Édouard Baldus
Édouard-Denis Baldus (June 5, 1813, Grunebach, Prussia – 1889, Paris) was a French landscape, architectural and railway photographer in the mid-1800s.
Baldus was originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman and lithographer before switching to photography in 1849. In 1851, he was commissioned for the Missions Héliographiques by the Historic Monuments Commission of France to photograph historic buildings, bridges and monuments, many of which were being razed to make way for the grand boulevards of Paris, being carried out under the direction of Napoleon III's prefect Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. He was extremely well-known throughout France for his efforts in photography. One of his greatest assignments was to document the construction of the Louvre museum.
In 1855, Baron James de Rothschild, President of Chemin de Fer du Nord, commissioned Baldus to do a series of photographs to be used as part of an album that was to be a gift to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a souvenir of their visit to France that year.
Baldus used wet and dry paper negatives as large as 10x14 inches in size. From these negatives, he made contact prints. In order to create a larger image, he put contact prints side by side to create a panoramic effect.
External links
Notable photographs
- The Chantilly Viaduct, 1855.
References
- Daniel, Malcolm, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus, with an essay by Barry Bergdoll. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.
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