The Many Lives of the Getty Bayard Album

This essay looks at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Bayard Album, a book filled with 167 photographs predominantly taken by pioneering French photographer Hippolyte Bayard (1801–87). It brings to the fore questions about Bayard’s processes, subjects, and network of British colleagues. The uncertainty surrounding the album’s compiler offers an opportunity to explore Bayard’s own role. While the album is undated, physical clues present evidence that it was one of the earliest photographic albums ever made. Thus, the compiler had to turn to non-photographic precedents for the presentation and sequencing of imagery. The various notations and twentieth-century alterations found in the Getty album reveal its mutability, raising questions about whose hands this album passed through and how the various owners changed its meaning over the course of 180 years. This study demonstrates how the album genre complicates our understanding of cultural artifacts and the artists associated with them.