Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors (review)

Henri-Victor Regnault (1810–1878) managed to combine rigorous science with artistic sensitivity in a career that encompassed both industry and academe. Through extensive personal and professional engagement with photography, his experiences involved both imaginative and practical applications of the new medium, and he facilitated photography's acceptance among a number of important groups. During his tenure as director of the Sèvres porcelain works, Regnault tried to reconcile the tradition of deluxe handicraft with new industrial priorities, including photographic documentation of production. In his state-supported career, he conducted experiments related to steam power and coal gas as well as photographic chemistry, but he came to feel that his amateur photographic portraits and landscapes took too much time away from his more important research. Thus his role in early photography has been overshadowed by others who made it their professional priority. Now Laurie Dahlberg has restored the record of Regnault's contributions during the critical decades of photography's introduction in France.

In an elegantly written introduction Dahlberg argues that Regnault represents a means to understand the complicated history of photography across different sectors of French society, and her book is organized thematically to reflect his involvement as scientist, industrialist, and photographer. The first chapter is devoted to Regnault's educational background and his interactions with photography. Elected to the Académie des sciences in chemistry, he also occupied the physics chair at the Collège de France, where he lectured on optics. He believed in the truth of empirical practice and was not given to imaginative or theoretical approaches. It was said that his lifetime endeavor was to master "the art of avoiding all errors" (p. 16), a phrase Dahlberg uses both as this chapter heading (where it seems appropriate) and as the subtitle for her book (where it makes less sense). Due to his professional and academic connections, Regnault was ideally suited to become the first president of the national photographic organization, the Société française de photographie.

Dahlberg's second chapter discusses Regnault's 1852 appointment as director of the Sèvres porcelain works and his engagement with photography there, both as avid amateur making his own images and frustrated promoter of its practical applications. His suggestion of using photographs to document and publicize production was met with resistance due to the conflicted role of technology in the culture of this artistic domain and in French society at large. As Dahlberg demonstrates, this struggle at Sèvres reflected wider issues in photography's reception as both art and commerce.

In her third chapter Dahlberg depicts Regnault's portraits of family and colleagues as a new cultural activity, constructing identities in private settings rather than in commercial studios. In chapter four she relates with some irony how the landscape photographs of Regnault and his friends sensitively recorded nature even while these men were actively developing more and more land through their work in industry and commerce.

The book is generously illustrated, and its horizontal layout facilitates the presentation of its high-quality images, though making it awkward to hold and read. The thematic organization omits a clear chronology of Regnault's life and career appointments that would have provided some continuity. For example, Dahlberg mentions his study with Justus von Liebig several times, but never states when or in what circumstances this occurred. Perhaps the reader is expected to find this information in the notes through references to Robert Fox's work on Regnault and the history of science. There are problems with some illustration captions and attributions, along with a few errors of fact. As an art historian, Dahlberg slights the specifics of Regnault's important contributions to photographic chemistry, but she synthesizes in beautifully concise prose contemporary theoretical discourses regarding nature and landscape as science and art, and the conflicted cultural and political forces that attended industrialization in Second Empire France. She successfully conveys the importance and relevance...