[Machines for the Textile Industry, Pierrard-Parpaite, Reims]
Auguste Jean Marie Jugelet French
Not on view
In this album, a series of portraits outlines a new future for the French textile industry. They are not occupational portraits: the subjects are not workers, but rather machines. In them, cutting-edge devices for wool carding and spinning are handsomely posed before the camera, hulking over their human operators. The album, commissioned by the manufacturer Pierrard-Parpaite of Reims, highlights the scale and sophistication of the new enterprise, and boasts of the firm’s recent triumphs at the 1855 World’s Fair. Already in these early salt prints, bold iron brackets and sequential rows of spindles appear strikingly graphic, seeming to anticipate the industrial eye of modern photography in the decades to follow. The Breton photographer Auguste Jugelet, better known today as a painter of seascapes, here harnesses the potential of less natural subjects.
