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.


*******

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 moment of excitement during the late summer of ’97 when the wrath of the venerable City Fathers of Paris descended upon them for selling such depraved pictures from a market stall, within sight of the cathedral of Notre Dame. Fortunately for René and Jean-Paul, the morning journal on the day of the tribunal, declared that most of Paris lay within sight of Notre Dame and that included the Academy des Arts, in which hung the original ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which, by popular opinion on the day, lacked at least two ladies. For one night only, the elated pair became the toast of the Moulin Rouge and queues formed at their table to buy copies of the postcard in question. But, as is the way of these things, on the following morning, nothing remained of their encounter with Madame Fame save a few unspent sous and a splitting headache.

During this time, Juliette, who had no home as well as no family, virtually lived in the apartment on rue Cavallotti. The arrangement suited Jean-Paul admirably given the tacit agreement between the three of them that she would never bring any of her ‘occasional friends’ into apartment 17b.

Conversely, René had been known to frequently relax this rule with regard to his own modest studio, two streets away, across the park in rue Lepic. In fact it had been at that address that he had stumbled upon Juliette giving herself enthusiastically to a surly looking German by the name of Adolf Miethe. In all of their time together, it was the first occasion that he had actually seen her at work, in her ‘evening’ role, and he was more than alarmed to see her face so smeared with rouge and her eyes bulging such that he thought she might be having a convulsion.

There was of course no way that René could have known at the time that the male body bouncing so vigorously on top of Juliette was Adolf Miethe, although the fact that he was still wearing highly polished riding boots did suggest that the man was German.

René withdrew from his apartment to the café across the road, where he sat on a bentwood chair, nursing a cup of coffee and a glass of Armagnac into which he mindlessly stirred a cube of sugar. From his table in the window of the café, he could see the flickering lamp behind the lace curtains of his single room, and he waited for it to dim, the signal that Juliette had concluded her business. When at last the lamp went out, he waited a moment or two for them to emerge before finishing his glass. The heavy street door opened, emitting the pair, arm in arm like lovers into the night and René watched them exchange a few words, eager for them to part, so that he could retire to the warmth of his recently used bed. But then Juliette spotted René in the window of the café and, grabbing Adolf by the elbow, she steered her bewildered client across the road and into the café.

Tidier, but still smudged with rouge, Juliette’s face glowed with excitement as she dragged the reluctant German towards René’s table.

“René, may I present Adolf Miethe. He is also a photographer and he is desperate to meet you.”

René, unable to avoid the meeting, stood and extended a hand. “Bonsoir monsieur.”

The formal German clicked his heels in salute but declined René’s hand, clearly still more than a little embarrassed by the notion that he had so recently been observed in the act of making love to Juliette - in René’s bed. Juliette pushed Adolf into an adjacent chair and gestured to the waiter to bring more Armagnac.

Adolf remained silent, mainly because he spoke very little French but also as he was exceedingly unsure of whom he might be addressing. He knew nothing of René or his business, indeed his name had not been mentioned, until now. Juliette, who made it her business to speak enough of every language as she might require in order to conduct her business in a capital city such as Paris, took control and explained as best she could.

It transpired that she had met Adolf earlier that evening in the Moulin Rouge, where he had been expounding to a group of bored gallants, the theories of his amazing new discovery, which he called ‘Blitzlichtpulver’. Needless to say, Herr Miethe was the only one in the entire establishment who cared to know about Blitzlichtpulver, being as you can neither drink it, nor take it to bed with you. Also, being the consummate German, this minor fact did not inhibit his need to continue to explain its virtues to all and sundry regardless of their attention at the time. Only Juliette realised the significance of this invention and, for the want of another to pay for her drinks, she lent on his arm and allowed him to relate the whole story into her pretty pink ear.

It is said that an animated Adolf was an amazing sight to behold. Somehow his exuberant pronunciation of the compound German word caused him to salivate excessively on the first syllable and to spray the rest of the word in every direction, with the assembled listeners saved only by the heavy moustache that adorned his upper lip. The more he explained to Juliette, the more she became convinced that he should meet with René and Jean-Paul. Admittedly it had taken several minutes of obscure translation and a quite remarkable series of gestures, but she was now convinced that Blitzlichtpulver was exactly what was needed to save her from the torture of having her body, invariably naked and on the verge of freezing, locked into iron frames to immobilise her for sufficient time to imprint her image on the glass plate inside Jean-Paul’s camera. Quite simply, if Adolf were to be believed, this new ‘flash-light-powder’ would create sufficient intensity of light in a fraction of a second to activate Rene’s chemical brew, thereby relieving her of the agony of posing for hours on end.

