Camera Obscura - Brian Doswell (grave mercy TXT) 📗

CAMERA OBSCURA

This year marks a series of anniversaries celebrating the history of photography. Many of the pioneers, such as Louis Dageurre, have given their names to parts of that magical process of capturing the light and fixing the image for all eternity. For these few famous names, their stories are repeated in libraries all over the world. But there were others whose names are not so well known. This story lifts the photographer’s black cloth on one small team who came so close to joining the list of the great and the good.

The story begins in Paris in the year 1897. La Goulue dances each evening at the Moulin Rouge where Toulouse-Lautrec holds court at his table, sketching silhouettes of men in tall hats and high-kicking girls with whirling skirts, on napkins which he exchanges for glasses of absinthe. His ink-stained fingers, with blackened chewed fingernails, are his craftsman’s tools but, hovering over his shoulder is a new form of art - the photograph. Lautrec smiles inwardly at the thought - convinced that the clutter of the photographer’s studio will never sit at his table and create instant petty foibles, to be sold for a few sous, with the proceeds drunk before the night is out.


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René Albert La Selles pauses, wheezing and coughing yellow phlegm, on the last of the five flights of stairs leading to the apartment of his friend and business partner, Jean-Paul Arnot. Apartment17b, rue Cavallotti is situated facing the park, on the hill towards Montmartre. René hates hills and stairs more than life itself. The combination of cigars, wine and spirits that he consumes each evening in the bars of boulevard de Clichy, will kill him soon. His doctor knows this, his friends know this but, most of all, he knows this. He leans against the iron handrail that guards the winding staircase and wipes his chin with the frayed and ragged end of the scarf wound around his neck. The flecks of blood in his sputum are his secret. These little red spots whisper to him that his doctor is a wasted expense; his fate is already sealed. René doubts that he has six months left to complete his work, but complete it he must. If he were to share his secret with his doctor, the foolish man would want to send him to the coast, to Deauville, away from Paris, away from his beloved 18eme Arrondisement and away from Jean-Paul.

On the landing of the fifth floor he pauses and wipes his chin once more before approaching the door that bears the numerals 17b. Inside there are voices, muffled by the thickness of the wood. René listens - then an explosion rents the air.

In a moment of desperate panic, René leans against the door only to find it open and he tumbles into a room filled with smoke and reeking of gunpowder. For a second or two he can see nothing and then a vision appears. A girl, naked with blonde ringlets in disarray, emerges through the miasma. She falls into his arms, coughing and spluttering. He holds her close to his own heaving chest and peers into the smoke for signs of Jean-Paul. The girl kicks wildly and René feels a hand grab at his ankle. Jean-Paul is laying full length on the boards holding a kerchief to his face.

“Ah, René, you have arrived in time to witness my latest failure. I must have used too much sulphur in the mixture.”

René takes off his coat and wraps it around the shoulders of the girl before crossing the room to open both sets of tall windows that look out across the park. Fresh air gradually replaces the smoke and slowly the room clears. A library stool rests askance against the bookcase. This was where the girl had posed for the photograph. In the centre of the room, a tripod holds Jean-Paul’s camera, a masterpiece of varnished cabinet-making with elegant brass fittings at the corners and a black lacquered lens holder, which is presently aimed towards the soot-stained plaster moulding of acanthus leaves on the ceiling. On the floor is a pile of sticks, the remains of the frame that recently held the experimental mixture of lycopodium, magnesium and gunpowder that would one day, they hoped, enable the partnership of Arnot-La Selles to establish a mobile photography business, the first of its kind in the whole of Paris.


*******


René and Jean-Paul were an odd couple. René, small in stature, with hunched shoulders and a shuffling gait, was obsessed with the chemical processes required to fix images onto paper, rather than those first glass images produced by Daguerre, which were exciting but cumbersome and could not be reproduced for a mass market. In contrast, Jean-Paul, a rotund figure, enjoyed life to the full but had come to accept that if he could not successfully paint his way to a fortune, then perhaps the camera would enable him to bring the images in his mind to the attention of the paying public.

René had been addicted to the world of photography since his father had shown him an original Daguerreotype on the walls of the French Academy of Sciences. As a boy and later as a young man, René had followed the emerging science of photography through the works of his heroes, Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox-Talbot and Josef Petzval, all stalwarts of the art, and sadly all, save Petzval, now dead and gone. For a while René had harboured aspirations for the name of La Selles, to be listed alongside these luminaries but recently he was under no illusion that his dying body was destined to cheat him of that goal. René blamed the stench of the photographic chemicals for his rotting lungs, all far too late now.

