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Architectural Review, The, May, 2002 by Tom Kay

OLD FRANCE CELEBRATED IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY. COMMONWEALTH ASSOCIATION OF ARCHITECTS STUDENT COMPETITION. PRITZKER FOR AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECT GLENN MURCUTT. AR'S REVITALIZING THE EUROPEAN CITY CONFERENCE. JEWISH ARCHITECT TOM KAY WRITES FROM RAMALLAH IN PALESTINE.

RECORDING OLD FRANCE

In 1851, five photographers were dispatched to various destinations in France by the Commission des Monuments Historiques, to make images of some 173 historic buildings and sites where restoration work was envisaged or had already begun: Roman remains, monasteries, churches, cathedrals, fortifications, chateaux and other buildings in public ownership. It was the most ambitious government-funded photographic survey of the period and it offers a startling fresh picture of provincial France as it was during the Second Republic -- that brief interlude between the fall of Louis-Philippe and the rise of Napoleon III.

First dubbed the 'Mission heliographique' in 1979 and since pieced together, it has now become something of a monument in its own right. The five photographers -- Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887), the Prussian-born Edouard Baldus (1813-1889), Henri Le Secq (1818-1882), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) and Mestral (about whom little is known, not even his Christian name) -- were all members of the short-lived Societe heliographique (1851-1853). The society's journal, La Lumiere, followed their progress and fuelled expectations of an exhibition and a publication. But the Commission simply selected and purchased a total of 258 images (negatives and prints) for reference purposes: 120 from Le Gray & Mestral, who had produced some 600 images between them, 92 from Le Secq, 46 from Baldus and none from Bayard, as he seems not to have submitted any.

La Mission heliographique, Cinq phogoraphes parcourent la France en 1851 (1) presents magnificent reproductions of many of the original images, including a few thought to be from the set Bayard failed to submit, supplemented by other examples of contemporary French photography. It also contains an illustrated catalogue of the 258 images purchased by the Commission and such complementary information as colour maps of the period overlaid with the routes the five photographers are thought to have followed (reconstructed from their claims for travelling expenses) and lists of the buildings they were asked to photograph.

Anne de Mondenard's text seeks to clarify the facts surrounding the 'Mission Heliographique' and to establish its place in a peculiarly French version of photographic history (William Henry Fox Talbot is misspelt and the images he made when touring France in 1843 are not mentioned, only those he made there three years later). The painstaking process of relocating all but four of the negatives and prints the Commission originally purchased is described at length, the photographs are discussed both in terms of technique and composition, but not nearly enough is said about the subject matter -- the buildings themselves.

Perhaps a French readership is supposed to know that the Roman temple at Vienne (photographed by Baldus) was about to be metamorphosed into a smaller version of Maison Carree at Nimes, or that the church at Parayle-Monial (also photographed by Baldus) was to be transformed into an idealized version of Cluny. But why did the Commission require photographs of at least 10 different buildings where drastic over-restoration by Paul Abadie (1812-1884) was already in progress or soon would be? (Abadie is not even indexed). And was Le Secq asked to photograph the church at Vignory (Haute-Maine) because the Commission approved, or disapproved, of the way it had been rebuilt by Emile Boeswillwald?

Each photograph sets the mind racing. For instance, the view of the west front of the former cathedral at Lisieux, reproduced on page 192, contradicts a gloomy prediction Ruskin made in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Having drawn one of the spandrels above the southwest entrance in August 1848, while touring Normandy with Effie, he used it for Plate VII and tells us it is from: 'one of the most quaint and interesting doors in Normandy, probably soon to be lost for ever by the continuance of the masonic operations which have already destroyed the northern tower'. The new tower appears in Bayard's photograph of 1851, yet Ruskin's spandrel is just visible -- still unscathed.

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France subsidized some of the research for the book on the Mission Heliographique, in connection with a major exhibition on the work of Gustave Le Gray. (2) A number of the original images of 1851 by Le Gray & Mestral are on show, as are many other photographs taken by Le Gray during his highly eventful life. Highlights include astonishingly large views of Paris, studies of trees in the forest of Fontainebleau (where he fled to escape a cholera epidemic in 1849), numerous seascapes -- some showing the French and English fleets engaged in joint manoeuvres off Cherbourg, portrait photographs of Napoleon III, the Empress Eugenie and their baby son in 1856, a balding Garibaldi and fellow redshirt General Istvan Turr in Palermo and evidence of their activities there -- barricades and war damage -- in the summer of 1860, and exotic subjects in Syria and Egypt photographed by Le Gray when on the run from his creditors. He finally settled in Cairo, where he died.