Antoine François Jean Claudet (1797 - 1867) is known as a French artist, glass merchant, and one of the first commercial photographers. A student of Louis Daguerre, he is also considered a pioneer in producing daguerreotype images.
Claudet, who lives in London for much of his life, makes an extraordinary contribution to the development of photography. He improves the exposure process by experimenting with chlorine (instead of bromine), resulting in a shorter exposure time. Claudet is also credited with inventing red darkroom lighting and creating the illusion of motion through a series of photographs that differ only slightly from one another. He is also the first to use a painted background when taking photographs.
In 1845, Claudet buys a lens designed by Josef Max Petzval that is sixteen times faster than the lenses used until then. In addition to short exposure times (about fifteen seconds), this allows Claudet to produce larger-format photographs. Six years later, in mid-1851, he builds the Temple of Photography in London and focuses on stereoscopic photography. This interest leads to a folding stereoscope and a stereoscopic viewer that enables the widely honored Claudet to view up to one hundred stereoscopic images in succession.
In 1867, less than a month after his death, a fire destroys the Temple of Photography, and much of Claudet’s valuable photographic collection goes up in flames.
