The Straw Hat

Émile Joachim Constant Puyo was both a photographer and a theoretician. In 1896, he wrote "Notes sur la photographie artistique," the first of many articles and books on equipment processes that he would publish throughout his career.

Puyo developed special lenses to create impressionistic effects in his landscapes, in his genre scenes, and especially in his portraits of fashionable women, of which "The Straw Hat" is an example. This image, with its extensive manipulation, is also typical of his female subjects' elegance and grace. Like their British and American fin-de-siècle counterparts, French secessionists, Puyo among them, led the crusade for the acceptance of photography as art.

Puyo was instrumental in developing a number of pigment processes, including gum bichromate, oil transfer, and (in the case of "The Straw Hat") oil pigment. Like a painter, Puyo proudly affixed his circular monogram to this image, which epitomized his impressionist pictorial aesthetic.