Gustave Le Gray

Trained as a painter in the studios of Paul Delaroche — where he later took on Henri Le Secq, Charles Nègre, Nadar, Olympe Aguado, and Maxime Du Camp as photography students — Le Gray turned to photography in the late 1840s and invented the dry waxed-paper negative in 1851 — a process that revolutionized landscape photography by enabling extended exposures and travel without portable darkrooms. The same year, he co-founded the Société héliographique — the first photographic society in the world. Selected by the Commission des Monuments Historiques for the Mission Héliographique of 1851 (with Henri Le Secq, Édouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, and Auguste Mestral), he documented the medieval monuments of central and southern France. His 1856-1857 seascapes — particularly The Great Wave at Sète and The Brig — were the first photographs to render both sky and sea with full tonal detail, achieved by combining two negatives. Commissioned by Napoleon III to document Camp de Châlons (1857), he ended his career in Egyptian exile after financial collapse. Held at MET, Orsay, BnF, Getty. Public domain since 1955. His waxed-paper negative opened the way for mobile landscape photography, before wet collodion (Archer, 1851) and later gelatin silver bromide (1871) superseded paper-based negatives.