Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Hippolyte Bayard

Bayard was born on January 20, 1801. On June 24, 1839 he invented his own process known as direct positive printing and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs. He then produced his own method of producing photos called the Direct positive process. It exposed silver chloride paper to light, which turned the paper completely black. Then it was soaked in potassium iodine before being exposed in a camera. After the exposure, it was washed in a bath of hyposulfite of soda and dried. He would have people sit with their eyes closed so as to eliminate the eerie, "dead" quality produced due to blinking and moving one's eyes during such a long exposure. One of Bayard's most famous photograph's was called the Self Portrait as a Drowned Man. In the image, he pretends that he commited suicide, by sitting and leaning to the right. It was a very dark photograph and he wrote on the back of it, great detail about the photo, and what it represented. He later went onto work with photography and he was a founding member of the French Society of Photography. Hu suggested combining two negatives to properly expose the sky and then the landscape or building, and idea known as combination printing which began being used in the 1850's. Bayard died on May 14, 1887. Death is unknown.

<http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard>




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