Processing History
Acquisition Information
Publication Rights
Access
Arrangement
Preferred Citation
Scope and Content of Collection
Biographical/Historical Note
Bibliography
Contributing Institution:
Special Collections
Title: Joachim Bonnemaison collection of panorama photographs
Creator:
Lumière, Louis, 1864-1948
Creator:
Marville, Charles, 1813-1879
Creator:
Méhédin, Léon, 1828-1905
Creator:
Lumière, Auguste, 1862-1954
Creator:
Richebourg, Pierre Ambroise, 1810-1875
Creator:
Nègre, Charles, 1820-1880
Creator:
Vignes, Louis, 1831-1896
Creator:
Abbott, Berenice, 1898-1991
Creator:
Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène, 1819-1889
Creator:
Baldus, Edouard, 1813-1889
Creator:
Adamson, Robert, 1821-1848
Creator:
Jones, Calvert Richard, 1802-1877
Creator:
Le Gray, Gustave, 1820-1884
Creator:
Caneva, Giacomo, approximately 1813-1865
Creator:
Macpherson, Robert, 1815 or 1816-1872
Creator:
Laurent y Minier, Jean, 1816-1886
Creator:
Hill, David Octavius, 1802-1870
Creator:
Bonnemaison, Joachim
Creator:
Braun, Adolphe, 1812-1877
Creator:
Bonnemaison, Joachim
Creator:
Beato, Felice, 1832-1909
Creator:
Beaucorps, Gustave de, 1825-1906
Creator:
Sommer, Giorgio, 1834-1914
Creator:
Man Ray, 1890-1976
Creator:
Feininger, Andreas, 1906-1999
Creator:
Eaton, Thomas Damant
Creator:
Martens, Friedrich von
Creator:
Bisson frères
Creator:
Basile, Renzo
Creator:
Story-Maskelyne, Nevil, 1823-1911
Creator:
Talbot, William Henry Fox, 1800-1877
Creator:
Opisso, Ricard, 1880-1966
Creator:
Mangin, A. (Alphonse), 1825-1885
Identifier/Call Number: 98.R.19
Physical Description:
72.5 Linear Feet
(24 boxes, 47 flatfile folders)
Date (inclusive): 1803-1998 (bulk 1846-1944)
Date (bulk): 1846-1944
Abstract: The collection, compiled by the French photographer and collector Joachim
Bonnemaison, consists of over 630 photographic and printed panoramic images of cities and sites mainly in Europe, but also
in Africa, Asia, North
America and South America.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here
for the
access policy .
Language of Material: Collection material is in French,English, and German.
Processing History
Processed and researched by Sandra Starke in 2011. The finding aid written in 2012 by Beth Ann Guynn with assistance from
Linda Kleiger.
Acquisition Information
Acquired in 1998.
Publication Rights
Access
Open for use by qualified researchers.
Arrangement
Arranged in seven series: Series I. Africa, 1850-1930; Series II. Asia, 1844-1916; Series III. Europe, circa 1830-1998; Series
IV. North America,
1858-1940; Series V. South America, 1860-1891; Series VI. Unidentified locations, circa 1850-1891; Series VII. Panorama paintings,
1803-1900.
Preferred Citation
Joachim Bonnemaison collection of panorama photographs, 1803-1998 (bulk 1846-1944) The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
Accession no.
98.R.19.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa98r19
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection, compiled by the French photographer and collector Joachim Bonnemaison, between 1973 and 1997, consists of
over 630 photographic and
printed panoramic images of cities and sites mainly in Europe, but also in Africa, Asia, North America, and South America.
Over half of the photographs
are of locales and scenes in France. The majority of the images date between 1846 and 1944. Over fifty panoramas in the collection
are the only known
copies of the photograph.
Panoramic photographs fulfill the modern desire for wide, sweeping views. The extended prospect of the view is also, in essence,
an exploration of
space. The collection shows the transformation of the panoramic principle that was embedded in the centuries-old tradition
of painted and printed
birds-eye views into the newly possible photographic images of the nineteenth century, and offers a variety of understandings
of what the genre of
panoramas encompasses.
