Un combat photographique en Crimée (A photographic combat in the Crimea)

Colonel Jean-Charles Langlois, graduate of the Polytechnique
school and famous painter of battle scenes was charged by the
French War Ministry to produce a series of panoramic scenes of
the siege of Sebastopol. He arrived in the Crimea on November
13, 1855, and remained until May 12, 1856. For the first time in
his career as a painter he decided to make use of photography, a
technology which was barely ten years old and with which he was
unfamiliar. Langlois became associated with the young
Léon-Eugène Méhédin, a trained architect who studied briefly
with Le Gray. Throughout his stay in the Crimea, Colonel
Langlois corresponded regularly with his wife who remained in
Paris. These letters serve as a basis for the present article
which illuminates the following themes: 1. Time and urgency; 2.
The individual image and reality; 3. Technology and meteorology;
4. Photographic logistics; 5. Assault as a metaphor for the act
of taking a photograph; 6. Photography, war and the Sublime.
(Magazins Abstract)


Citaten:
Rouillé, A.: Faire Image (Cahiers de Paris VIII, 1989)
Burke, E.: Recherche philosophiques sur l'origine de nos idées du sublime et du beau (1803)
Goupil-Fesquet, Fr.: Voyage d'Horace Vernet en Orient (1843)