Édouard Delessert

Cagliari, tower of San Pancrazio in 1854. Photograph by Edouard Delessert, 1854

From a wealthy family, writer and novelist, Édouard Delessert (Paris, 1828-1898) traveled extensively in the East, and did not fail to document his stays in as many travel journals.
His approach to photography dates back approximately 1850, thanks to Gustave Le Gray, the inventor of the waxed negative - a refined version of the calotype designed by Fox Talbot - and his uncle Benjamin Delessert, a founding member of the "Société Héliographique “, the first French photographic association. He was among the first to use the small 'carte de visit' format, designed in 1851 by Louis Dodero and, however, patented in 1854 by Adolphe Disdéri in 1854.
He arrived in Sardinia in May 1854, accompanied by an assistant and equipped with the necessary equipment for the production of calotypic negatives, as can be seen from his notes. During his six-week stay, he took forty photographs, published when he returned to Paris in the album "Île de Sardaigne. Cagliari et Sassari. 40 photographic views”; the travel diary, “Six Weeks on the Island of Sardinia”, was printed the following year.
Only two copies of the photo album are preserved, one at the Royal Library of Turin and the other at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
His is undoubtedly the oldest photographic documentation currently known about Sardinia. It depicts the main Sardinian towns he visited: Porto Torres, Sassari, Macomer, Milis, Oristano and Cagliari. His images are characterized by the almost total absence of the human figure, with the exception of the probable self-portrait against the background of a panoramic view of Cagliari.
This lack of presence is not intentional, as has generally been argued, but generated by the very long exposure times typical of older procedures, through which it was possible to fix only absolutely immovable elements. At least two shots, in fact, clearly show “ghost images”, confused halos that are nothing more than the wake of people's movement during the shooting (“Oristano, Porte d'Entrée”, “Sassari, Porte S. Antonio”), while in other two, static figures are clearly distinguishable (“Cagliari, Rue d'Jena”, “Cagliari, Porta Stampaccio”).