dead to the world: first photographic lie

The man who took the photograph below, the man who wrote the original inscription printed below it, and the “corpse” itself were one and the same: Hippolyte Bayard, as the yet unrecognized inventor of photography in France. At the time that Bayard posed as a drowned man, in October, 1840, he was thirty-nine years old, a minor bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance, and a man who, in his spare time, had devised a method for making permanent photographic images on paper. The reason his work is so little known can be traced directly to his character, for Hippolyte Bayard was a timid soul, and his timidity assured the neglect of which he complained.

---‘This modest photograph so early in the history of photography has already opened up an encyclopedia of doubts and challenges, artifices and deceits, ambivalences, ambiguities and downright lies.’---click image for source...

—‘This modest photograph so early in the history of photography has already opened up an encyclopedia of doubts and challenges, artifices and deceits, ambivalences, ambiguities and downright lies.’—click image for source…

If the average Frenchman had been asked in 1840, about pictures made in the camera, he would have said without hesitation that they were the invention of Louis Daguerre. For on August 19, 1839, with the announcement of Daguerre’s method of exposing silvered plates to light and developing a latent image by means of mercury vapor, all Paris was seized by daguerreotypomania.

One observer reported than an hour after the details of Daguerre’s experiments had been made public “all the opticians’ shops were beseiged, but could not rake together enough instruments to satisfy the onrushing army of would-be daguerreotypists; a few days later you could see in all the squares of Paris three-legged dark-boxes planted in front of churches and palaces.”

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Hippolyte Bayard was not simply the least-known of the triumvirate who invented photography, he was arguably the medium’s first artist. The process he devised consisted of making a positive image directly on to sensitised paper in the camera, but this less practicable method was ignored in favour of the systems developed by Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. So Bayard contrived this sour tableau. a parody of David’s Death of Marat, depicting himself as an unclaimed cadaver in the Paris morgue, a poor martyr driven by an uninterested world to commit the desperate act of drowning himself. In so doing, he gave us what might be ascribed the first photographic nude, the first photographic self-portrait, and, by virtue of its mocking, ironic self-referential qualities and written caption – ‘the body of the gentleman you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process which you have just seen, or of which you are going to see marvellous results’ – possibly the first postmodern image-text piece. It is, also, the first direct example of the photographic lie.

Bayard craftily utilised the camera’s propensity for combining verisimilitude with metaphor to convey his disgust at his treatment – his ‘mortification.’ In modern British parlance, one might also say that he was ‘gutted.’ Clearly, in this startling image, one of the earliest photographs we know, the photographer displays an immediate and sophisticated awareness of the medium’s endemic ambiguities. He was aware that he was fabricating a believable representation of death, not simply sleep, and that both were false. He was undoubtedly aware that the picture depended for its piquancy as an image partly upon a knowledge of David’s iconographic painting, but primarily upon its title, which colours our entire perception of it.Read More:http://www.gerrybadger.com/hippolyte-bayard/

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