New Frames of Reference: Early French Photographers at Home and Abroad

The first country to announce the invention of a photographic process and release it for public use in 1839, France took the lead in the early decades of photography’s technological and aesthetic development. New Frames of Reference: French Photographers at Home and Abroad in the Nineteenth Century explores how photographers adapted the conventions of portraiture, still life, landscape, and other established artistic genres to the new medium.

French photographers faced enormous challenges mastering the technical complexities of photography. From daguerreotypes to autochromes, early photographs exemplified a bewildering range of complex and unpredictable techniques. The exhibition documents a time when cameras were large and heavy, travel was slow, and the vagaries of sunlight and photochemistry undermined the very possibility of creating an image.

Like contemporary Impressionist painters, French photographers trafficked in the new and the fashionable: the urban renewal of Paris, the cut of the latest frockcoats and crinolines, and the faces of the famous. Consistent with a commitment to “progress,” scenes of disappearing or pre-industrial cultures and traditions – rural life and landscape, Middle Eastern monuments, crumbling Gothic buildings, exotic cultures – were categorized as “picturesque” and targeted to urban, middle-class consumers and patrons.

Including some fifty vintage photographs from the Chrysler Museum of Art collection, this broad-ranging exhibition provides the viewer with a sense of the lives and values of the first generation of photographic creators and consumers to define itself through the framing lens of the camera.

This exhibition is organized by Gary Van Zante and Anne McCauley, guest curators.