A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann and His Times

Author(s): Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Source: October , Autumn, 1981, Vol. 18 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 90-107
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778413

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 A Photographer in Jerusalem,
1855:
Auguste Salzmann and His Times

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU

If ripeness is all, no better illustration could be found than in

photography has described from its simultaneous birth in the two
ized and powerful countries in the world. Engendered by science
to art, and popularly believed to incarnate the absolute measure o
its success was guaranteed. Indeed, it is significant that almost
phy's eventual uses were foreseen at its very outset. And while
implications of photography constitute a largely suppressed disco
nineteenth century, the general awareness of its magnitude and i
expressed. Histories of photography appeared as early as 1856, an
there were by 1854 eight or nine photography journals in additio
the press.2 Photographic exhibitions were regularly held and wid
there were at least two court cases in France which attempted
photography was subject to art copyright law.3
The excitement and self-consciousness generated by photogr
reached a watershed of sorts in the period between 1850 and 18
the fifties is thus a crucial one in the history of photography, havin
of the highest levels of artistic achievement in the medium's hist
use of photography for the creation of new forms and structures
tion of knowledge. The decline in both the level of quality and s
the mid-sixties is traditionally linked to photography's evolutio
sanal stage to an intensely commercialized and industrialized on

1. A more recent hypothesis has it that the generative principle was art. See P
Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, New York, Museum o
2. See The Second Empire 1852-1870: Art in France under Napoleon III, Philadelphia Museum of
Art, 1978.
3. In one case, the history painter Yvon commissioned the elder Bisson to photograph Napoleon
III for use in the preparation of his painting L'Empereur au kApi. Bisson subsequently sold copy prints
from his negative, Yvon brought suit, and the court decided in favor of Yvon. In Mayer & Pierson v.
Betheder and Schwabbe, a suit between two competing photographic firms, "the defendants relied on
the 'photography as non-art theory,' while the plaintiffs maintained the contrary view ... .The case
went through several appeals, with the final decision establishing photography as art." Both cases cited
in Gisele Freund, Photography and Society, Boston, Godine, 1980, pp. 81-84.

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 Auguste Salzmann. Jerusalem, Walls of the Temple,
General View of the East Side. 1856.

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 92 OCTOBER

The rediscove
refer to as F
the appropria
preserve of
images on pa
government
cases disinteg
museum, gal
dreamed of
now the subj
the Photogra
these images
serve vastly d
obscure such distinctions. For nowhere have the institutional methods of confer-
ring aura been more clearly revealed than in the apotheosis of early photography,
a process initiated by collectors, followed by galleries and museums, and now
being academicized by a new generation of photographic historians and graduate
students. The tendency to lump together willy-nilly under the unifying rubric of
art the photographic work of physiologists and physicians (Marey and Duchenne
de Boulogne), entrepreneurs and artists (Disdiri and Le Secq), archeological
documentarians and the makers of tourist views (Salzmann and Braun) has
resulted in the neglect, if not obfuscation, of important questions of intent,
context, and production. Because the terms of the contemporary photography
world involve the assimilation of photography toute entihre into an art discourse,
it should not be surprising that these are equally the terms of the rediscovery and
reassessment of early photography. To a significant degree, this process was
anticipated in the very nature of the photography-as-art discourse as it has evolved
in the past fifty years. When Edward Steichen mounted at MOMA an exhibition of
aerial views and bombardments made during World War I by the military, he was
effectively stating that the art of the photograph is not contingent on intentional-
ity. Inevitably, connoisseurship has to a great extent taken the place of criticism or
analysis.
In discussing the work of Auguste Salzmann-a photographer whose
principle body of works lends itself especially well to the connoisseur's act of
formal delectation-I am less concerned with demonstrating its high quality than
in trying to place its maker within a specific context of photographic production
in the early years of the Second Empire. Many of the questions which are raised by
work such as Salzmann's are not presently answerable. It does seem, however, that
a meaningful approach to the history of photography needs to stress the context-
in the broadest sense-of both its production and its reception.

4. The fading and discoloration of photographs, often due to improper wash or fix, was the subject
of a study by the Photographic Society of London. It was considered to be particularly serious in that it
threatened the purchase of expensive art photographs.

