Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography

Jillian Lerner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000214826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction.

Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the "selfie" and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience.

This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies.

1 The drowned inventor

Bayard, Daguerre, and the curious attractions of early photography

One of the most fascinating documents in the early history of photography is Hippolyte Bayard’s self-portrait as a drowned man. Conceived in an act of protest, Le Noyé is a ghostly testament to the technical and artistic achievements of an overlooked pioneer (Figure 1.1). The original photographic process Bayard devised had been ignored by the authorities and the press, swept aside in the state-sponsored fanfare surrounding the daguerreotype in 1839. In response, Bayard fabricated a portrait of himself, the disconsolate inventor, as an anonymous suicide festering at the morgue, unclaimed by anyone with the power to recognize him.

Figure 1.1 Hippolyte Bayard, Le Noyé (Drowned Man), self-portrait with handwritten message on verso, October 1840. Direct positive on paper. © Société française de photographie.

Le Noyé was seen by few contemporaries and did little to improve Bayard’s immediate circumstances.¹ Yet Bayard’s photographic declaration that he had been written out of history ensured that he would be written into it, eventually. The corpse of the drowned inventor did not fade away. Like a latent image—temporarily invisible—it lay dormant at the Société française de photographie (SFP), awaiting the eager development of future historians bent on resurrecting the “first images” of photography.²

Le Noyé provides material evidence of the unique paper-based heliography that Bayard had perfected by 1840. Moreover, it demonstrates a highly sophisticated and self-reflexive mode of representation, which is rendered even more complex by the existence of three similar versions, one of which (pictured here) has a curious handwritten message on the verso. Pairing image and text, Bayard serves up a compelling fiction that foregrounds the uncertain nature of the new medium. Le Noyé is at once a self-portrait, a still-life, a theatrical mise en scène, a chemically fixed solar-drawing, a morbid spectacle, and an illustrated news item. It probes photography’s relationship to other image types and narrative forms, and it highlights aspects of the competitive environment in which the proto-photographers vied for attention.

In what follows I explore two crucial allusions in Le Noyé. First, Bayard dramatizes his photographic achievements and frustrations (circa 1838–1840) with reference to the visceral and narrative attractions of the Paris morgue. Second, Bayard’s composition responds to publicity tactics that contributed to the official recognition of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre as the inventor of photography. Bayard’s dramatic self-presentation depends partly on a mocking and combative characterization of Daguerre, suggesting the latter is a savvy self-promoter who knows well the secrets of show business, artistic posturing, networking, and sensational journalism.

Despite a substantial critical literature on this legendary composition, Le Noyé continues to fascinate scholars and provoke a range of plausible interpretations. Some have explored significant art historical and theatrical references.³ Others have pursued conceptual meditations on the status of the photographic sign.⁴ Because Le Noyé offers up the spectacle of Bayard’s corpse—both lifeless and lifelike, absent and present—it has invited theoretical excurses on the relationship between photography and death.⁵ Here I focus on historically specific connections to sensational journalism, photographic publicity, and the spectacular display of cadavers at the Paris morgue. My approach combines formal analysis with a broad-based historical exploration of related visual attractions, textual sources, and social practices in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s.

One of the most perplexing issues posed by Le Noyé is how to assess the extraordinary relationship between Bayard’s photographic mise en scène and the accompanying fictional text he composed on its backside. I try to make sense of this icono-textual dialogue in relation to other strategies of enticement, exposure, and storytelling deployed in initial representations of photography in the late 1830s. The earliest accounts of Daguerre’s “discovery” also surround visual evidence with reported speech and fantastic description. To paraphrase François Brunet, the “contest over the invention of photography was also a contest of narratives,” in which photography “was experienced as an event, and in writing, before it was encountered visually.”⁶ The conundrum of Le Noyé’s two faces (photograph and caption) has its own sly way of underlining these discursive conditions.

The corpse of the drowned inventor

On the back of one version of Le Noyé, Bayard scrawled an astonishing story that proposes a contextual backdrop for the image.

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen, or the marvellous results of which you are soon going to see. To my knowledge, this ingenious and indefatigable researcher has been working for about three years to perfect his invention. The Academy, the King, and all those who have seen his pictures, that he himself found imperfect, have admired them as you do at this moment. This has brought him much honour but has not yielded him a single farthing. The government, having given too much to M. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for M. Bayard and the unhappy man drowned himself. Oh! The fickleness of human affairs! Artists, scholars, journalists were occupied with him for a long time, but here he has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and Gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay. H.B. 18 October 1840.⁷

In his own cursive script Bayard puts forward this photograph as physical evidence of his claim to invention, an object of wonder and diversion, and a scandalous editorial about current events in the race for plural photographies. He introduces the fictional premise of the inventor’s suicide, emphasizing issues of anonymity and recognition. He also presents his body as a macabre visual attraction and underlines its status as a fragile material object subject to decomposition. All of these issues have special significance with respect to the visual culture of the morgue and the challenges of early photography.

