Summary of Mary Warner Marien's Essay on Charles Nègre's Chimney Sweep Walking.

Chimney Sweep Walking, Negre, Charles, 1851

The essay initially starts with a discussion on what were seen in 1839 as the strengths and weaknesses of photography and its limitations as an art form at the time. she mentions that Negre was a painter as well as a photographer and tells us that his interest was in making photography not just about realism and exact naturalism, but to take a more artistic and painterly approach, to experiment with shape, abstaction, pattern and tone.

She relates how under his painting tutorage under Paul Delaroche, gave Negre the confidence to try and relate painting technique to photographic technique, and how this led to him using the mediums of both formal art and photography to produce his best work. Using standard and traditional stock figures as a basis, he would use the underclass/ working class people of Paris to depict his scenes.

She then relates the historical context of using the chimney sweep in recently industrialised towns and cities, and the area in which the picture was taken, and also writes about how the technical limitations of the time may have determined a certain amount of composition, and then about the controlled ideas of the composition itself, the appaerance of movement, the shadowing of faces, the imagined or implied relationship between the sweeps themselves.

She goes onto discuss the how it was seen as a sort of documentary photograph (before that term existed) and how there was no real provision, thanks to lack of proper social outlets, for this to be seen as a sort of confirmation of social ills, though Negre himself was likely aware of it, no real meaning existed to explain this at the time.

She explains the enormous amount of technical work, from line drawings to highlights, and suggests his use of composition and technical work perhaps romanticise the image toward a nobler image. She discusses themes of western art and the ages of man, and how visual devices relate to certain time periods. The faces of the sweeps are obscured, which she suggests implies a deeper historical meaning.
The mid nineteenth century critic Frances Wey has suggested it was no longer art, and Mary Warner Marien  believes " Negre's image was thoughtfully composed by the photographer through an act of will that separated it from the mechanical rendition and moved it closer to the principles of art".

From Mary Warner Marien's Essay on Charles Nègre's Chimney Sweep Walking taken from Howarth, S and Alexander, M. D. 2005. Singular images: Essay on Remarkable Photographs. New York: Aperture