Pierre Trémaux


Pierre Trémaux was a French architect, Orientalist photographer, and author of numerous scientific and ethnographic publications.

Life and career

Very little is known about Pierre Trémaux's life. He was born in Charrecey, France into a family of modest means. He was the son of Jean-Marie Trémaux, a farmer and Claudine Renaudin and had at least two sisters. Details of his final years are very sketchy and details of death and final resting place are unknown.
Trémaux distinguished himself in many fields. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1840 and received the second Prix de Rome in Architecture in 1845. As a trained architect, he worked at the Schneider establishments in Le Creusot. He was interested in urbanism, the breakthrough of the Suez Canal. A naturalist, he traveled to Algeria, Tunisia, Upper Egypt, Eastern Sudan and Ethiopia in 1847-1848, where he made many drawings and became one of the first to produce photographic images of the region. From Alexandria, he went up the Nile to Nubia. In 1853-1854, he undertook a second photographic trip to Libya, Egypt, Asia Minor, Tunisia, Syria and Greece. He returned from these trips with many illustrations and photographic images, some of the first photographs ever made of the region and its people.

Work

Photography

Relatively few of his photographs have survived, and of the few that exist, the condition is very poor yet these reveal that he was not particularly talented as a photographer. However, his published works, the Voyagesseries, were the first books on Egypt, Palestine and other Middle Eastern locations to use photographic illustrations.

Theory of Evolution

Trémaux is the author of a work that caused a sensation at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris: Origine et transformations de l'homme et des autres êtres , 1865. In this book he proposed, for the first time in history, the evolutionary theory that today is referred to as the theory of punctuated equilibria.

Publications

Between 1852 and 1868, Trémaux produced a number of distinct groups of photographic plates to accompany texts on the geography, architecture, and people of African and Anatolian regions. Produced with the support of French government, these high quality publications, combined an array of graphic techniques in ways that had not previously been attempted. The images combine salted paper prints, engravings, tinted and colour lithographs and photolithographs.
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