Antoine Claudet, a figure of photography, 1839--1867
Item
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Title
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Antoine Claudet, a figure of photography, 1839--1867
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:9bd1c3e9be8b:10795
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identifier
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10855
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Creator
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Hellman, Karen,
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Contributor
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Geoffrey Batchen
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art history | Art criticism | British | Claudet | daguerreotype | French | History | Photography
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Abstract
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Up to now, the early decades of nineteenth-century photography have been narrated in terms of "great" individual achievements and have tended to characterize the histories of photography in England and France as separate but parallel chronological paths. Equally, scholars have usually split their object of study between two opposite disciplines: that of science and that of art. I propose instead a lateral approach that considers the ways in which both photography and individual photographers interconnected within an expanded network of international cultural forces, primarily commerce, technology, science, and art. I aim to do this through a close study of the career of Antoine-Francois-Jean Claudet (1797-1867), a French-born photographer operating a daguerreotype portrait studio in London from the early 1840s to the late 1860s.;As a commercial photographer interested in improving the technical as well as aesthetic possibilities of photography, as a prolific writer on the medium, and as a Frenchman living in England constantly in communication with photographers and scientists on both sides of the English Channel, Claudet intersected with these cultural forces more directly than many of his contemporaries. By examining his pursuits laterally, across the multiple communities that they traversed in his time, this study will argue that a career like Claudet's is integral to any substantial understanding of the photographic medium's first decades, while also making a vital addition to how the history of photography is usually figured, one which acknowledges connection and collaboration as key to understanding more accurately the period of photography's invention and early development.;In order to account for Claudet's connective role as a photographic figure, I will look at the early decades of photographic history as a network of dialogues in the midst of an expanded web of inseparable cultural forces. Writing Claudet's career as dialogue allows for a re-picturing of photography's development as a process of successes and failures, knowns and unknowns, that produced a range of cross-disciplinary conversations. If we consider these correspondences as the latent images of photographic history, this approach is itself a photographic one. It exposes and then "develops out" these latent conversations.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
