1 May 2013 (ed. 9 August 2021) • 22 mins •

Making History: The Gernsheims and Nicéphore Niépce 

Born one hundred and fifty years apart the achievements of the struggling landowner and inventor Nicéphore Niépce and the groundbreaking photo historian Helmut Gernsheim and diligent researcher Alison Eames were inextricably linked when Gernsheim rediscovered Niépce’s earliest surviving photograph following a newspaper appeal. Graham Harrison looks back at the exploits of a German-born chronicler, his astute wife and a brilliant, but ill-fated Frenchman. 

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult." Seneca (4BC-65AD).

In London in 1942 between the Blitz and the V-bomb attacks on the city during the Second World War, a German architectural photographer called Helmut Gernsheim published a book called New Photo Vision (Fountain, 1942).

In the sixty-four-page monograph with a suitably prickly image on the cover, Gernsheim criticised the prevailing romanticised style of English photography, advocated a new realism, and insisted that as photography had the capacity of being a means of expression it followed that the medium was an art in its own right.

Gernsheim sent a copy of the book to Beaumont Newhall, curator of the groundbreaking exhibition Photography 1839-1937 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Newhall in his eighty-page introduction to the catalogue had made an early reference to photography being a serious art form.

Recognising a kindred philosophy Newhall met with Gernsheim and planted in his mind the idea of Gernsheim becoming a photo historian. Newhall also suggested that Gernsheim drop the criticism in favour of collecting nineteenth century photographs which at the time could be bought for just a few shillings.

Although Gernsheim never did drop the criticism he and his wife Alison did begin to collect photographs, thousands of them from the Victorian era among them masterworks by Fox Talbot, Hill and Adamson, Fenton and Daguerre. 

In the process of collecting the couple rediscovered the neglected work of Julia Margaret Cameron, created a literary sensation by unearthing Lewis Caroll’s interest in photography and found Niépce’s priceless Point de Vue or View from the Window at Le Gras, the world’s oldest surviving photograph from nature which had been lost for over fifty years.

And as their discoveries unfolded, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim mapped the early history of photography which they described with encyclopedic detail in The History of Photography: From the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914, which was published by the Oxford University Press in 1955. 

A NEW REALISM

The third son of a Munich literary historian, Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim was born on 1 March 1913. In 1937, with Hitler chancellor and the Nazis in power, the half-Jewish Gernsheim left Germany for Paris and then London where he undertook a commission to photograph artworks at the National Gallery. 

In London, Gernsheim established himself as a commercial photographer with commissions from Rolls Royce and the shipping line P&O. Following the outbreak of the Second World War the British Government categorised Gernsheim as a “friendly enemy alien” and deported him to Australia where he was interned with two thousand other refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. 

Before long Gernsheim was giving lectures on the aesthetics of photography at the internment camp. His qualifications were a first-class diploma from the Bavarian State School of Photography and a belief that Neue Sachlichkeit, the modern realism movement and the dominant force in radical art and design in Germany in the 1920s and early 30s, was an absorbing subject for his fellow internees. 

By 1942 Gernsheim was back in Britain having secured his release by volunteering to document important and historic properties threatened by German bombs for The National Buildings Record, now part of English Heritage. 

The photographs which Gernsheim took were exhibited widely, praised by Kenneth Clark and Nikolaus Pevsner and later published in the books Focus on Architecture and Sculpture (Fountain Press, 1949) and Beautiful London (Phaidon, 1950).

The same year of his return to Britain, Gernsheim brought out New Photo Vision, the product of his internment camp lectures, and married Alison Eames (1911-69), a Londoner with an interest in nineteenth century English social history. 

Alison’s “gift for scanning books in Latin, French and German for useful clues” made her the ideal partner in a collaboration that was to last until her death two and a half decades later. In that time the Gernsheims were to write twenty books and 160 articles on the history and aesthetics of photography.

POINT DE VUE

There is no other work of art that takes you back through time the way the faint image of rooftops in Burgundy does. 

Its creator, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, was a well-to-do amateur scientist and inventor whose family estate of Le Gras near Chalon-sur-Saône was in financial decline following the upheaval of French Revolution.

In 1813, when the new art of lithography swept France, Niépce set out to invent a printing process of his own which he hoped would create a printing plate directly from a camera obscura. 

One might guess that he also hoped to patent such an invention and secure enough income to save Le Gras. The estate however remained a burden little eased by the mortgaging of properties and the sale of land. In reality, it wasn’t until after the inventor’s death that the family were to benefit financially from Niépce’s endeavour.

