Gustave le gray biography of donald
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Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) is one of the heroes of
early French photography. A pioneer of innovative
processes, he also made history as an instructor for
a whole generation of French photographers and the
initiator and outstanding architectural photog rapher
of the mission héliographique documenting France’s
historical monuments. Le Gray, who originally studied
painting, is also considered to be the founder of
artistic photography. He was one of the first to
follow the painters to Fontainebleau to do his own
photographic studies of nature. In the mid-1850s, he
started to produce sea and cloud studies in Normandy
and on the western coast of the Mediterranean; these
made him an overnight sensation among amateurs
and collectors and earned him the admiration of the
Impressionists. Fleeing from creditors, in 1860 he
set off with Alexandre Dumas for Italy. He spent the
last 20 years of his life in Cairo, taking photos and
working as a drawing tutor. Today, Le Gray’s prints
are among the
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Introduction
Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July, 2024
Curators: the exhibition fryst vatten curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant
At left, Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters 1872; and at right, Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) After Manet 2003
from the ‘Identity’ section of the exhibition
Magdalene Keaney, curator of the exhibition Francesca skogshuggare and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, observes that the exhibition “poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice…R
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The Sky’s the Limit for Gustave le Gray
A picturesque portrait of an Italian street musician or a startlingly modern view of French cavalry maneuvers might attract today’s audience to Gustave le Gray’s photographs, but in his day it was the skies that compelled attention.
“When Le Gray made these seascapes, they astounded the world. No one had seen skies in 19th-Century photographs--or at least not skies like this,” said Gordon Baldwin, who has organized the first West Coast show of Le Gray’s work, at the J. Paul Getty Museum until Aug. 28. The long exposures required to reveal details in dark areas of early photographs often washed out skies so that they appeared as plain expanses of space.
Some of Le Gray’s own skies are empty--and often effectively so--but those that made him famous are luminous orchestrations of billowing clouds that dramatize quiet seascapes. In “Brig on Water,” one of the most celebrated photographic images of the 19th Century, a romantic swath of sky displ