A morgue, a dead man, a vase with flowers, a straw hat, a small garden statue… This image, which looks like the final version of a deceased person, is actually a self-portrait that contains criticism.
Let’s dive into why this man who painted his own dead body did such a thing, what message he wanted to convey, and the details of the painting, which even entered the Guinness Book of Records.
First, let’s take a brief look at the interesting history of photography.
In fact, the first cartridge of photography dates back to the 1700s. A German professor named Johann Heinrich Schulze discovers that silver nitrates are affected by sunlight. In the early 1800s, inventor Thomas Wedgwood managed to record the image of the object on the surface using light using chemical methods, but this image was not permanent.
The inventor named Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who made experiments and additions to this method; He records the images on a paper that he makes transparent with varnish, on a tin plate using the lithographic technique. According to records, the first photograph was taken in 1826, exposed for 8 hours, resulting in the first known photograph in history.
So how did history’s first “fake photo” emerge?
This picture, which is a ‘self-portrait’ and looks like a photograph, is actually a bit scary. The man named Hippolyte Bayard in the picture; He depicts his own corpse in the morgue, where there is a garden statue, a vase with flowers and a straw hat.
He was experimenting with photography. Even though he was not the inventor of photography, he was the inventor of fake photography. There was a reason why it was like this.
He could have been among the inventors of the real photograph, not the fake photograph.
Photographer Bayard was persuaded by his friend to delay announcing his process to the French Academy of Sciences. This delay cost him recognition as one of the main inventors of photography.
He tried to express the injustice he was exposed to and felt through a drawing. Although the picture seemed scary when looked at from the outside, it turned into a self-portrait of pain when I learned its story.
On the back of the painting was an inscription by the painter:
“The body you see here belongs to M. Bayard, the inventor of the method. The government, which was very generous to M. Daguerre, told M. Bayard that they could do nothing, and the poor man drowned himself. Ah, the vagaries of human life! He had been in the morgue for several days and “No one recognized him or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you had better pass through here for fear of offending your sense of smell, because, as you can see, the gentleman’s face and hands are beginning to rot.”
The French morgue of the time made Bayard’s protest more meaningful.
At that time, the Paris morgue was open to the public. Visitors came to identify victims of unsolved murders and suicides. Bayard’s morgue painting was actually a metaphor for recognition and identification.
Besides the people exhibited in the Paris morgue, there were also a few items related to them. Bayard also chose a straw hat, a statue and a vase with flowers to describe himself.
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