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A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 93

Like many of the acknowledged masters of Fre

Auguste Salzmann (1824-1872) is both exemplar
currently known, he produced only two bodies
calotypes of Jerusalem and its environs printed b
lished with a text in 1856 under the title Jeru
photographique de la ville sainte, and, some years
and frescos excavated from the Necropolis at Cam
only a few photographic reproductions of the art wor
contemporary biographical dictionaries we know
painter of orientalist and landscape subjects with
After 1856 he virtually disappears from the scen
Camiros book, which appeared between 1858-1860)
pher. Nothing is thus far known about the remain
Although he received a gold medal for his photog

Auguste Salzmann. Valley of Jo

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 94 OCTOBER

displayed in
largest photo
his day seem
markedly dif
In all these r
whose greate
came of age a
been consider
tant, the calo
macy by arti
undifferent
denied. Delacr
the calotype
commercial
1859 ("A veng
its messiah").
The calotype
was printed,
or precision.
technique inv
exposure. The
for the conte
tated a darkr
graphing abr
Salzmann's p
milieu of th
Constant, Val
four in fact came out of the atelier of Paul Delaroche. It was of course the same
Delaroche, early enthusiast of the daguerreotype, who is remembered more now
for his cry "From today, painting is dead" than for his Death of the Duc de Guise.
Others were trained as architects (Normand) or illustrators and designer-engravers
(Nadar and Marville). It is a testimony to their sense of the vitality and potential of
the new medium that this group of young artists abandoned their ateliers and
embraced photography. It is probable that neither their talent nor commitment to
the prevailing juste milieu painting (none of these men, with the exception of
Vallou de Villeneuve, were in any way associated with the realist school) was very
great and that they saw in photography a form of expression that had not yet
produced either an Ingres or a Delacroix--indeed, even a Vernet-against whom
to invite invidious comparison. Photography, as opposed to daguerreotypy,

5. Delacroix was a founding member in 1851 of the Soci't' Hdliographique, which became in turn
the Societe Frangaise de Photographie.

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A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 95

represented an open field, an artistic tabula r

debate-art or technology-functioned as a s
But like Salzmann, within ten, or at most fif
of the most gifted photographers of this per
quietly ceased their production. As early as 1
many to have been the greatest of the early p
henceforth devoted himself to his museum of
to become a drawing instructor in Egypt an
known photographs. Regnault renounced pho
native Arles, where most of his work was co
mechanical reproduction. The Bisson Freres w
vanished altogether; Baldus devoted himself
duction; and Blanquart-Evrard closed his Imp
all accounts attribute the body count to the effe
by Disd6ri's exploitation of his carte-de-visite
to account entirely for the phenomenon. Th
cartes-de-visite made at a few francs each did
bought prints by Le Gray at as much as 100
subscribers who ordered the sumptuous albu
were not the same that bought the scenic vi
the well-heeled savants, notables, and nobles t
membership of the Societe Frangaise de Ph
making their living from photography and w
activities of Mayer & Pierson, Disderi, and t
If the abrupt and unexplained closure o
problematic, perhaps even more so are those
Salzmann's, produced a single body of beauti
that, as far as is known, were preceded neit
nor followed by later development. Such is t
photographic album Egypte, Nubie, Palesti
first publishing and printing venture (1851)
and Louis de Clercq, who also photographed
With respect then to the choice of the calo
apparent brevity of his photographic career
scene, Auguste Salzmann represents what
photography's early history.
The enigmatic aspect of Salzmann's pro
contradiction between his professed intent
quality of the work itself (not so much non
that, and the fact that this body of photogra
personal vision as any produced in the nin
Salzmann's accompanying text, a collaborat
heim, about whom nothing at all is known,

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96 OCTOBER

Jerusalem to
was forced t
has been abl
Durheim. Co
an importa
model of su
did, that fi
Salzmann's i
personal exp
Salzmann's
missions of
to be render
he was char
the holy cit

Auguste Salzm

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 A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 97

