La Voulte.

Getty Museum

La Voulte.

Creator

Édouard Baldus

French Photographer · 1813–1889

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"[E]veryone knows [Mr.] Baldus," a reviewer wrote in 1859. By the mid-1850s, Édouard-Denis Baldus was the most successful photographer in France and at the height of his career. He began as a painter, turning to photography in 1849 when paper negatives were just becoming popular. Throughout much of his life, he listed himself in city directories as peintre photographe (painter photographer), in re

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Date
about 1861
Medium
Albumen silver print
Culture
French
Department
Photographs
Institution
Getty Museum
Object ID
4d362808-5ce6-4eb6-8611-8f309d75b8c9

From the Getty Museum record

Immediately below the bridge on the right, ghost images of a horse and carriage foretell the demise of travel at the fitful pace of animal power. In the presence of the Paris-Lyons and Mediterannean Railroad's new viaduct, the ghost images are dwarfed and almost indistinguishable. The railroad, traveling at three times the speed of a horse and carriage, was a unifying element in France, literally and figuratively bridging the country's various regions and promoting an unprecedented sense of nationhood. Like other photographers working in the 1800s, Édouard Baldus used long exposure times to make his photographs. If an individual or a carriage moved away from its initial position, a faint impression was captured on the negative and appeared in the print. The impression's transparency gives it its name, a ghost image. While Baldus made this exposure, the horse and carriage repeatedly moved, twice stopping long enough to be faintly recorded on the negative.

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