Olympe Aguado

Works

Most of Aguado's photographs consist of landscapes (especially trees, rivers, and pastoral scenes) and portraits. He had a penchant for experimenting with new photographic processes, and thus produced photographs using numerous different mediums. Surviving Aguado daguerreotypes include Intérieur d'un hôtel particulier, He initially preferred collodion on glass for portraits, but later switched to albumen prints. No known examples of Aguado's enlargement experiments have survived.

Some of Aguado's most interesting images consist of a series of staged family portraits, or "living pictures," taken in the 1860s as an apparent critique of Second Empire nobility. The most well-known of these include Admiration, which depicts several people with their backs turned to the camera admiring a painting, and La Lecture, which depicts a man reading to a bored audience (some of whom are falling asleep).

Aguado's photographs are included in the collections of the Getty Museum, the Musée d'Orsay, the French Photographic Society, and the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Gallery