Gabriel Cromer

Gabriel Cromer was a photographer, a historian of photography and a collector of photographs. He was born in Rethel, in the Ardennes, France, the 1st of April 1873 and died in Clamart, in the Isle-de-France on the 14th of November 1934.

Biography

Michel Alexandre Edmond Joseph Gabriel Cromer was born in Rethel on the 1st of April 1873 to a wealthy family, with jurists on his father's side and Protestant textile manufacturers on his mother's. Cromer was raised in Paris and learnt photography early on. After earning a law degree Cromer did not pursue a career in law, but instead devoted himself to photography. Around 1900, he built a villa in Clamart, a fashionable suburb of Paris, with a large photographic studio, and several laboratories. However, Cromer did not establish a professional photography business: as a person of private means, he practiced photography as an amateur.

He began collecting photographica around 1906 and became one of the 20th century's most important collectors of daguerreotypes, cameras and photographs. He built his collection both through traditional means (auctions, dealers, antiquarian bookstores), and also by establishing relationships with the descendants of family members and friends of figures such as Louis Daguerre (one of the inventors of photography) and Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot (an important early practitioner of the daguerreotype process). He was an enlightened amateur photographer and scientific popularizer, organising many conferences on the history of photography. He became a member of the Société française de photographie in 1912 and became the society's librarian in 1927. In 1928, Louis Lumière gave him a series of first attempts at autochrome plates, including a portrait of Louis taken by his brother Auguste around 1902–1905.

Gabriel Cromer wanted his collection to form the basis for a French national museum of photography. On 26 December 1924, he gave speech to the Société francaise de photographie, exhorting the group to create, or at least join him in actively advocating, for a French national museum of photography. With the approach of the Second World War, the Kodak company showed interest and, in 1939, after negotiations with Cromer's widow, acquired a large part of Cromer's collection. In 1949, this acquisition was transferred to the newly formed Photographic Museum at George Eastman House.

The Cromer Collection at Georges Eastman House Cromer's collection of photographica was sold to the Eastman Kodak Company in 1939, five years after Gabriel Cromer's death. It was then donated to the George Eastman House Museum, founded in 1949, which still owns the daguerreotypes made by Cromer's amateur to this day. by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot, as well as works by Nadar, Étienne Carjat, Charles Marville, Gustave Le Gray, Edouard Baldus, and the Bisson Brothers and albums by Eugène Durieu, Désiré Charnay and Victor Hugo.