Met Museum: Early Photography in Italy

After having visited the Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Gallery last week, I noted that several of the works on view were of Egyptian scenes and thus represented some of the world's first travel photography.  At the current exhibit at the Met Museum, Paradise of Exiles: Early Photography in Italy, there were also photos from photography's first decades on view but this time the location was Italy, nexus of classical antiquity.  Another difference was that many of the works had been photographed by local artists, both amateurs and professionals, as well as by visitors from other countries, principally England, though these were hardly exiles in spite of the exhibit's fanciful title.

The show is relatively small by the Met's standards and consists of some forty-four prints, negatives, cartes de visite, and daguerreotypes as well as a truly unique album of photograms created by an Italian associate of Henry Fox Talbot immediately following the latter's invention of the medium, i.e., 1839-1840.  The album, easily the most noteworthy article shown at the exhibit, is described as follows on the museum's website:

"Album di Disegni Fotogenici contains thirty-six photogenic drawings by Talbot, twenty made from direct contact with objects, fifteen made from camera negatives, and one made with a solar microscope; three letters from Talbot and one from his uncle, William Fox-Strangways; three printed notices; and three photogenic drawings-the first to be made in Italy-by the Italian chemist Sebastiano Tassinari."

Perhaps no visitor to Italy is so renowned as John Ruskin whose The Stones of Venice was to become an indispensable guidebook for generations of English travelers.  Still, I had not known until recently that Ruskin had experimented with the daguerreotype process in the course of researching his books.  According to an article in The Telegraph, it was only in 2015 that a "box of photographs miscatalogued at a provincial auction in 2006 have finally been confirmed as having belonged to the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin."  It's not clear how deeply Ruskin was involved in the process.  Although the museum's website mentions only that he "purchased and commissioned daguerreotypes from photographers working in the city," other images have been attributed to Ruskin himself with the assistance of his valet.  The particular image on display here, Palazzo Vendramin, Venice, was most likely taken by Le Cavalier Iller, described by the Met as "an itinerant French practitioner."

There are also works are on display by other British photographers.  Of these, two are particularly well known.  The first is the Scotsman Robert Macpherson who began his career as a painter and who is represented here by albumen prints showing the Theater of Marcellus and the Cloaca Maxima.  The second is Calvert Richard Jones who learned the salt paper process directly from Talbot and who is represented here by a view of the Duomo in Milan.

The work of several French photographers is also on view.  Of these, the most illustrious is Gustave Le Gray who traveled with Alexandre Dumas to Palermo in order to record the "Expedition of the Thousand" led by Giuseppe Garibaldi in the fight for Italian unification.  Two excellent albumen prints from that 1860 campaign can be seen here, the Barricade of General Turr in Via Toledo and the other a formal portrait of Garibaldi himself.  These were among the world's first war photographs and brought instant fame, if not riches, to Le Gray.

In contrast to the British and French, Italian photographers, at least as shown at this exhibit, concentrated on what would now be known as "tourist pictures," though of the highest level.  The best of these were created by the Fratelli Alinari, a photographic firm still in existence.  Their view of the Baptistery in Florence is remarkably sharp for a salt print, most probably because it was made from a collodion glass negative rather than a calotype.

The exhibit continues through August 13, 2017