Marshall M. Miller, was born in Dummerston, Vermont, in 1830. After he died in 1899, an obituary in the Vermont Phoenix provided information about his life before and after his commercial adventure in China from 1860 to 1863. ” (Wu Hung, Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China)
PWT 25-2018 CHINESE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY. MILTON MILLER
Le Dilemme du prisonnier et le dilemme du gendarme
“Le dilemme du prisonnier, énoncé en 1950 par Albert W. Tucker à Princeton, caractérise en théorie des jeux une situation où deux joueurs auraient intérêt à coopérer, mais où, en l’absence de communication entre les deux joueurs, chacun choisira de trahir l’autre si le jeu n’est joué qu’une fois. La raison est que si l’un coopère et que l’autre trahit, le coopérateur est fortement pénalisé. Pourtant, si les deux joueurs trahissent, le résultat leur est moins favorable que si les deux avaient choisi de coopérer.
Le dilemme du prisonnier est souvent évoqué dans des domaines comme l’économie, la biologie, la politique internationale, la psychologie, le traitement médiatique de la rumeur, et même l’émergence de règles morales dans des communautés.
Il a donné naissance à des jeux d’économie expérimentale testant la rationalité économique des joueurs et leur capacité à identifier l’équilibre de Nash d’un jeu.” (Wikipedia)
Riondel. “Tzigane retenu prisonnier à Moillesulaz, il défend à un journaliste de la photographier”. Frontière Franco-Suisse, 1906. Épreuve aristotype d’époque, 78×103 mm, légendée et créditée au crayon au verso
PWT 24-2018 Encombrants voyageurs
Weekly transmission 23-2018 presents:
“After the forming of the National Constituent Assembly, LaFayette helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with Thomas Jefferson’s assistance; inspired by the United States Declaration of Independence, this document invoked natural law to establish basic principles of the democratic nation-state. In keeping with the philosophy of natural liberty, Lafayette also advocated for the end of slavery.
After the storming of the Bastille, Lafayette was appointed commander-in-chief of the National Guard and tried to steer a middle course through the French Revolution…
As leader of the National Guard, Lafayette attempted to maintain order and steer a middle ground, even as the radicals gained increasing influence…”
La Fayette et Mme de Staël – à propos d’une correspondance inédite
La popularité de La Fayette est depuis quelques années en recrudescence, mais c’est à l’Amérique qu’il le doit…”
((Paul-Gabriel Othenin de Cléron, comte d’Haussonville, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1921)
Texte integral en ligne : https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Fayette_et_Madame_de_Staël
PWT 22-2018 Lafayette Nous Voila
AH ! ÇA IRA, ÇA IRA, ÇA IRA ! Edith Piaf singing (Youtube) :
“… and so, at last, to the festivities of today, when Markle was hitched to her true love—her true true love, forever and ever—at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Third time lucky. The heavens above were of an unfamiliar blue. Ever since Elizabeth II was crowned under soaking skies, the pact between good news and bad weather has been a matter of national pride, yet here we were, suffused with warmth—an event so rare that it was greeted by Amal Clooney in a dress of liquefied sunshine. Her husband’s suit, to judge by its tint of shimmering gray, had been woven from the same material as his beard. Oprah Winfrey was in pink and continued to radiate satisfaction, despite the fact that, having turned up promptly at a quarter to ten, she had to occupy her spot in the knights’ stalls of the chapel (not the coziest of perches) for two and a quarter hours before the main event. So contagious were “the atmospherics,” as one member of the palace staff described them, that even Victoria Beckham was affected. She didn’t actually smile, but there were several moments when it looked as if she might.
The surrounding mood was of a buoyancy not seen since the London Olympics in 2012. Ordinary citizens initiated conversations of their own free will rather than, as custom dictates, either waiting for their dogs to sniff each other or deciding not to speak at all. More than two thousand members of the public had been invited onto the castle grounds and were guaranteed a clear view of the proceedings. The invitation was, in part, a vote of thanks for services rendered. One such guest, Helen Mack, had worked in the hospice movement for thirty years, providing care for the terminally ill; another spectator, Cavita Chapman, is not only a senior manager in the treatment of mental health—a cause to which Harry has lent outspoken support—but, as I learned, an expert on the insanely complex plot of “Suits.” Chapman was crisp in her assessment of the real-life couple, expecting great things of Meghan (“She’s a feminist”) and the Prince—“Harry’s always been, you know, ‘Why not?’ ” Put together, Chapman said, “Both of them will change the world.”(Anthony Lane, The New Yorker) Read more »
Claude-Marie Ferrier (1811-1889)
Windsor Castle and Town Skyline, 1851
Salt paper print from an albumen glass negative
JOIN US AT THE LONDON PHOTOGRAPH FAIR – THIS SUNDAY!
