n 1859 the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote a long review of that year's Paris Salon, the state exhibition of painting and sculpture. Its second part, "Le public moderne et la photographie", is the best-known early attack on a new way of making pictures by machine. It is quoted below in the original French, from the 1868 collected edition, with our own translations, which are labelled as ours. (Baudelaire, 1859)

the document

Twenty years after the daguerreotype was made public in 1839, photography had become a trade and a craze. Baudelaire's target is less the machine than the public's taste for exact copies, and the painters who, he says, fled into the new trade. The first passage is the insult:

“Comme l’industrie photographique était le refuge de tous les peintres manqués, trop mal doués ou trop paresseux pour achever leurs études, cet universel engouement portait non seulement le caractère de l’aveuglement et de l’imbécillité, mais avait aussi la couleur d’une vengeance.”
— Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, II, in Curiosités esthétiques, Michel Lévy frères, 1868 (Wikisource)

As the photographic industry was the refuge of every failed painter, too poorly gifted or too lazy to finish his studies, this universal craze bore not only the mark of blindness and imbecility but also the colour of revenge. [our translation, not a published one]

The second is the settlement he proposes, and the phrase that gives the tour its room:

“Il faut donc qu’elle rentre dans son véritable devoir, qui est d’être la servante des sciences et des arts, mais la très-humble servante, comme l’imprimerie et la sténographie, qui n’ont ni créé ni suppléé la littérature.”
— ibid. (Wikisource)

It must therefore go back to its true duty, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor replaced literature. [our translation, not a published one]

The third is the fear underneath:

“Mais s’il lui est permis d’empiéter sur le domaine de l’impalpable et de l’imaginaire, sur tout ce qui ne vaut que parce que l’homme y ajoute de son âme, alors malheur à nous !”
— ibid. (Wikisource)

But if it is allowed to trespass on the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, on everything that has value only because man adds something of his soul to it, then woe to us! [our translation, not a published one]

what it says

The argument has three parts, and they come apart. One is a claim about people: that the craze is driven by bad taste and by failed artists. One is a division of labour: the machine may record and serve, as printing serves literature, but should not compete. And one is a theory of value: some things are worth something only because a person put something of themselves into them. The third is the one that lasts, and it is close to what modern experiments find ordinary viewers believe; see how people respond to machine-made art.

what is contested

Whether Baudelaire was wrong. Photography did not stay a servant; within a lifetime it was an art with its own museums. But his third claim was never really about photography's abilities. It is a claim about where value comes from, and it cannot be refuted by better photographs. Readers also disagree about tone: much of the section is satire of the public, and the "humble servant" line may be as much a jibe at painters who copy as a rule for machines.

A famous companion line is not real. The painter Paul Delaroche is often quoted as saying, on seeing a daguerreotype, that painting was dead from that day. The historian Stephen Bann has traced the line no further back than a survey published in 1873, decades after the supposed remark, and Delaroche in fact encouraged photography (Bann, 2001). We do not quote it except to say it is apocryphal.

methodological critiques

As evidence about the reception of photography, a single brilliant polemic is a poor sample: it records one writer's position, sharpened for publication, not what visitors felt. Its value is as a statement of a position that keeps recurring, in nearly the same words, whenever a machine makes pictures.

later reception

Walter Benjamin, in the essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility (1935–36), turned the question round: he argued that photography and film changed what art was, by detaching it from the "aura" of the unique original, rather than simply failing to be art (Benjamin, 1936). The argument against generated images in the 2020s often repeats Baudelaire's third claim almost exactly, and the reply often repeats Benjamin. [the house's view] Both are still worth reading in full before taking a side.

in the tour: a wing planned for the tour, called "Who made this?", will have a room called “The Very Humble Servant” ···

References

1. Baudelaire (1859). Salon de 1859, part II, "Le public moderne et la photographie". Collected in Curiosités esthétiques, Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1868; transcribed from that edition at Wikisource. fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques/Salon_de_1859
2. Bann (2001). Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press. We have not seen the page ourselves; the point is summarised by L. Anslow, "Paul Delaroche loved photography", at the link. newart.press/p/paul-delaroche-loved-photography
3. Benjamin (1936). The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. Written 1935–36; first published in French in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936). Paraphrased only.

see also