Gustave Le Gray

Gustave Le Gray, trained first as a painter in Paris, turned to photography in the late 1840s and opened the school that helped shape figures such as Nadar^*1. His famous seascapes solved a technical problem: a single negative could not properly render both sea and sky, so he combined separate exposures in the darkroom to make images such as The Great Wave^*2. He also improved the calotype through the waxed-paper negative process. Financial difficulty forced him out of France around 1860, and he spent the rest of his life in Cairo as a photographer and drawing teacher. Forgotten for a long time, he has since been restored to a central place in nineteenth-century photographic history^*1.