No doubt inspired by the enlightenment but hampered by the estate’s remoteness from Paris, Niépce experimented in isolation with light-sensitive materials to produce a negative image which faded quickly. His objective, though, was a lasting positive image and he groped along to that end for nine more years. 

The breakthrough came in 1822 when he succeeded in creating a permanent, positive, contact print from an engraving using bitumen of Judea on glass. The image’s highlights hardened by the action of light, its shadows cleared by petroleum and lavender oil. Niépce called his invention “heliography,” or sun-writing.

Five more years were to pass before Niépce applied the same chemistry to a polished pewter plate, made and eight-hour exposure from the window of his attic workroom and captured a permanent image of the world outside. 

The resulting picture known as View from the Window at Le Gras or simply as Point de Vue, is the earliest surviving image from nature which from 1952 to 1963 the Gernsheims would describe as "The World’s First Photograph".

And fixed faintly but for ever on that mirrored surface in the summer of 1827 is a view of the outbuildings, rooftops and a pear tree on Nicéphore Niépce’s heavily mortgaged estate.

An EXTRAORDINARY LACK of INTEREST?

Niépce's older brother Claude lived near Kew Gardens in London. Claude had moved to Britain to promote another innovation, the world’s first internal combustion engine which the brothers had created in 1807. When a French patent for the engine expired in 1817, Claude secured a British patent consent from the court of George III. 

As the end of the British patent approached in 1827, Claude was suffering from delirium and became terminally ill. That September Niépce travelled to England to visit him. 

Niépce brought to England (or later sent for) examples of his pioneering experiments in photography that including a paper contact print and four heliographic plates. Three of the heliographs were contact images reproduced from etchings, the fourth was the Point de Vue.

Niépce showed his artifacts to the Austrian-born illustrator Francis Bauer who was botanic illustrator to the King and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Bauer suggested that Niépce write a memoir so that he could present the invention to the Society and perhaps gain its patronage. 

As instructed, Niépce wrote a short description which he titled Notice sur L’Heliographie but the scientific academy declined its support apparently because Niépce would not divulge the details of his invention. 

A Scottish journal would later suggest that Niépce’s rejection may have had more to do with an extraordinary lack of interest in the invention of photography by the Royal Society. 

“One would have expected that a picture, painted or copied by the agency of light, would have fixed the attention of any body of men to which it was submitted,” stated the Edinburgh Review in January 1843. “And we would have experienced some difficulty in giving credit to the statement, did we not know that the same body has refused to publish the photographic discoveries of Mr. Talbot!” 

Whatever the reasons behind the rejection we do know that Niépce returned to Le Gras empty handed and his brother Claude, having squandered a significant amount of the family fortune in pursuit of ill-advised business opportunities, died at Kew in 1828. 

LOST

Before he returned to France, Nicéphore Niépce presented the memoir, the contact print and the four heliographs to Francis Bauer in the hope the King’s botanic illustrator might still find a sponsor for his invention in Britain. 

Bauer did his best to promote Niépce, as did a number of prominent Britons, but none of them lived long enough to exert significant influence. 

In 1829, having failed to secure sponsorship for himself, Niépce entered into a ten-year collaborative agreement with Louis Daguerre, a Parisian painter and physicist celebrated for his staged Dioramas, who had been seeking a way of capturing the image created by the camera obscura for some time.  

It was not until 1831, two years after his collaboration with Niépce began and fifteen years after Niépce had first experimented with silver chloride, that Daguerre discovered the light-sensitivity of silver iodide, his first success.

When Niépce died unexpectedly in 1833 his side of the agreement passed to his son and heir Isidore and Daguerre became the dominant partner for the agreement’s remaining six years. 

When the agreement ended in 1839 Nicéphore Niépce’s place in the history of photography was eclipsed by Daguerre and by William Henry Fox Talbot as their respective photographic processes were announced to the world. 

The Point de Vue and the other artifacts that Niépce had left with Francis Bauer in England in 1827, were, following Bauer’s death, sold and later divided. 

In 1884 the memoir, the Point de Vue and a contact print were bought by Henry Baden Pritchard, proprietor and editor of the Photographic News and author of The Photographic Studios of Europe (Piper & Carter, 1882). Unfortunately Pritchard died shortly after acquiring the items and they passed to his widow Mary.

When Mary Pritchard herself died in 1917 the Niépce artifacts were placed in a trunk with other family belongings, deposited in a London warehouse and forgotten.

