Informal Moments: Portraits from Photography’s First Decade

This installation brings together a group of early photographic portraits with Edouard Baldus’s celebrated scene, Group at the Château de la Faloise (1857) as the centerpiece. Early photographers often worked outdoors by necessity, giving up the controlled atmosphere of a studio for abundant sunlight outside. This led them to improvise portrait poses and settings, gradually contributing to changed conventions and subtly influencing developments across the visual arts.

Baldus’s informal group portrait, widely recognized as a proto-Impressionist outdoor scene, will be shown with portraits by other artists including Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Jean-Baptiste Frénet, and Charles Nègre, all of which demonstrate the exciting modernity of early photography.