Baldus was originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman and lithographer before switching to photography in 1849. In 1851, he was commissioned for the Mission Héliographique by the Historic Monuments Commission of France to photograph historic buildings, bridges, and monuments. He was extremely well-known throughout France for his efforts in photography. One of his greatest assignments was to document the construction of the Louvre museum.
Baldus used wet and dry paper negatives as large as 10x14 inches in size. From these negatives, he made contact prints. In order to create a larger image, he put contact prints side by side to create a panoramic effect.
EdouardBaldus arrived in Paris to study painting in 1838 when he was twenty-five, shortly before Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1789-1851) first showed his magically precise photographic images to the world.
Baldus was a native of the small town of Grunebach, Germany, forty-five miles east of Cologne, and, according to some reports, he first embarked on a career as an artillery officer in the Prussian army before giving up arms for the brush in the early 1830's.
MALCOLM DANIEL, an assistant curator in the department of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the curators of the exhibition and the principal author of the accompanying catalogue, The Photographs of EdouardBaldus.
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