Hércules Florence's photographie in Brazil
1833–34 (Campinas, Brazil)
Working alone in Campinas, Brazil, the French-born artist Hércules Florence made images with silver salts and called the method 'photographie', years before the word was used in Europe.
How it began
Hércules Florence was a French-born painter who settled in Campinas, in the province of São Paulo, after a scientific expedition through the Brazilian interior. With no printing presses nearby, he looked for a way to reproduce his drawings and labels. From around 1833 he experimented with paper sensitised with silver salts, both in a camera obscura and by contact printing.
How it works
Like Schulze before him, Florence relied on silver salts that darken in light. He printed designs drawn on glass onto sensitised paper by sunlight, and stabilised the results well enough to use them as labels and diplomas. His notebooks call the method photographie: drawing with light.
Why it mattered
Florence shows that photography was being invented in several places at once. His use of the word photographie predates John Herschel’s “photography” of 1839. Because he worked far from Europe’s scientific societies, his priority was not recognised until the Brazilian historian Boris Kossoy studied his papers in the 1970s.
Limits and what replaced it
His process was little known and made no lasting camera images. The methods that spread around the world came from Daguerre and Talbot in 1839.
Today
Recognised as one of photography's independent inventors since Boris Kossoy's research in the 1970s.