Gustave le gray biography template
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We’re travelling back in time a bit to find one of the first true landscape photographers. Gustav Le Gray was originally a painter but moved over to photography very early in its incubation. His mastery of the craft and art of photography make him, for me at least, qualify him for this accolade. I think we can definitely say that between him and Fox Talbot, they made the first forays into representing the wilderness in photographic form.
He is also one of the first proponents of HDR, although I think we can forgive him as he only shot two exposures and manually blended them. Take for example the photograph below. This would have been impossible to capture in one photograph for decades after his death and it was his vision of separating the sky and land components and mastery in combining them to artistic ends that is one part of the whole that makes his work so fascinating.
Biography
Although apparently an incredibly clever inventor and self taught chemist (you had to make yo
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Gustave Le Gray was the central figure in French photography of the 1850s—an artist of the first order, a teacher, and the author of several widely distributed instructional manuals. Born the only child of a haberdasher in 1820 in the outskirts of Paris, Le Gray studied painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche, and made his first daguerreotypes by at least 1847. His real contributions—artistically and technically—however, came in the realm of paper photography, in which he first experimented in 1848. The first of his four treatises, published in 1850, boldly—and correctly—asserted that “the entire future of photography is on paper.” In that volume, Le Gray outlined a variation of William Henry Fox Talbot’s process calling for the paper negatives to be waxed prior to sensitization, thereby yielding a crisper image.
By the time Le Gray was assigned a Mission Héliographique by the French government in 1851, he had already established his reputation with portraits, views of Fontaineble
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This page forms part of a series of pages dedicated to the many artists who painted in Cherbourg. A full list of all the artists with a link to their works can be found at the bottom of this page.
Movement(s): Photography
Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (1820 – 1884) has been called “the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century” because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and “the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making.” He was an important contributor to the development of the wax paper negative.
Gustave Le Gray was born in 1820 in Villiers-le-Bel, Val-d’Oise. He was originally trained as a painter, studying under François-Edouard Picot and Paul Delaroche. He lived in Italy between 1843-1846 and painted portraits and scenes of the countryside. Le Gray exhibited his paintings at the salon in 1848 and 1853. He then crossed over to photography in the early years of its de