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Gustave Le Gray was born August 30, 1820 in Villiers-le-Bel, France.
For about three years at the beginning of the 1840s, Le Gray studied with the painter Paul Delaroche. Delaroche was noted for his quote about photography: "From today, painting is dead." Delaroche changed his mind somewhat, and preached the benefits of photographs as art studies. It is perhaps in his studio that Le Gray saw his first daguerreotype.
In 1843 Delaroche disbanded his studio and announced his plans to go on to Italy. Le Gray apparently took up the painter's idea for this trip, actually preceding Delaroche by about a month. Italy was a country Le Gray was to return to several times and where he married a young Roman woman in 1844.
After returning to Paris and while attending the French Salons of 1848 and 1853, he became even more fascinated with the new art of photography. By the 1840s Le Gray was still painting, but also making daguerreotypes and then salt paper prints.
In 1849 he proposed a process based on paraffin-coated paper, and by 1850-52 he had developed new dry wax processes for paper negatives that gave his prints greater detail. At this time he started to teach photography and had many students, including other noted photographers such as J.B. Greene, W.H. Guebhard, Leon-Eugene Mehedin, Adolphe Bilordeaux, Luigi Crette, Alphonse De Launay, F. E. Le Dien, Theodore de Banville, Henri Le Secq, Maxime Du Camp, Edouard and Benjamin Delessert and Léon de Laborde. It is also possible that he later taught Louis De Clercq his waxed paper negative techniques.
From the late 1840s through the early 1850s, Le Gray also documented the forest of Fontainebleau. In 1851 he became a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world, and later became a member and officer of the Société Française de Photographie.
In 1851 Le Gray joined the Mission Héliographique, a project to document important French architecture and monuments sponsored by the French Government. He worked with his friend Mestral. They embarked on a grand tour from the châteaux of Loire to Issoire, including the towns of Poitiers, Périgueux, Angouleme, Bordeaux, Moissac, Toulouse and Carcassonne. Their images from this series are among the rarest of the Mission Héliographique, and most such prints reside only in French institutions.
In 1853, he made another voyage to Italy, this time with a photographer by the name of F. E. Le Dien. He and Le Dien made numerous images of Rome, Pompeii and the Italian countryside with paper negatives. Le Gray was soon to abandon paper negatives for the new glass plate collodion negative process. He had already used collodion on paper.
Le Gray began to use this new process on a series of Marine studies, which were largely of the French fleet and Emperor's yacht. These were a commercial success and Le Gray sold prints even to the English photographic trade. Le Gray also became well known for his portrait studies, but apparently became bored with the work and left it to his older studio assistant Adolphe Marie Alexandre Alophe, who eventually took over his studio at the end of the 1850s.
In 1857 at the request of the Emperor Napoleon III, he made a photographic "report" on the operations at the military camp of Châlons. Approximately 15 Châlons albums are recorded in institutional and private collections.
By 1860 Le Gray, facing mounting financial difficulties, left his wife and children and fled Paris. He first went to Palermo in the company of the writer Alexander Dumas where he photographed the war in Italy.
Parting company with Dumas, Le Gray went on to Lebanon, Syria and then Egypt in 1864, where he taught drawing in Cairo for a living and continued to photograph. Besides his portrait and commercial work, he produced a number of Egyptian scenes, particularly of the Pyramids and the Tombs of the Mamelouks, which are quite rare. He died in Cairo on July 29, 1884.
Today most photo critics would agree that Le Gray is the most important 19th-century figure in photography. He was certainly one of the most interesting.
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