James A. Ganz

$16.95 Softcover

Édouard Baldus (1813–1889) was the most important French architectural photographer of the mid-nineteenth century. This book offers an in-depth exploration of one of his most intriguing projects—a remarkable series of views of the Château de La Faloise, in which his subject was not primarily the country house but the owner and his family at leisure on its grounds.

James A. Ganz locates the photographs at a key moment in Baldus’s career and during one of the most eventful decades in the history of French photography, showing that they stand at a crossroad between the English “conversation piece” and the birth of Impressionist portraiture in the early paintings of Monet and Bazille. Each of the images is scrutinized for the information that it presents and withholds—including readings of the sitters’ body language for clues to their identities and relationships—and enlarged photographic details help the reader understand Baldus’s complex and playful images.

80 pages, 10 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches
30 color and 24 black-and-white illustrations
2008
Published by the Sterling and Francine Clark At Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

ISBN 978-0-300-10 (softcover)