In the late eighteenth century the desire to see more and farther fueled the development of the monumental painted panoramas
that became an
international craze by the early 1800s. The term panorama was coined by the English painter Robert Barker, who combined the
Greek words pan (all) and
horama (view) in 1792 to describe his large-scale painting of Edinburgh, which, when hung inside a circular space, enveloped
the spectators, who stood
in the center of the space, within a 360-degree view. The following year Barker built the first dedicated panorama building
in Leicester Square, London
to exhibit his panoramas. In short order the panorama became a hugely popular form of mass entertainment. The most common
themes for panorama paintings
were famous battles, historical scenes, and views of exotic locales. A small number of items in the collection are related
to the history of the painted
panorama. The collection includes photographs of panorama buildings, as well as ephemera such as a poster advertising Robert
Barker's first building in
London.
The term panorama quickly passed into everyday usage as a noun whose various meanings included "a complete and comprehensive
survey or presentation of
a subject" (1800); "an unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer" (1802); and "a continuously passing scene;
a mental vision in which a
series of images passes before the mind's eye" (1813). In one aspect or another, each item in this collection encompasses
one or more of these
definitions, thereby demonstrating the breadth and scope of the panorama genre.
The immersive experience afforded by the panoramic view became such an essential way of seeing in nineteenth-century visual
culture, that by 1845, only
six years after the invention of photography, Friedrich von Martens, a young Viennese printmaker working in Paris, patented
the first panorama camera.
His daguerreotype camera employed a rotating lens and a curved daguerreotype plate. Martens is represented in the collection
by his
Panorama de Paris, pris des hauteurs de Chaillot, from the early 1840s comprising two aquatint prints (here represented as a
joined panorama), as well as by four albumen panoramas from the 1860s.
In the 19th century, photographers often designed and built their own cameras, resulting in a wide array in the format and
appearance of panoramic
photographs. Panoramic photographs can also be made by piecing together sequential segments of a wide or sweeping scene. A
large number of the items in
the collection are joined panoramas comprising two or more consecutively shot photographs abutted together to create a panoramic
view.
The collection includes photographic prints made in the most popular nineteenth-and early twentieth-century photographic media,
as well as in a number
of rare and early techniques. Photographic processes present in the collection include salted paper, albumen, collodion, carbon,
and gelatin silver
prints, as well as cyanotypes. Among the earliest prints in the collection are two salted paper cliché-verre prints from the
1840s by Nevil
Story-Maskelyne of lace and ferns respectively, and a William Henry Fox Talbot photogenic drawing of lace from the same period.
Although these early
photographs are not panoramic, they set the stage for the collection as examples of the earliest photographic ways of seeing.
Several round photographs translate the tradition of tondo painting, wherein a curvilinear image is projected onto a plan,
into the medium of
photography. They range from architectural views (unusual in tondo painting) such as Thomas Damont Eaton's
Castle Acre Priory,
Norfolk
(circa 1845) and Gustave de Beaucorps'
Château d'Amalfi (1859) to Charles Nègre's
Trail in the Mountains and
Coiled Snake by an unidentified photographer (both circa 1860).
Related to tondos, circular anamorphosis photographs are grounded in a long tradition of perspectival paintings and prints.
These images, which present
their subject matter in a distorted, often unrecognizable form, show the object's true shape when they are viewed from a certain
vantage point or with
the aid of a curved mirror or other anamorphosic device. Alphonse Mangin, the inventor of the anamorphic lens, is represented
in the collection by his
Vue panoramique prise de la terrasse du batiment Nord-Est de L'Hotel des Invalides (1878). Other techniques such as the
multigraphs, that is multiple images of the same subject seen from various angles through the use of mirrors, by Ricard Opisso
(
Study of Three Trumpet Players in Two Mirrors, circa 1892-1920) and an unidentified photographer (
Portrait of a Man
with Hat in Five Different Angles
, 1924), and Louis Lumière's 1920 photostereosynthesis portrait of his brother Auguste, seem to push the
boundaries of the panorama genre.