Around the time of the centenary of the Point de Vue in 1926, the surrealist photographer Man Ray became an advocate of Niépce and in 1933 an imposing monument was erected outside Niépce’s home village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes.

But until his images were found, if they ever could be, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s pioneering work would remain no more than a footnote in the history of photography.

THE TRUNK

If Helmut and Alison Gernsheim weren’t the first people to realise the significance of the Point de Vue - the honour may belong to George Potonniée author of Histoire de la Découverte de la Photographie, published in 1925 - then they certainly proved themselves the most dogged in pursuit of its rediscovery. 

Gernsheim’s search for Niépce’s lost work began in 1947. It wasn’t until April 1950 that a glimmer of hope appeared after an appeal published in The Observer newspaper brought a response from Mary Pritchard’s son. [1]

The son told Gernsheim that he remembered the memoir and the Point de Vue but he also remembered his mother’s distress at their loss. Pritchard said the artefacts were not returned after being shown at the Royal Photographic Society's International Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1898.

Eighteen months passed, then out of the blue the Gernsheims received a letter from the wife of Mary Pritchard’s son informing them that her husband had died and a big trunk had been opened to reveal among the family relics, Niépce’s lost work.

Mrs Pritchard explained that although the Point de Vue was among the artefacts any further effort would be a waste of time because the image had faded completely. Knowing that bitumen did not fade Gernsheim telephoned Mrs Pritchard to ask if he could see the treasure trove for himself. 

On 14 February 1952, at Mrs Pritchard’s home, the framed pewter plate was placed in Gernsheim’s hands for the first time. 

Gernsheim had not expected to see a mirror and he took the plate to the window where he held it at an angle to the light as one does a daguerreotype. He then increased the angle further to reveal the lost image of Le Gras.

Turning the frame over, the historian saw what had been written on the back in 1827 by Francis Bauer and read the words, “Monsieur Niépce’s first successful experiment of fixing permanently the Image from Nature.”

Helmut Gernsheim’s discovery of Niépce’s lost work enabled him to push the date of photography’s first surviving image back some eight years from Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing of the latticed window at Lacock Abbey taken in 1835 to Niépce’s Point de Vue of 1827 and thereby laid the foundation stone on which the Gernsheim's History of Photography was built.

SEARCHING for a HOME

Helmut Gernsheim was never a man to doubt his own abilities, nor was he a man to forget a snub. 

Although he and Alison might find themselves being accused of making “sweeping generalisations”, Gernsheim didn’t mind reminding others of what he saw as their own failings as happened when he and Alison determined that their archive should be bought by a British institution to become part of a national collection of photography. [2]

The Royal Photographic Society was to stay in the Gernsheim line of fire for decades. Having joined the Society in 1940 and become a Fellow in 1942, Gernsheim resigned in 1952, apparently because of the Society’s failure to purchase the Gernsheim collection. 

Over twenty years later he would write in a letter to The Times of the “clear rebuff” he received from the RPS. In the same letter he attacked the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Roy Strong, saying there was no hope for the creation of an independent national collection of photography, “Unless a national effort is made now, and national interest is placed before institutional politics.” [3]

Strong, who left the National Portrait Gallery for the V&A in 1974 and was knighted in 1983, writes in Self Portrait as a Young Man, “The Gernsheim Collection was offered to the NPG but it would have involved having to take on Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, regarded as people who were more than difficult. The fact that this did not happen was viewed therefor with some relief.” 

Asked recently if the collection might have stayed in Britain if the Gernsheims had not been attached, Sir Roy said, “Yes. Probably.” 

Strong went on to point out that the decision to refuse the Gernsheim Collection was made before his arrival at St. Martin’s Place but added that photography had no support from the art establishment in the early 1960s anyway. Strong writes that, “Photographs were regarded with a sniffy condescension,” by the NPG at the time.

Having found no home for their historical collection in Britain the Gernsheims sold it in 1963 to the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas for a figure from somewhere below $500,000 to over $1 million, sources differ. 

The couple moved from London to Lugano in Switzerland where Alison died in 1969 depriving Gernsheim of “a wonderful companion, an ideal collaborator and a wise councillor,” just as a revised and enlarged edition of their History of Photography was being prepared for print by Thames and Hudson. 

Although the Gernsheims left Great Britain their magnum opus had done a great service to the nation by placing Britain firmly at the centre of the development of photography. 