27th May 2018, 10am – 4pm
ABOUT
With thousands of rare, unique and unusual finds at every event, The London Photograph Fair is the meeting place for vintage photography dealers, collectors, curators and connoisseurs – since 1982
LOCATION & TIMES
Venue: Bloomsbury Holiday Inn, Coram Street, London WC1N 1HT
Date & Hours: Sunday 27th May 2018, 10am – 4pm
TUBE
Russell Square (1 min walk) / St. Pancras Station (7-10 min walk)
Weekly transmission 18-2018 presents:
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532–1592) was a Spanish explorer …
Fortifying the Strait and closing the loop of the Columbian exchange …
Fondation de deux villes dans le détroit de Magellan au XVIe siècle
Weekly drawing by Théophile Bouchet: “Closing the loop”
Two unpublished drawings by Wilhelm Heine who crossed the Strait
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532–1592) was a Spanish explorer,
author, historian, mathematician, astronomer, and scientist. His birthplace is not certain… In 1555 he began his exploring career, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. His first destination was New Spain (in what is today Mexico), where he lived for two years. Little is known of this period in his life, other than that he encountered difficulties with the Inquisition. He then sailed to Peru, where he lived for more than twenty years, gaining a reputation as a navigator.
In Lima he was accused by the Inquisition of possessing two magic rings and some magic ink and of following the precepts of Moses. He then joined Álvaro de Mendaña’s expedition through the southern Pacific Ocean to find the Terra Australis Incognita, which, should Mendaña have followed Sarmiento’s indications, had reached New Zealand or/and Australia; but they discovered the Solomon Islands instead, in 1568. The expedition failed to find gold and attempts at establishing a settlement in the Solomon Islands ended in failure. In order to take credit for the discoveries for himself Mendaña threw the journals and maps made by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa overboard and abandoned him in Mexico. However, a trial was then held in Lima, with the result giving Sarmiento credit for the discoveries.
Continuer la lecture de « 06.05.2018 PWT 18-2018 Port Famine, A Tragedy Without Pictures »
Aug. 26, 1944, de Gaulle was making his official entry into the capital…*
Few things had rankled more with the French leader that summer than the failure of Washington and London to recognize his Provisional Government as the Government of France. His nightmare was of being caught between the Scylla of AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) and the Charybdis of a Communist‐run commune. He was determined Paris’s liberation should be largely a French gesture under his leadership, and he intended to install himself in the city as soon as it was free, with or without his allies’ blessing.
Suite sur le pdf : PWT 17-2018 Liberation of Paris
Full Menu:
First Course:
Goat Cheese Gateau
Tomato Jam
Buttermilk Biscuit Crumbles Young Variegated Lettuces
Main Course:
Rack of Spring Lamb
Burnt Cipollini Soubise Carolina Gold Rice Jambalava
Dessert:
Nectarine Tart
Crème Fraîche Ice Cream
East view of mansion at Mount Vernon (Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana)
About the portraits:
Xue-Lan-Se (born 2004)
The Candidate, 2017
El Muro, 2017
Photo ceramic impressions on aluminium (Fotalux), 30×30 cm
Unbreakable, indestructible, convenient for all outside walls,
each one of an edition of 7 numbered signed copies. each 400 US $
Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I’ve read, that things inanimate have mov’d,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.
What then am I? Am I more senseless grown
Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!
‘Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.
Anselmo sleeps, and is at Peace; last Night
The silent Tomb receiv’d the good Old King;
He and his Sorrows now are safely lodg’d
Within its cold, but hospitable Bosom.
Why am not I at Peace?
William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697
SYLVAIN, PHOTOGRAPHE DE TAHITI
In 1946, a young French war correspondent photographer …
seduced by his stopover in Tahiti, when he returned to France from Indochina, chose to settle in Punaauia. Adolphe Sylvain, a public works engineer by training, has just participated in the Libération de Paris as a tank driver in General Leclerc’s 2nd DB. He took the opportunity to fix some of the famous photos of the liberation with his Rolleiflex.