Jean-Paul was equally moved by the notion of capturing the light in a small wooden box and reproducing pictures over and over again. In contrast, Jean-Paul, who had studied under Claude Monet, was enamoured with the idea of composing artistic works of enduring value, not for the Academy of Sciences but for the Academy of Art. Not for him the science laboratory, the flasks of stinking chemicals, the darkness of the developing room. Jean-Paul saw his future arranging tableaux such as Édouard Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe.’ He also knew that the respected Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer had used a camera obscura to capture the image of ‘The Girl With A Pearl Earring’, indeed it was that which had drawn him to photography in the first place, combined with the small fact that Monet had eventually tired of him for being both lazy and totally incapable as a painter, with a brush of any size.

Quite by coincidence, René had first met Jean-Paul at a reception given by Claude Monet, on what proved to be the occasion of Jean-Paul’s departure from that renowned atelier. The reception had been advertised as a comparison of selected works by Monet and photographs of his actual canvasses. Several photographers had submitted prints of varying quality for display in the Gallery du Bois on rue Lepic. The evening was of course a ruse, set up by Monet and his Impressionist friends, to lure the photographers into making fools of themselves by showing their sepia toned images alongside the vividly coloured originals. Both sides were equally convinced of their art and, although the Impressionists claimed to have won the day, the photographers won the night by selling copies of their photographs for ten sous while the painters sold nothing.

It had been the mention of photography in the advertising bill that had drawn René into the gallery, plus the fact that it was only a few steps from his own tiny apartment on rue Lepic. Chance had thrown him into the company of Jean-Paul and, during the course of the evening, both men had become exceedingly drunk to the point of swearing their undying friendship and committing their lives hereafter to the endeavour of producing commercially affordable pictures. Their evening in the gallery, and Jean-Paul’s employment, ended abruptly when Jean-Paul, in the process of raising his glass to toast their friendship, managed to pour the contents of his wine glass over the newly tailored puce coloured, velvet jacket of his erstwhile employer. Monet, who by then, was not in the best of moods, is reported to have spoken loudly of straws and camel’s backs, before disappearing into a huddle of Impressionists.

It also happened that René and Jean-Paul shared that most common of male attributes, they were both exceedingly fond of wine and completely unable to determine when they had drunk enough of it. Forcibly discharged into that Parisian evening, and still possessed of a raging thirst, the pair had soon found themselves among the throng of a small café on rue Puget. An accordion could be heard across the room but cigar smoke prohibited the sight of it from their position at the bar. The lost souls settled at the bar and ordered champagne, determined to celebrate their new-found partnership. In such a café, on such a street, the sound of a champagne cork was then, as indeed it still is, the signal for them to be joined by a young lady, prepared to listen, and sympathise with their every word - for money.

Juliette, who admitted to no family and therefore no family name, was a working girl who lived by means of her wits and her body, both of which she used in which ever way she needed, in return for hard cash. Her wits were as sharp as any in Montmartre and her body still young, firm and comparatively free from the pox. Of the three, she was most certainly the one in best command of her wits on the night in question. Glass followed glass until it was decided that Juliette should become an employee of the newly formed, ‘Arnot - La Selles’ – ‘Photographers to the Masses’, even though not a single picture had yet been taken or sold.

It was a considerable surprise to those who knew them that, within a few weeks, the small team began to enjoy a measure of financial success producing and selling, to the masses, postcard size images of Juliette, who posed, invariably skantily clad or indeed naked, during the day while continuing to work the streets by night. Jean-Paul took the pictures; René fixed the image on glass plates and printed the cards in the adjoining darkroom. For her part, Juliette became the principal agent for the team, selling cards to her clients past, present and hopefully future, for the princely sum of 2 sous per card. The resourceful Juliette also recruited models from among her friends, to ensure a regular supply of subjects for these highly collectable postcards. It amused the team and their customers that the artistic composition of their poses might, with some imagination, be favourably compared with oil paintings hung in the Academy. Their version of ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe,’ proved to be exceedingly popular, mainly due to Jean-Paul’s insistence on the inclusion of three additional, equally naked young ladies into the famous lunchtime scene.

‘Arnot - La Selles’ – ‘Photographers to the Masses’, experienced a brief