Ferdinand de Saulcy, who had initiated the p

dedicated it. These theories concerned the dating
Jewish, Islamic, and Christian architectural wo
lished by de Saulcy in 1851, illustrated with dra
archeological milieu to which they had been ad
De Saulcy seems to have thought that this r
quacy or assumed subjectivity of his visual docu
the newspaper Le Constitutionnel in 1856, whic
the Bulletin of the Soci&te Frangaise de Photogr
Salzmann, "history painter, archeologist, and sa
phic documentation. How this ultimately becam
Ministry of Public Instruction is unclear. The in
of officialdom and photography were such tha
made in any number of ways.6 With the consp
republican Nadar, photography and bohemia ha
the Second Empire.
Nowhere was the implicit confidence in the o
vision more clearly demonstrated than in the Frenc
ship of various photographic missions. Photogr
beginning been granted official recognition, sa
of the fifties began with the launching of the M
aegis of the Commission des Monuments Histori
Napoleon III, himself totally indifferent to art
relations, if not propaganda, purposes which
direct imperial commission were such projects
the Asylum at Vincennes, Le Gray's series of army manoeuvres at Chailons,
Baldus's albums of the railroads, and such icons of imperial piety as Le Gray's
portrait of the Empress Eugenie at her prie-dieu.
The enormous production (both official and private) of photographic
documentation of architecture, historic sites, and ruins was to a certain extent
fueled by the passion for documentation itself. The mid-nineteenth century was

6. Consider, for example, a few connections. Eugine Durieu was a founder of the Soci&te
He1iographique and made nude photographs for Delacroix, whom he also instructed in photography.
In 1848 he was named director of the Administration des Cultes, which reported to the Ministry of
Public Instruction. As a member of the Cultes he was also a member of the Commission of Historic
Monuments. Count Leon de Laborde, also a founding member of the Socite&, served variously as
curator at the Louvre, director of the National Archives, and he worked for the Commission of Historic
Monuments. He studied photography under Gustave Le Gray together with his two nephews,
Benjamin and Edouard Delessert, who accompanied de Saulcy on his first voyage to the Middle East in
1851.

7. This first and most ambitious of photographic documentation projects engaged five
photographers-Hippolyte Bayard, Henri Le Secq, Edouard-Denis Baldus, O. Mestral, and Gustave
Le Gray-to photograph those sites and works of architecture designated by Viollet-le-Duc and the
Commission; 120 sites throughout France were photographed.

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 98 OCTOBER

the great pe
was underst
the world.
books appear
encompassin
Lacan's Phy
phy was a m
Photograph
legibility of
positivism a
But this belief in the definitive truth of the photograph is a curious
phenomenon. That the photograph of the 1850s did not produce color or clouds
or anything moving, that the world it depicted was largely vacant, was very
quickly taken for granted and such deficiencies discussed almost exclusively in the
context of the critical debate that focused on photography versus painting. Even
with respect to architectural views, the photographer could not generally do
interiors and could take only those views possible with a large camera mounted on
a tripod. Nonetheless, the prevalent belief that photographic documentation con-
stituted an unassailable and objective truth was largely unchallenged through-
out the century. It was, in fact, the very quality of unmediated verisimilitude that
was perceived as its greatest weakness as an art form. Thus, when Salzmann wrote
in his text that "the photographs are not narratives [recits], but facts endowed with
a conclusive brutality," he was describing the attributes that photographs were
thought to have rather than the particular quality of his own work, which, in its
abstraction and suppression of documentary information, appears to contradict
Salzmann's stated goals.

"Anybody," wrote Walter Benjamin, "will be able to observe how much

more easily a painting, and above all sculpture or architecture can be grasped in
photographs than in reality."8 This realization was fully formed by the early 1850s
and many of the best photographers of the period-including the artist-
photographers-photographed works of art with the same assiduity and commit-
ment as they brought to their own work. Charles Marville was for many years the
official photographer of the Musees Nationaux, in which capacity much of his
photographic work was what we would call copy-stand work. The copying of
paintings, engravings, and sculpture was viewed as a serious photographic
enterprise in its own right.9 Benjamin further pointed out:

8. Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," trans. Phil Patton, Artforum, vol. XV,
no. 6 (February 1977), 50.
9. In the exhibitions at the Societe Franraise and the Expositions Universelles, reproductions of

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A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 99

At about the same time as the formation of

tion the conception of great works was
view them as the productions of individ
tive images, so powerful that capacity to
the condition of reducing them in size. In
cal methods of reproduction are a techn
help man to a degree of mastery over the
no longer useful.10

