Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. Photographer.
Hazan| N° d'inventaire | 23447 |
| Format | 25 x 29 |
| Détails | 256 p., publisher's hardcover. |
| Publication | Paris, 2020 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782754112000 |
Forgotten for over a century, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey from Langres has established himself over the past twenty years as one of the major figures in the early days of French photography. This wealthy aristocrat, who chose to become a painter and draftsman, an archaeologist and architectural historian, and a scholar and lover of rare plants and birds, was also a pioneer of the daguerreotype. This technique, which he mastered perfectly by 1841, allowed him to produce a body of work whose ambition and scope are almost incomparable.
The corpus created by Girault de Prangey includes no fewer than 1,000 daguerreotypes listed to date, a figure that could increase as his work remains mysterious. It was produced mainly between 1842 and 1844, during a tour of the Mediterranean basin from Italy to Egypt, via Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Palestine.
In a completely new way, this collection is placed within the photographer's broader production, which remained little studied for the part preceding the journey, and largely unknown for that which followed. This reveals a photographic work on paper of unsuspected variety and quality, inspired above all by his estate and its gardens. It is a new vision of Girault de Prangey which is proposed here, a more complete one, the great photographer that he was from the 1840s to the 1870s, and of which his spectacular daguerreotypes gave only a partial idea.
The first monograph in France devoted to the photographic work of Girault de Prangey, the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay and the accompanying book highlight these discoveries in the French context of the 1830s to the 1880s - artistic, archaeological, that of the rise of illustrated scientific publishing and learned societies of archaeology, acclimatization and horticulture - to offer a resolutely new understanding of the personality of Girault de Prangey and his evolution as an artist.
Forgotten for over a century, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey from Langres has established himself over the past twenty years as one of the major figures in the early days of French photography. This wealthy aristocrat, who chose to become a painter and draftsman, an archaeologist and architectural historian, and a scholar and lover of rare plants and birds, was also a pioneer of the daguerreotype. This technique, which he mastered perfectly by 1841, allowed him to produce a body of work whose ambition and scope are almost incomparable.
The corpus created by Girault de Prangey includes no fewer than 1,000 daguerreotypes listed to date, a figure that could increase as his work remains mysterious. It was produced mainly between 1842 and 1844, during a tour of the Mediterranean basin from Italy to Egypt, via Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Palestine.
In a completely new way, this collection is placed within the photographer's broader production, which remained little studied for the part preceding the journey, and largely unknown for that which followed. This reveals a photographic work on paper of unsuspected variety and quality, inspired above all by his estate and its gardens. It is a new vision of Girault de Prangey which is proposed here, a more complete one, the great photographer that he was from the 1840s to the 1870s, and of which his spectacular daguerreotypes gave only a partial idea.
The first monograph in France devoted to the photographic work of Girault de Prangey, the exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay and the accompanying book highlight these discoveries in the French context of the 1830s to the 1880s - artistic, archaeological, that of the rise of illustrated scientific publishing and learned societies of archaeology, acclimatization and horticulture - to offer a resolutely new understanding of the personality of Girault de Prangey and his evolution as an artist.