Acknowledgments

McCauley, Elizabeth Anne

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Acknowledgments

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871

~The idea for this book originally came from a sense of frustration. In the course of preparing various articles and catalogue entries on Second Empire photography, I had repeatedly returned to Parisian archives to search for the specific photographer under consideration amid hundreds of unrelated references. Wouldn’t it be more efficient, I thought, to once and...

Author

Elizabeth Anne McCauley

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00182.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19719

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book originally came from a sense of frustration. In the course of preparing various articles and catalogue entries on Second Empire photography, I had repeatedly returned to Parisian archives to search for the specific photographer under consideration amid hundreds of unrelated references. Wouldn’t it be more efficient, I thought, to once and for all consistently comb through all the archives and do a study of photography as an industry and profession?

Little did I know that this enterprise would carry me through ten years of my adult life, a marriage, the births of two children, and a considerable transformation of my mental universe. To acknowledge all my debts of gratitude would be to reconstruct my long trajectory through the leaking attics of the Louvre, the dust-laden bowels of the old Archives de la Seine, the womblike comfort of the Bibliothèque nationale (in summer at least), and the meticulous, white-gloved study rooms of American museums. It was a quest that, like all projects, was alternately exhilarating and tiring, surprising and predictable, and ultimately open-ended.

Many people offered assistance, lodging, criticism, and emotional support along the way. Bernard Marbot, curator of nineteenth-century photography at the Bibliothèque nationale, gave me access to his collection and wry wisdom and encouraged my activities. Françoise Reynaud at the Musée Carnavalet, Françoise Heilbrun and Philippe Néagu at the Musée d’Orsay, Marie de Thézy at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Christiane Roger at the Société française de photographie, Nicole Villa at the Archives du Louvre, Jean-Denys Devauges at the Château de Compiègne, André Cudennec at the Archives historiques de la Préfecture de Police, and Mark Haworth-Booth at the Victoria and Albert Museum shared their photographic material and expertise. Weston Naef, Maria Hambourg, David Travis, Roy Flukinger, the late Davis Pratt, Sinclair Hitchins, Jim Borcoman, Mark Haworth-Booth, Janet Buerger, Martha Charoudhi, Marni Sandweiss, Chris Steele, and the staffs of the Boston Atheneum, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, the Archives nationales, the Archives de la Seine, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, the Bureau des Brevets, the Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, the Bibliothèque Forney, the Institut néerlandais, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Bibliothèque Doucet willingly allowed me to consult relevant material in their institutions. Particularly generous were Gérard Lévy, François Lepage, and André Jammes and the late Hughes Texier, François Braunschweig, and Sam Wagstaff, who showed me images and archives and often let me photograph the originals in their collections.

Equally important in the evolution of this book were the many discussions I had with friends in various fields. Molly Nesbit, Chris Phillips, François Béguin, Werner Szambien, André Rouillé, Jean Sagne, Phil Nord, Nia Janis, Nancy Keeler, Michel Frizot, Jeff Rosen, David van Zanten, Raymonde Moulin, the late Alix Blanchette, Heather McPherson, Marilyn Brown, and Alain Parguez, among others, led me to some understanding of “la vie parisienne,” both past and present. Mike Weaver and the participants in his summer photographic jam session in 1985 also listened and responded to an early presentation on the material that became the first two chapters of this book. Particular thanks are due to Joel Snyder and a second reader for the Yale University Press, whose sensitive comments and questions about the manuscript were welcome.

An earlier version of Chapters 1 and 2 was published in Peter Walch and Thomas F. Barrow, eds., Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1986), 67–97. A version of Chapter 6 was first published in the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 14 (1986): 157–72, © The J. Paul Getty Museum.

The research and production of this book were assisted by a Museum Professionals grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, and numerous summer research grants from the University of Texas at Austin. A faculty research grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston helped support the costs of photographic reproduction rights, and a special grant from the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas paid for data entry for the appendix. For their patience and interest in the book, I would also like to thank the editors at the Yale University Press and particularly my enthusiastic copy editor, Mary Pasti.

Although Robert Herbert had very little direct input in this book and stood supportively in the background during its slow gestation, he remains the inspiration behind my espousal of an art history that plays a concrete object against an ever-fluctuating social fabric. He taught me that both art and society are complex and that establishing any sort of relations between the two has to be done with great care, long looking, and profound and extensive immersion in the remaining evidence from the period under consideration. To him I will always owe a great debt.

My husband, Tom Ferguson, good-naturedly put up with this project through the entirety of our marriage, read drafts, and kept me thinking about what interest groups benefited from cultural policies. My daughters, Louisa and Chloe, may some day understand what I was doing all those hours in my study. For their affection and humor, this book is dedicated to the three of them.

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