It is revealing to contrast Benjamin's retr

tions of a technique for miniaturization with
Napoleon III and his court in 1862, Viollet-le-D
so much as M. Homais at the Agricultural Fa
In France perhaps no other government has
the arts than that of the present. Within the
buildings have been constructed than since the time of Louis XIV.
Painting has been able to create one of the greatest chapters in history;
sculpture has become exalted; our museums have been further en-
riched; our libraries made still more vast and capable of receiving the
ever-increasing number of uses. The discoveries of exploratory expedi-
tions have thus been passed on to artists and scholars immediately. And
to add to our good fortune, photography has placed in our hands the
masterworks of all periods and all cultures, just as the great exhibitions
of London and Paris have brought to light a vast quantity of art
normally hidden in private collections .... [Further] the railroad has
allowed us to see more monuments in a week than it would have been
possible to visit in a month."

That Viollet-le-Duc, connected through the Monuments Historiques with

some of the most gifted photographers of the period, should have uniq
stressed the ability of photography to place "in our hands the masterworks of
periods and all cultures" is indicative of the awareness that photography, like
expeditions and the railroads, was an agent of cultural transmission. Thinkin
along similar lines, the art and photography critic Francis Wey had proposed
1851 that the Louvre consecrate a gallery to photographs of important paintin
by French artists not represented in French museums. Thus, Malraux's Imagin
Museum was presaged a century earlier; in both cases the governing imp

works of art were shown side by side with art photographs and essais in photo-mechanical repro
tion. Le Secq, the Bisson Freres, Salzmann in Camiros, among many others, produced signifi
amounts of copy work.
10. Benjamin, p. 50.
11. Cited in The Second Empire, p. 254.

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100 OCTOBER

effects a stan
ultimately redu
Benjamin's use
out often eno
photographic
framework. Th
Empire-a perio
at the time. Th
either of a mis
systematic den
Middle East tha
the 1850s depic
was the conditi
reasonable to as
the world to b
expanding emp
In urging the
Francis Wey, a
And in no part
the Middle Eas
the Crimea wa
being fought t
Palestine receiv
Greene, de Cle
only the well-k
contemporary
teenth century
Lerebours's Exc
which appeared
places and mon
contributed to
Salzmann was
with a camera t
de Saulcy's cho
unlikely he wo
tion and person
although Salzm
even photograp
not yet strong
take photograp
it. "To learn ph

12. See Edward Sa

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A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 101

equipment on the back of mules, camels, and ma

was probably infinitely more important to De S
some background in archeology and was sympath
In January of 1854 Salzmann arrived in Jerusal
The little currently known about these months
exclusively from de Saulcy's letter in Le Constit
Salzmann's text. Neither of these sources provid
barest allusion to his artistic goals and purposes n
supposition that he conceived of his photographs
struck almost every contemporary viewer is how
graphs are from others of the same period, even
depicting the same subject. Such a comparison re
photography to express individual vision. It show
Salzmann was departing from the customary con
position. That standard practices were derived
organization of pictorial space in painting was
photographers with training in the traditional fine a
to legitimize photography was waged on painting
phic texts and treatises of the period-from L
instruct the photographer in principles of picto
photography imposed its own necessities and, im
topoi, photographers were very much guided by
tuted good design, balanced composition, and spa
however, was legibility, for if this was the inte
painting, it was especially understood to be the
photography. From the most humble to the most
tioners, landscape and archeological photographe
gression from foreground through middleground
images so as to articulate and emphasize the prin
specifically documentary intention, as was Salzma
But the documentary intention of Salzmann
denied by the images themselves; the visual in
record is ideally suited to convey is markedly
ubiquitous standing figure-fellaheen, porter,
pears in archeological photography to indicate sca
Views are cropped in such a way that the colossa
monumental. Landscape either dwarfs the ph
eliminated; the visual signposts one requires t
placement, and context are, in short, almost com
What Salzmann has created instead is an abstract vision of textures and