It also quickly became apparent that the more closely Juliette demonstrated her interest in Blitzlichtpulver, the more Adolf became interested in Juliette’s own saleable assets. Never one to miss the chance of earning a pfennig or two, Juliette persuaded Adolf to accompany her to René’s apartment in the hope of finding her friends and business partners, after a half hour of business conducted on her own account.

Having now completed her own transaction and made the introduction to René, Juliette set about explaining her understanding of the new powder, speaking alternately in French and German as necessary. Three heads locked together over the stained marble table-top as the two principals grew more and more excited about the possibilities of Blitzlichtpulver. At length, just as the waiter was about to deliver three glasses of Armagnac to the table, Adolf could resist no longer. He delved deep into his coat pocket and produced a rolled paper tube about the size of a small cigar, which he placed onto a saucer and, with a flourish characteristic of a circus ringmaster, struck a sulphur match and lit it.

The ensuing chaos would have played well in any of the theatres on rue Pigalle. Three glasses of Armagnac helped to fuel the fire and the recoiling waiter is reported to have turned two consecutive somersaults without touching the ground. Of the three at the window table, there was no sign as they were now all fixed to the floor as if nailed there by the unseen hand of the master carpenter himself. For the record, René, Juliette and Jean-Paul, who had not even been there at the time, were instantly barred from drinking in the café on rue Lepic, for life.

The few days that followed that evening, proved to be among the most exciting in the whole of René’s life, save perhaps for that very first time he set eyes on an original Daguerreotype in the Academy. It was a frantic period during which Adolf readily demonstrated the flash light properties of the lycopodium powder mixture while steadfastly refusing to share the formula for its composition. For three days the team set about solving the secondary problem of synchronising the ignition of the flash-powder with the opening of the camera aperture. Their best result was to open the lens, fire the powder and replace the lens, each action being conducted by hand and therefore producing a somewhat random outcome. Sadly, even their best results served only to make them strive for something better. During this period, Juliette worked alternately as photographic model and caterer which meant that the four enthusiasts existed entirely on bread, cheese and wine, emerging only as the need arose, for them to replenish the stock of chemicals for the darkroom.

On the fourth day, Adolf announced his imminent return to Leipzig, thereby bringing the series of experiments in apartment 17b.to an abrupt halt. René pleaded with Adolf to share the basic formula with them but the wily German refused, determined to guard the potential future profits for himself. This set-back cast a brief shadow over the partnership of Arnot-La Selles but also served to make them even more alert to the possibility of taking their camera out of the studio and into the pit that was the Moulin Rouge. Visions of a fortune in gold coins hung before their eyes, yet it remained forever a centimetre out of reach, as they laboured to recreate the essential flash-light-powder formula.

René spent many days and nights in the tiny laboratory of apartment 17b, but success continued to elude him and, during the bitterly cold winter of 1897, his health began to fail.

January 1898 passed with René confined to his bed from where he passed daily instructions to Juliette who managed the roles of nurse, model, whore and darkroom chemist with aplomb. Jean-Paul wrote letters to Leipzig and even contemplated making the journey in search of Adolf Miethe but that would have left them with no income and a steady stream of doctor’s bills to pay. He started experimenting again, sometimes on his own, and sometimes with assistance from the ever available Juliette.

*****

Thus it was, on one of his rare visits to apartment 17b, René found himself clutching the naked, soot smeared body of Juliette and gazing at the wreckage that signified the latest failed attempt to control the volatile flash powder mixture.

*****

Jean-Paul the failed artist and René the failed chemist are now both lost in obscurity. Had luck been on their side in that fateful year, their names may well have been found in the history books as the fathers of portable flash photography. It would undoubtedly have pleased René’s own father to have seen his son’s name on the wall in the French Academy of Sciences, but it was not to be. The exertion of climbing the stairs combined with the shock of the explosion, and maybe the warmth of Juliette’s naked body in his arms, were enough to send René back to his bed from which he would never rise again.

Jean-Paul scraped a living for several years as a wedding photographer before finding his own obscurity in the dampness of a Parisian jail where he was sent after attempting to sell the photographs of an inordinate number of bridesmaids whom he had persuaded to pose for him after the event.

There is no record of Juliette or her life after René, save that she continued to use the apartment on rue Lepic until the bailiffs arrived to take René’s furniture in lieu of unpaid rent. Although, perhaps that is not strictly true. There is, more than one hundred years later, a flea market in Montmartre every Sunday morning where it is still possible to buy faded and crumple-edged postcard photographs of the delightful Juliette, posed on the library stool in front of the bookcase in apartment 17b. rue Cavallotti.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 21.03.2010

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