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Nothing is simple for this fellow!
I wish I had some idea how I came to be looking up Charles Baudelaire on Wikipedia, but I consider it a lucky strike of free association: I had never seen a photograph of him before. This one got my attention.
It's credited to Étienne Carjat, c. 1863. I had some idea of what he looked like from paintings, but none of them have that mimetic jolt: you stare in at the subject, he stares out at you. It's weirdly modern, immediate. How often do you see photographs from the 1860's where the subjects have bruises under their eyes? He looks like an accountant who hasn't slept for a month. He's a Decadent poet's hangover. And somehow he looks respectable. Run-down, but not in the aesthetically dissipated way. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 commented, "I'm not sure I'd ever expected to see a photograph of a person who looked like a cross between Remus Lupin and Calvin Coolidge, but if I had I would not have expected that person to be Baudelaire.") Given, of course, that he was Baudelaire, I bet it annoyed the fuck out of him.
It's credited to Étienne Carjat, c. 1863. I had some idea of what he looked like from paintings, but none of them have that mimetic jolt: you stare in at the subject, he stares out at you. It's weirdly modern, immediate. How often do you see photographs from the 1860's where the subjects have bruises under their eyes? He looks like an accountant who hasn't slept for a month. He's a Decadent poet's hangover. And somehow he looks respectable. Run-down, but not in the aesthetically dissipated way. (
fleurdelis28 commented, "I'm not sure I'd ever expected to see a photograph of a person who looked like a cross between Remus Lupin and Calvin Coolidge, but if I had I would not have expected that person to be Baudelaire.") Given, of course, that he was Baudelaire, I bet it annoyed the fuck out of him.
no subject
Somehow I'd missed all of them. All hail Wikipedia, which at least joins text to image in recognition-useful ways. (I'm now thinking of it as a field guide to dead artists. There must be something to do with that concept.)
How long an exposure would it have been?
I have no idea—ask
this rather more relaxed photo of him. Also this one.
I saw those. Oddly, they look more rather than less posed to me: portrait of the artist as a relatively young whatever. There's no particular stance in the first one, just Baudelaire. I'm sure it's as much of an illusion as any other portrait, but . . .
the photo of Rimbaud.
Yeah. That I've seen.