Duchenne & Adrien Tournachon
1854/1862
Pain

Albumen print
4.7 x 3.6 ins
 
Archive Farms
Publication:
 
Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, John Murray, London, 1872, pl 7
 
Philip Prodger: Darwin's Camera, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009,
 
The Truthful Lens: A Survey of the Photographically Illustrated Book 1844-1914, Lucien. Goldschmidt, The Grolier Club (1980), pl 90
 
Scenes in a Library, Carol Armstrong, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA , 1998, fig 1.24
 
Rosenblum, Naomi, A World History of Photography, Abbeville Press, New York, 1997, pl 79
 
George Eastman House, Photography from 1839 to today, Taschen, Koln, 1999, pg 284
 
Duchenne de Boulogne - Exhibition at the Beaux Art de Paris" - 1999
 
Nadar - Les années créatrices - 1854 - 1860 - Musée d'Orsay Exhibition in Paris 1994 and the MMA in New York 1995.
 
Frizot, Nouvelle histoire de la Photographie, 1994
 
Photographie et Science - une beauté à découvrir - Musée des Beaux-Arts de Canada, 1997
 
Canguilhem - Le merveilleux scientifique - Photographies du monde savant en France (1844-1918), 2004
 
Sobieszek, Robert, Ghost in the Shell, Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999, pg 41
 
Other Collections: MMA, Musee d'Orsay, NYPL
 
Notes: Plate 64 from Dr Duchenne de Boulogne,Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, 1862. Duchenne de Boulogne himself is partially visible on the right hand side of the photo.
 
Adrien was the younger brother of Félix Tournachon, the well-known artist and caricaturist whose work appeared in numerous satirical newspapers under the pseudonym, Nadar. The two became embroiled in a legal battle over the exclusive right to the name "Nadar." Félix had arranged for Adrien, a painter, to learn the photographic process and then to open his own photographic studio. When the business began to fail the two collaborated, and Félix supplied financial backing, contacts, and his pseudonym. Adrien asked Félix to relinquish his share in the studio and continued the practice alone using the name "Nadar jeune," which prompted Félix to take legal action. After the court ruled that Félix was "the only, the true Nadar," Adrien turned his attention to photographing animals.
 
(source: NGA)
 
In compiling a scientific treatise to aid artists, the physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne used electrical stimulation of the facial muscles to elicit expressions of the principal emotions. Wanting his transcriptions to be exact, he collaborated with Adrien Tournachon (brother of the famous Nadar), a photographer who specialized in portraiture. From the negatives they made together in 1854, Adrien produced a single set of carefully crafted prints that the doctor mounted in a large album (now École des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Later, on his own, Duchenne copied and cropped the images to create illustrations for his book Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; ou, Analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques (1862). In the volume, Duchenne wrote that the subject of this image seems terrified of the idea of imminent death or torture: “This expression must be that of the damned.”
 
LL/90765