The Times, in Alison’s obituary of 7 April 1969, stressed how, “The extent to which the evolution of photography is due to British pioneering spirit in the scientific and in the artistic field throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras became first evident in (the Gernsheim’s) monumental History of Photography.”

While the Harry Ranson Centre can boast its “landmark acquisition” as “one of the seminal collections in the United States,” Britain, a nation the Gernsheims recognised as nurturing the embryonic science and art of photography can only wonder at what it missed, although one also can’t help wondering what might have been if Helmut Gernsheim had not been so angry for so long at British intransigence. 

Among the 35,000 images that went to Texas in 1963 were an intact Pencil of Nature (1844-46) by Fox Talbot, salted paper prints of the Crimean War by Roger Fenton and one hundred and forty albumen and silver gelatine prints of some of the most extraordinary and valuable photographs of the nineteenth century taken by Julia Margaret Cameron between 1863 and 1875.

The GIFT

When Helmut Gernsheim was in Mrs Pritchard’s parlour in the winter of 1952, the conversation moved to the value of Niépce’s Point de Vue. “Priceless,” is what Gernsheim reports he said. Mrs Pritchard, after some subtle persuasion from the photo historian, declared, “No one could look after these historic items better” and presented them without charge to Gernsheim.

And when the University of Texas bought the Gernsheim collection, Helmut and Alison, because they believed that, “Museums and other public institutions often turn gifts into cash when it suits them,” gave the Point de Vue and the other Niépce artefacts - presented to them by Mrs Pritchard - to the university as a gift.

In 1983, twenty years after his archive went to America, a national collection in Britain which Helmut Gernsheim had argued for so long was finally realised with the opening of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford. [4]

The Bradford archive holds the William Henry Fox Talbot Collection, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Herschel Album which was saved for the nation in 1974, and from 2003 (until 2017 when it was transferred to the V&A in London) the Royal Photographic Society Collection of 250,000 pieces including three heliographic contact plates brought to England by Niépce in 1827.

NO MORE PERSUASIVE ORIGIN MYTH

Among the first photographers to challenge the photographic establishment and the art establishment in Britain, Helmut Gernsheim, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells us, would “immeasurably enrich our photographic inheritance” and the scholarship he built upon his own collection was “instrumental in establishing the academic credibility of photo-history.” 

After Alison's death, Helmut Gernsheim remarried and continued working until his own death in Switzerland in 1995. In 2002 his widow Irene, passed Gernsheim's collection of twentieth century photography, including his own photographs, to the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. 

At a symposium in Mannheim in 2003 the American critic and author A.D. Coleman said the work of Helmut Gernshiem together with that of his friend Beaumont Newhall, had dominated the history of photography in the English language for forty years. Their combined work, Coleman said, remains the standard reference for the history of the medium.

“No one to date has substantially impeached the scholarship of either Gernsheim or Newhall, nor has anyone offered a more persuasive origin myth than theirs,” said Coleman.

If Gernsheim could be difficult, there remains little doubt that the history of photography is indebted to him. 

Not least because he and Alison took that history beyond Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and even Niépce’s indistinct view from his attic workroom window to some of the earliest found writings on the principle of the camera obscura in a thirteenth century text from France, to the experiments of the eleventh-century Arab scholar Ibn Al-Haytham, author of Kitab al-Manazir, the Book of Optics, and back to the writings of Aristotle in the third century BC.

And in so doing Helmut and Alison Gernsheim made photography just a little more important. 

The Gernsheims also showed us that Nicéphore Niépce's misfortune was not because the Frenchman’s efforts and visionary ideas led him to a backwater but because he was not fortunate enough to be given the support that his labour and vision deserved. 

By 1828 Niépce had moved on from pewter plates to experiment with polished silver plates and the fumes of iodine, a process which would form the basis of the daguerreotype. The following year he signed a collaborative agreement with Daguerre.

When Niépce died in 1833 none of his inventions had been officially acknowledged. The village council at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes paid for his grave and without an income to support them Niépce’s widow and son Isidore were forced to sell Le Gras. 

In 1839 the French Government granted Isidore a pension for life of 4,000 Francs a year in recognition of his father’s contribution to the invention of photography.

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Text & photographs

© 2013 Graham Harrison

NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS for Making History: The Gernsheims and Nicéphore Niépce

The GERNSHEIMS

[1] In The First Photograph, a letter published in the The Observer on 9 April 1950 (page 2), Gernsheim seeks not the Point de Vue but a photograph of Kew Church taken by Niépce which Michael Faraday recalled seeing sometime between 1827 and 1829 and was in the possession of Henry Baden Prichard and Prichard’s widow until 1898. Niépce’s Kew Church is yet to be found.

