Brighton Photographer Louis Bertin

Friday, 29 August 2014

Louis Bertin

1874-1886

This CDV, photographed "from life" by Louis Bertin shows Mr (later Sir) Charles Wyndham, the famous actor, surgeon and later founder of London's Wyndham Theatre.

He has a fascinating biography which can be read on Wikipedia (click here), highlights of which include the fact that he volunteered to become a brigade surgeon during the American Civil War; he performed on stage in the UK with Ellen Terry, and once in New York shared the stage with the actor John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

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Here is another Bertin card from my collection, this time showing one of his non-celebrity clients (as far as I know!).

If you would like to read much more about Louis Bertin then I recommend the wonderful page on the Sussex PhotoHistory website dedicated to the Bertin family, with many illustrations. Follow this link.

From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

Because I've always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don't need to explain; maybe you'll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can – what was just inside the door.

The wonder is even stronger with old stereoscopic views – the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth. It's never been a mystery to me why the whole country was once crazy about them. Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real: Insert a view, slide it into focus, and the old scene leaps out at you, astonishingly three-dimensional. And then, for me, the awe becomes intense. Because now you really see the arrested moment, so actual it seems that if you watch intently, the life caught here must continue. That the raised horse's hoof so startlingly distinct in the foreground must move down to the solidness of pavement below it again; those carriage wheels revolve, the girl walk closer, the man move on out of the scene. The feeling that the tantalizing reality of the vanished moment might somehow be seized – that if you watch long enough you might detect that first nearly imperceptible movement – is the answer to the question Kate has asked me more than once: "How can you sit there so long – you hardly move! – staring endlessly at the very same picture?"

Time travel with old photographs

Brighton Photographer Louis Bertin

Louis Bertin

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Time travel with old photographs

Brighton Photographer Louis Bertin

Louis Bertin

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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