Groundbreaking photographic work with a focus on Bayard

Photography is a young artistic medium, but its history is almost 200 years old. In the early photographs of the 19th century, many conventions of image composition were developed that are still in use today. They are automatically applied by young people, who are surrounded by images like no generation before them, to make a photo »look good«. Artists around the world are exploring the question of what fascinated the early photographers and what significance 19th century photographs have for us today. In the exhibition Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles presents old photographs from the collection and shows how they serve contemporary artists as a starting point for their own works. Stéphanie Solinas (*1978), Myra Greene (*1975), Lieko Shiga (*1980), Wendy Red Star (*1980) and Lisa Oppenheim (*1975) are among the artists featured in the show, which will be on display from April 9 to July 7.

At the same time, the related exhibition Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer is running in parallel at the Getty Museum. Bayard (1801-1887) is considered one of the four fathers of photography alongside Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, but is far less known today than the others. He developed the first direct positive process which, in contrast to the process invented by Daguerre shortly afterwards, did not use metal plates but paper coated with silver chloride as the image base. However, he turned to the patent office a few months after Daguerre, where Daguerre's process had already been evaluated – Bayard's invention was rejected. The patent specification published in August 1839 ultimately contributed to the success of the daguerreotype. Bayard was unable to market his process effectively, although he organized the world's first photography exhibition in Paris in June 1839 with around 30 works. In the following years, Bayard created several self-portraits in which he staged himself as a deceased person. He used the narrative possibilities of the new medium instead of seeking a pure depiction of nature. The pictures earned him a reputation among his contemporaries as the first »photo forger« in history; in retrospect, he is described as the first »artist of photography«. With this exhibition, the Getty Museum pays tribute to the multifaceted work of an almost forgotten pioneer of photography.