[2] The accusation against Helmut and Alison Gernsheim for making "sweeping generalisations" comes from H.J.P. Arnold's Fox Talbot Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science (Hutchinson Benham, 1977, page 215): “The sweeping generalisations made by some historians - and notably the Gernsheims - have been based on the obviously self-interested, one sided anti-Talbot arguments of the 1850s and such statements as ‘Understandably, everyone [Arnold’s italics] interested in photography was indignant at Talbot’s patenting activities,’ are the language of the propagandist rather than objective historian. And it simply was not true.”

[3] In 1975 there was an exchange of opinion on the letters pages of The Times between Helmut Gernsheim and Sir George Pollock, Vice President of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Roy Strong, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and John Wall, editor of the National Photographic Record at the RPS. The Gernsheim quotes come from his letter Photographic heritage, published in The Times on 10 May 1975 (page 15).

[4] The Bradford museum has had three names: The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (1983–2006), the National Media Museum (2006–2017) and the National Science and Media Museum (from 2017).

Obituary: Helmut Gernsheim by Peter Ride, The Independent, 5 August 1995.

Helmut Gernsheim Reconsidered (PDF): The proceedings of the Mannheim Symposium hosted at the Forum Internationale Photographie at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim on 12 October 2003. 

The exhibition The Birth of Photography, Highlights of the Helmut Gernsheim Collection at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim in the autumn and winter of 2012-13 was held to mark the centenary of Gernsheim’s birth. Among the exhibits was Nicéphore Niépce’s Point de Vue (or View from the Window at Le Gras) which returned to Europe for the first time in half a century.

The photography collection at the Harry Ransom Centre, the University of Texas at Austin is home to over five million prints and negatives built on the Helmut and Alison Gernsheim Collection which was bought by the university in 1963. 

NIÉPCE

Nicéphore Niépce (pronounced “Nee-se-four Nee-ps”) was baptised Joseph but adopted the name Nicéphore, after Saint Nicephorus a ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople. Niépce, apparently, is a reduced form of the Scottish or Irish name McNiece, a variant spelling of McNeese.

The ambition of the French inventor was to produce lithographic plates directly from a photographic process, an idea realised by his cousin Abel Niépce de Saint-Victoire in 1855, twenty-two years after Niépce’s death. 

Niépce, Letters and Documents: a searchable archive of over 700 documents connected with Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) the creator of the oldest surviving photograph and co-inventor of the first internal combustion engine.

Nicéphore Niépce House-Museum: a reference site with details of the Niépce Museum which is open from 1 July to 31 August, 10am to 6pm, except Tuesdays. €6, students €4.50. In 2013 the agency Gamma-Rapho held exclusive rights to photograph the Niépce house, the funds going towards further research.

The Prix Niépce is an annual prize of €8,000 aimed at professional photographers over the age of 50 who have been resident in France for three years or more.

A Reality One Can No Longer Touch

In his book La Chamber Claire (Camera Lucida) published in 1980 the French philosopher Roland Barthes uses a photograph of a dinner table credited to Niépce to illustrate his argument that photographs become “a reality one can no longer touch.” Barthes captioned the image “The first photograph. Niépce: The Dinner Table. Around 1823,” four years before Point de Vue was taken. 

There is no reference to the dinner table image in Niépce’s correspondence with his brother Claude. Gernsheim, citing Georges Potonniée, suggests the image of the table was likely to have been taken after Niépce and Daguerre had become partners in 1829. Only a half-tone reproduction of the glass † original remains, the plate having been smashed along with everything else in his laboratory by an insane professor at the Conservatoire des Artes et Métiers in Paris in 1900.

†Physautotype positive on glass, a process invented by Niépce with Daguerre in 1832.

Giphantie

One final thought. It is just possible that a young Nicéphore Niépce read Giphantie (1760), a novel by Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche in which the invention of photography is tantalisingly anticipated.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to Sir Roy Strong who was gracious enough to answer questions put to him at the Bodleian Library, Oxford in March 2013 and to Dr Michael Pritchard, Director General of the Royal Photographic Society, who in February 2013 provided information concerning Helmut Gernsheim’s membership of the Society.

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Photo of Sir Roy Strong at the Divinity School at the Bodleian Library during the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival © 2013 Graham Harrison

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Text & photographs

© 2013 Graham Harrison