Fotógrafos franceses en el Perú del siglo XIX

Shortly after the war of the Peruvian independence from the Spanish rule (1821), photography was invented in France (1839). The French government bought the rights of the new discovery to share it with the world (with the exception of England).At that time Peru was experiencing economic prosperity due to the exploitation of huge amounts of guano, a natural resource, and Limabecame an interesting place for the new trade. The first daguerreotype arrived at the port of Callao in 1842, only three years after its discovery. Afterwards French photographers arrived such as Philogone Daviette, Furnier, A de Lattre, Amic Gazan and Emile Garreaud. This last indivdidual started revolutionary technique of the wet collodion, which provided a negative image in a glass plate that allowed multiple reproduction of the image, instead of the unique copy provided by the daguerreotype. In 1860, the French photographer Nadar was very famous in Paris, while in Lima his correspondent Eugene Maunoury opened a fancy studio that made the carte de visite very popular. A few years later, his employee Eugene Courret and his brother bought his share of the business and made of the Courret Brother’s Studio the most important one of the history of Peruvian photography until it finally closed in 1935. The Courret archives contain the most important graphic testimony of Peruvian events during the second half of the nineteen and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Courret. Photographed the war with Spain in 1866, the War of the Pacific with Chile and portraits of the most important people of his time. The 55 000 glass negative plates of the Courret Studio were acquired by the Biblioteca Nacional of Peru in the 1980.