According to Michel Poivert, Bayard’s message was directly addressed to the Académie des Beaux-Arts as a plea for greater recognition and financial support.⁸ Furthermore, Bayard’s mode of address appears to be tailored for a particular type of Parisian consumer who is both curious and distractible, eager to experience the novelties of the day, and capable of passing fluidly from one type of diversion to the next. Bayard first acknowledges a privileged viewer who can examine and manipulate this photographic specimen at firsthand, holding it, flipping it over to read the text and stare at the image in turn: “the process that you have just seen, or the marvellous results of which you are soon going to see.” Next he shifts to a journalistic tone, reminiscent of sensational reports and promotions in the popular press: “to my knowledge, this ingenious and indefatigable researcher has been working for close to three years to perfect his invention.” This is how most Parisians encountered photography in 1838–1839: as a series of incredible claims and anecdotes circulated in the papers and through word of mouth. Finally, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Bayard assumes the voice of a showman entreating pedestrians to proceed to the ticket booth or to keep moving past a gruesome display at the morgue. In a few short lines the quizzical observer of a sample photograph becomes an enchanted reader and then a compliant bystander. In prose that mimics hyped accounts of the daguerreotype, Bayard presents Le Noyé as a rare specimen, a puff piece, a marvelous attraction, and a parade.

Figure 1.2 Hippolyte Bayard, The Drowned Man, self-portrait, 1840. Direct positive on paper. © Société française de photographie.

Image and text work together to produce this circuit of impressions. So what do we make of the fact that Bayard made several similar self-portraits (Figure 1.2) that do not have the support of this text? André Gunthert suggests that the “real subject” of the picture known as Le Noyé has been obscured by the presence of this anomalous suicide note. If we consider the composition in its “iconographic autonomy,” he argues, we discover that Bayard adopts the pose of the sleeping shepherd: a reading which accounts admirably for the straw hat, the sitter’s nudity, and seated posture and has the merit of resituating the work in relation to Bayard’s numerous other compositions featuring figural sculptures.⁹ Gunthert doubts there is any iconographic justification for the theme of the drowned inventor based on the visual evidence alone. He asks, “does the figure have the attitude of a cadaver at the morgue?” I think it does, though my reading aims to expand rather than contract the interpretive possibilities. I perceive substantial formal similarities, as well as experiential and discursive connections, between Le Noyé and the visual presentation of cadavers at the Paris morgue.

Figure 1.3 “People visiting the morgue in Paris to view the cadavers. A crowd gathers to view the grisly sight of the bodies, including a mother and her young son,” in Journal des anecdotes, 1833.

The morgue

From 1804 to 1864, the Paris morgue was located on the Quai du Marché Neuf near the Pont St. Michel. The living entered from the street into a spacious hall, where anonymous corpses were exhibited, ten at a time, behind a paneled glass partition (Figure 1.3). The dead were brought in through the back of the building, situated on the banks of the Seine. The work done at this public institution included record-keeping, criminological analysis, the performance of autopsies, and the provision of cadavers to the medical faculty at the Sorbonne.¹⁰ And every day from dawn until dusk, the unknown dead were arrayed for public viewing, with the expectation that onlookers might help to identify the bodies.

Locals and tourists came to this exhibit in droves, ostensibly to perform a civic duty, but also to partake of an unusual attraction that offered a mixture of visual, sexual, and social pleasures. The gruesome, intriguing, and theatrical qualities of this urban venue were emphasized in numerous caricatures and guides to Paris. Clearly people were curious about the look of expired, naked, and violated bodies. As Vanessa Schwartz has shown, visitors were equally intrigued about how those bodies were linked to sensational reports circulating in local gossip and the popular press; the cadavers could illustrate and embellish the experience of “real” news stories, often shocking cases of violence, sexual deviance, or injustice.¹¹ Here at the morgue, viewers could actively participate in the mystery of an anonymous corpse: they could peruse the physical evidence at firsthand, cross-reference what they saw with information they had read or heard, attempt to puzzle out the backstory, or perh...