Portaal van de kathedraal van Chartres 1854

Charles Nègre made this photograph of the Chartres cathedral portal sometime in the mid-19th century, using a waxed paper negative. Now, think about what’s involved in that process. He would have carefully coated a sheet of paper with wax, making it light-sensitive, then exposed it in the camera obscura for quite some time. The resulting image would have been faint and ghostly. Only then, through careful development, could the image emerge with the quiet grandeur you see here. The materiality of the paper negative gives this print a soft, almost ethereal quality, a far cry from the sharp detail we expect from photography today. It's a reminder that photography itself was once a craft, a labor-intensive process with its own unique aesthetic. This image is as much about Nègre's skill and technique as it is about the architecture of Chartres. It's a testament to the transformative power of human touch, even in an age of increasing mechanization.