There are three rare photographic paper negatives in the collection, two of which were made by Gustave de Beaucorps in 1859
(both the negative and a
print of his
Oasis de Korah are included), and the third by Léon Méhédin, circa 1862. A small number of contemporary
anamorphosis photographs (circa 1990-1998) made by the collector, Joachim Bonnemaison, who experimented with combining reconstructions
of 19th century
panoramic cameras and digital processing, brings the collection full circle.
The names of the photographers represented in the collection read like a
Who's Who of early practitioners and include
Edouard Baldus, Felice Beato, Gustave de Beaucorps, Bisson frères, André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Gustave Le Gray, Louis Vignes,
Alphonse Mangin,
Friedrich von Martens, Charles Marville, Léon Méhédin, Charles Nègre, Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, Thomas Damant Eaton, David
Octavius Hill and Robert
Adamson, Calvert Richard Jones, Robert Macpherson, Nevil Story-Maskelyn, William Henry Fox Talbot, Giacomo Caneva, Giorgio
Sommer, and Jean Laurent.
There are 40 Adolphe Braun photographs in the collection. Twentieth-century photographers include Berenice Abbott, Andreas
Feininger, Man Ray, Auguste
and Louis Lumière, Ricard Opisso, and Renzo Basile. Approximately half of the photographs are by unidentified photographers,
many of whom were likely
amateurs.
The source of the titles for the individual photographs are noted in the item notes, and are usually found in the negative
or written on the piece or
mount, or from an exhibition catalog. If no title source is indicated the title was devised by the catalogers. Titles given
by Bonnemaison are also
considered devised titles. Devised titles are not italicized. The collector's original tranche number and the original box
number prior to processing
are found at the end of each item note.
Biographical/Historical Note
Joachim Bonnemaison is a French photographer and collector.
Bibliography
The following resources are referenced in the container list using the abbreviations in square brackets:
[Arles]
Panoramas photographies, 1850-1950: collection Bonnemaison. Arles: Rencontres internationales de la
photographie, 1989.
[Hannavay] John Hannavay, ed.
Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. New York : Taylor & Francis Group,
2008.
[Plessen and Giersch] Marie-Louise von Plessen and Ulrich Giersch.
Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19.
Jahrhunderts, Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993.
[Voignier] Voignier, J.-M.
Répertoire des photographes de France au dix-neuvième siècle. Chevilly-Larue: Le Pont de
Pierre, 1993.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Gelatin silver prints
Cyanotypes
Collodion prints
Carbon prints
Photomicrographs
Salted paper prints
Stereographs
Japan -- Description and travel
Malta -- Description and travel
Mexico -- Description and travel
Photographs, Original
Photographic postcards
Photograph albums
Madagascar -- Description and travel
Argentina -- Description and travel
Watercolors (paintings)
Cartes-de-visite
Albumen prints
Calotypes (negatives)
Anamorphoses
Crimea (Ukraine) -- Description and travel
Denmark -- Description and travel
Hong Kong -- Description and travel
Poland -- Description and travel
Lebanon -- Description and travel
Woodcuts
Photogenic drawings (photographs)
Panoramas
Russia -- Description and travel
Portugal -- Description and travel
Norway -- Description and travel
Turkey -- Description and travel
Brazil -- Description and travel
Canada -- Description and travel
Chad -- Description and travel
China -- Description and travel
Belgium -- Description and travel
Egypt -- Description and travel
Czechoslovakia -- Description and travel
United States -- Description and travel
France -- Description and travel
Spain -- Description and travel
Switzerland -- Description and travel
Israel -- Description and travel
Italy -- Description and travel
Greece -- Description and travel
India -- Description and travel
Germany -- Description and travel
Great Britain -- Description and travel
Austria -- Description and travel
Algeria -- Description and travel
Clichés-verre (photographic prints)
Autochromes
Etchings (prints)
Uzbekistan -- Description and travel