Gustave Le Gray

Gustave Le Gray ( born August 30, 1820 Villiers -le- Bel, Val- d'Oise, † 30 July 1884 in Cairo ) was a pioneer of photography, in particular the artistic.

Life and work

In the early days the son of a haberdasher born. After leaving school, he studied painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche. He invented in 1850 by Frederick Scott Archer along the negative film process with the collodion wet plate. His photographic works documented in berückendem realism of his time and impressed throughout Europe citizens and nobility. In 1854 he was co-founder of the Société française de photographie. He fled because of its debt in 1860 to Egypt. His photographs are in the auctions of the most expensive in the world.

Le Gray invented method the sandwich negative, wherein a positive ( photograph ) is illuminated by two negative. As a photographer of the French court, he should produce recordings of the fleet. Thus at this stage of the photochemistry it took a long time to take pictures of cloud formations. On the other hand, required the illumination of the waves and the surf a very short exposure time. Using the combination of two negatives that were taken with different exposure times, reach Le Gray dramatic photographs, reminiscent of the maritime painting seascapes.