First Photographic Hoax

Do you know that in 2024 photography will turn 185 year-old?

In 1839 French Academy of Sciences announced Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s invention of photography and presented it as a gift to the world.

This concluded a hundreds-year long search, once started by magicians and alchemists, for technology able to secure images created by light. Nevertheless, at the same time while Daguerre received his recognition (the process was originally named after him) some other inventors working towards the same goal felt overlooked and underappreciated.

Among them was another Frenchman, Hippolyte Bayard, who expressed his disappointment by creating the first photographic hoax – a self-portrait accompanied with a mocumentary note. Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, known as Le Noyé was produced on October 18th, 1840, and it consists of three photographs, which differ only in minor details, and portray Bayard staged as a decomposing corpse.

The images are supplemented with a short mockumentary suicide note in which the creator of a photographic method of direct positive printing, in mockingly solemn tone directly addresses the viewer and explains both the pictures and circumstances of his alleged drowning:

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life...! https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103KH7 

Bayard ironically plays with the pictorial conventions of his time, but Le Noyé is not a simple ridicule of visual styles. It contains a “serious joke,” which in the ostensibly humorous way passes the emotional message and communicates difficult truth By composing Le Noyé in a way that it makes a clear visual allusion to Jacques-Louis Davis, Death of Marat (1793), the painting which secured Marat’s status as a revolutionary martyr, Bayard not only mourns himself as an undervalued innovator and failed entrepreneur but also paints his self-portrait in terms of a sacrificial victim of culture in which social connections mean more than genuine achievements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat#/media/File:Death_of_Marat_by_David.jpg 

Most importantly however, by composing a witty self-portrait and the joke, the photographer attracts the viewer’s attention to his invention and abilities.

By positioning himself as an underdog cheated by authorities he builds his own personal brand of the “independent” photographer, who in his work relies on how own wit and creativity