This selection from a small but significant collection of the photography of Jean Laurent offers visitors to the Center for Creative Photography the first display of these extraordinary nineteenth-century prints since they were acquired in 1981.

Jean (Juan) Laurent y Cía.
Toledo.- 19.- La Puerta del Sol

Jean Laurent, artist, inventor, and entrepreneur was born in Garchizy, France in 1816. He became a cardboard manufacturer, supplying material for bookbinding and candy packaging. He moved to Spain in the 1840s, where he lived the rest of his life, changing his name to Juan, the Spanish form of Jean. In 1856 he opened a studio in Madrid. A decade later, his photographs of Spain and Portugal began selling in Paris, where he established a retail business to further expand the audience for his popular views of these southern
European countries
During the nineteenth century, modern society developed a genuine interest in the larger world with a corresponding taste for collecting. Laurent was able to work both on commission and by commercializing his own images, catering to the tastes of the upper and middle classes of his time.
Laurent cataloged every corner of Spain, and every social class of its citizenry. His images included paintings by the old masters, monuments from the past, and public works projects that reflected the country's transition to the Modern era. The prints were distributed in albums or as single works.
Although the importance of other photographic interpreters of Spain and Portugal in this period cannot be ignored, Jean Laurent was one of the most influential. Romantic as well as documentary, his images helped form the national identities of these countries.
Jean (Juan) Laurent y Cía. Cádiz.- 2057.- Vista general desde la Puerta de Tierra
 
Jean (Juan) Laurent y Cía.
Aranjuez.- 133.- Fuente del Cisne, en el Jardín del Príncipe
 
Jean (Juan) Laurent y Cía.
Burgos.- 1561.- El Paseo
del Espolón
Jean (Juan) Laurent
Ávila.- 57.- Portada
de la Catedral
 
Jean (Juan)
Laurent y Cía.
Toledo.- 567.- Claustro de San Juan de los Reyes, visto desde
el fondo
 
Jean (Juan)
Laurent y Cía.
Ronda (Málaga).- 2111 .- La Gruta del Gato
 
Albumen prints such as these were common in the late nineteenth century, and are distinctive for an egg white binder, similar to an emulsion. The warm color of these sharp, detail-rich images was obtained after gold toning, a process that also helped preserve them. Negatives were usually contact-printed using sunlight and specially prepared paper.
Like most of his contemporaries, Jean Laurent exposed collodion glass plate negatives. Collodion is made from inflammable chemicals such as guncotton and ether. Wet collodion glass plates had to be coated, exposed, and developed within a short period of time, so most photographers traveled with portable darkrooms. Dry processes, invented subsequently, allowed exposed plates to be developed at a later time. The low sensitivity to light characteristic of early processes explains why subjects in motion, such as trees blowing in the wind, often appear blurred.
Laurent was an entrepreneur who employed other photographers-notably native Spaniard Jose Martinez-Sanchez-whose contributions helped make possible the production of the over 11,000 negatives attributed to the J. Laurent Studio. Together, Laurent and Martinez-Sanchez invented leptographic paper, a thin collodion photographic printing paper that enhanced both the quality and preservation of photographs. Although other established studios and photographers used it, the paper
was not a commercial success.
J. Laurent died in the late 1880s or early 1890s. His stepdaughter continued to sell his prints, as did many other later J. Laurent Studio proprietors. Exquisite examples of vintage prints can be found in various collections around the world. Their negatives reside, under the name of the last owner of the material-Ruiz Vernacci-in Madrid's Instituto del Patrimonio Historico Español, and are now the property of the people of Spain.