This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition “Taches et Traces” presented in Beauvais during the Photaumnales 2015.

Made in 1840, a few months after the invention of photography was made official, Hippolyte Bayard's drowned self-portrait is often referred to as the "first art photograph". Neglected by those, scientists or politicians, who formalized the invention of photography, the experimenter expressed his disappointment by portraying himself as a drowned person. The fashion for the “selfie”, of which The Drowned One would form one of the most distant film ancestors, has recently amplified the success of this first staging in the history of photography.

Finally, Bayard after Le noyé gradually abandoned his direct positive process to resort to the negative on salted paper, the matrix of his eponymous prints. But what about the Bayard before The Drowned? These are some of his experimental images which are featured in the exhibition at the National Tapestry Gallery in Beauvais and in this book. Fragility of the test, Bayard's direct positive process was not fixed but only stabilized. At the limits of abstraction, the changing images that result oscillate between spots and traces, appearance and disappearance.

Luce Lebart, director of collections of the French Society of Photography and curator of the “Taches et Traces” exhibition.