NEW YORK, NY.- Hans P. Kraus Jr. is presenting its summer show Untroubled Waters: Navigating Early Photographs through 20 August 2026. On display are primarily British and French works by William Henry Fox Talbot, Gustave Le Gray, Charles Nègre, Paul-Marcellin Berthier, Robert Howlett, J. B. Greene, and others depicting boatyards, bridges, the seashore, and other waterways.
As a Cambridge man, it is not surprising that when William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) photographed in Cambridge he turned his camera on the Bridge of Sighs. The celebrated Bridge of Sighs over the River Cam had been completed in 1831, just a few years before Talbot’s photograph. Talbot’s use of light in this picture is exquisite. He timed his exposure for that brief period during the day while the ancient college buildings on the right were in deep shadow, bringing out the bridge in relief. The calotype’s relatively long exposure time allowed the water to flow into a silvery mass. The shadow in the lower left completes the framing.
Gustave Le Gray’s (1820-1884) seascapes brought him immediate international recognition for their technical and artistic achievement. This print of the French and English fleets at Cherbourg is a prime example of Le Gray’s celebrated naval views. Here he applied the many lessons he had learned in the making of seascapes since 1856. The present view was recorded in a single large glass negative during the official visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the port of Cherbourg. At the invitation of Napoleon III, between August 5 and 8, the royal couple viewed a demonstration of France’s modern fleet in several maneuvers.
Paul-Marcellin Berthier's (1822-1912) work as both a photographer and a painter of landscapes positions him as a participant in the debates of the time exploring the relationship between painting and the then new medium of photography. Here, Berthier's 1865 photograph of the Bineau Bridge anticipates both Seurat's The Bridge of Courbevoie, painted in 1886-1887, showing the island location of his most famous painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and van Gogh’s 1887 painting The Bridge at Courbevoie, one in his series of river scenes and landscapes made along the Seine in Paris.
Robert Howlett (1831-1858) was a partner at the Photographic Institution, a leading professional studio in London. In 1857 The London Times commissioned him to document the construction of the steamship Great Eastern. The images were published by the Illustrated London News on 16 June 1858.
Howlett’s three photographs of the Great Eastern on display were taken with a large sliding box camera. In an image of the ship’s hull, Howlett emphasizes the ship’s unprecedented scale to convey a sense of awe and spectacle. The giant ship was built at John Scott Russell’s shipyard at the Isle of Dogs, London. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the largest man-made object ever built at the time took four years to build and three months to launch in 1859. The Great Eastern was a symbol of Great Britain’s national pride and industrial supremacy. It was designed for the route to India and Australia but never sailed to either destination. Geopolitical and financial pressures ultimately rendered the Great Eastern redundant; it was sold for scrap in 1888.
J. B. Greene (1832-1856) was a student of Le Gray’s in Paris who, as Eugenia Parry writes, was “a magician of change who inspired [him] and shaped [his] genius.” In 1853, Greene made the first of two voyages to Egypt as a photographer and archaeologist. As Greene's work in Egypt evolved he began to place greater emphasis on evoking a place rather than merely describing it. While Greene's negatives were produced to create positive prints, a wider understanding of his oeuvre must acknowledge the integrity of these negatives as works of art themselves. The luminous reversal of the normal experience of light and shade ensured their status as an equally valued facet of his artistic output. His early death at age 24 left his exquisite Egyptian pictures as both his legacy and his memorial to photographic art. The dahabiyya pictured was Greene’s riverboat home and darkroom, complete with an American flag declaring his nationality.
