Edouard baldus biography

French photographer

Édouard Baldus (5 June 1813, Grünebach, Prussia – 1889, Arcueil) was a French landscape, architectural and railway photographer.

Biography

Early life

Édouard-Denis Baldus was born on 5 June 1813 in Grünebach, Prussia.

He was originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman and lithographer before switching to photography in 1849.

Career

In 1851, he was commissioned for the Missions Héliographiques by the Historic Monuments Commission of France to photograph historic buildings, bridges and monuments, many of which were being razed to make way for the grand boulevards of Paris, being carried out under the direction of Napoleon III's prefectBaron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

The high quality of his work won him government support for a project entitled Les Villes de France Photographiées, an extended series of architectural views in Paris and the provinces designed to feed a resurgent interest in the nation's Roma