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Between 1852 and 1868, the architect and amateur naturalist Pierre Trémaux (1818–1895) produced three groups of plates and accompanying texts on the geography, architecture, and people of African and Anatolian regions. These luxe publications, produced with the support of the French government, exploit an array of graphic techniques; they combine salted paper prints, engravings, tinted and colour lithographs, photolithographs, and texts in ways never previously attempted. Their examination provides insights into the ways these media interacted, and how comfortably photography in fact sat amongst its predecessors within the long-established context of the travel narrative. This paper will probe the implications of photography for Trémaux’s project through an investigation of his first book,Voyages au Soudan oriental et dans l’Afrique septentrionale. To what extent did the new, mechanical medium clarify or confound his effort to “explain” parts of Africa still hardly known to Europeans? What does this reveal about the role of photographic authenticity in familiarizing imperial audiences with distant places, during a transitional moment in visual culture? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Édouard Baldus, a prominent figure in the history of French photography, is known almost exclusively for his silver-based photographs of the 1850s and early 1860s. Yet Baldus was also at the forefront of developments in photomechanical reproduction, publishing seven albums of photogravure prints between 1866 and 1884. Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries. Motifs de décorations, published in various editions between 1869 and 1875, was the first to reproduce his own photographs rather than engravings by earlier artists. It depicts architectural elements of the Louvre and Tuileries palaces, images that derive largely from Baldus’s commission between 1855 and 1857 to document the construction of the New Louvre. Drawing from analyses of Palais’s prints and their corresponding photographs, this article examines Baldus’s photogravure process and his strategies as an editor and publisher of his own work. It furthermore demonstrates that he chose to illustrate Palais with photogravures rather than photographs for specific aesthetic and conceptual reasons in addition to concerns about economy and the stability of silver-based prints. Lastly, this article argues for the significance of Baldus’s photogravure production to his entire oeuvre and to the development of photomechanical processes in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]