13. Cited in En Egypte au Temps de Flaubert (exhibition catalogue), Paris, Kodak-PathS, n.d.

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 A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 103

surfaces in which the ostensible subject is e

plenitude of overall surface detail or an over
of high horizon lines or the elimination of h
towards the surface plane and all suggestion
photographing rock-cut tombs and grotto
around a black void, as in the Tomb of the
opacity of the rectangular tomb mouth contr
of all the other modulated gray surfaces. Th
Judges, as in so many of the other photogra
articulation and exposition of mass as for pur
to determine whether the tomb entrance is
element of archeological information that co
chosen. Beyond the emphatic blackness of th
cannot follow and is refused entrance int
compositional center and optical barrier. Sal
often selected because it draws areas that are at different distances from his lens
into a contrived and planar unity; in the Tomb of the Judges, the rock outc
ping at the right optically leads into the tomb face which is then linked t
stones of the hillside. As is typical with Salzmann's work, the tomb itself mi
five feet high, or fifteen; no way of gauging it is provided.
In the view of the Village of Siloam, the piling up of surfaces and tex
militates against any reading of depth. What is stressed is the different quali
stone, finished or rough, bricklike or massive, pebbly or smooth. In photog
such as The Pool of Siloam, Canal Cut in the Rock, Salzmann's inventiv
sophisticated use of shadow is particularly evident. Here the space is dramat
simplified through the use of contrasting light and shadow areas almost to
the image into quadrants. It is, at the same time, almost impossible to deriv
information about the canal which is the ostensible subject of the photogr
where it goes, how it has been cut, even exactly where it is. Possibly Salzman
caught up with what he could do with the camera, how by balancing bleache
lights with various darks he could create formal designs for which no proto
either in painting or photography-existed.
A comparison between a photograph of the same subject by Salzmann
Louis de Clercq is useful for what it reveals of Salzmann's strategies of fr
and cropping. De Clercq photographed in Jerusalem five years after Salzman
like him produced a single known body of work (the four volumes that com
Le Voyage en Orient, 222 photographs altogether). De Clercq's photographs
printed on albumin paper and Salzmann's on salt paper, but both empl
paper negatives and comparable cameras. The subject is the Gate of Dam
(Bab-el-Ahmoud). Where de Clercq has chosen a frontal view of the structur
constructed a carefully composed progression from foreground to middlegr
to the architecture, Salzmann, quite typically, has chosen an oblique view.
framing the gate more tightly, he eliminated both the view of the city tha

Auguste Salzmann. Tomb of the Judges (top). Pool of

Siloam, Canal Cut in the Rock (bottom). 1854.

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104 OCTOBER

Louis de
Auguste
(Both ph
Company

behind it, whi

domes on the
while de Clerc
Salzmann swat
shrouds the s
contrasts of l
strongly emph
surface textur
Salzmann seem
the pool of sh
that it streng
We do not kn
tion thought
the Exposition
following yea

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A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 105

elaborated pertained to their truth, their verisimilitu

Evidently the photographs were understood by De Sau
the critics as having accomplished their documentary
letter in Le Constitutionnel, De Saulcy considered his
images, although in fact his dating has never been a
critics charged, totally inaccurate.
What finally are we to make of a work such as S
should we discuss it and how is it to be evaluated and understood, both with
relation to photographic production of his contemporaries and its meaning for us
now?
The weight of the evidence is that, irrespective of how the photographs
appear to us now, Salzmann was not intentionally working in an art tradition.
Unlike many of his contemporaries who were, he did not even sign his negatives.
That his photographs appeared under the title Study and Photographic Repro-
duction of the Holy City explicitly refers to a documentary impulse. And it cannot
be overemphasized that in the mid-nineteenth century photographs were seen as

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106 OCTOBER

and understoo
reception than
of what is kn
of the Second
mission, it is
intentionality
Although Sa
example in Ra
beginning of
primitive pho
Andre Jamme
to point out t
structures he
that has elaps
apprehension
denced in the
impulse towa
tendency is to
The art histo
exhibitions, c
which deplete
new one. Thi
an art history
style, suppos
which the im
integrally bou
expansion and
so forth, the
The discourse
to an ever inc
As serious in
imagery has o
other discours
tion of an art
example, to co
ernist artists
which their
cultural adve
everywhere. T
thereafter be
Although th
nard...) as an
graphs, this t

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A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855 107

and assumptions about photography that inev

imperatives of the current market boom than
informed his work. To liberate Salzmann from h
for art is to suppress the circumstances and condi
possible. A single plate from Jerusalem, removed
was intended to be seen as an ensemble, remains
preserved as an autonomous whole. In the gre
photography's past, we run the risk of destroying

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