Charles-Fortunat-Paul-Casimir Perier

b. 1812 — d. 1897

Charles-Fortunat-Paul-Casimir Perier French, 1812-1897 Paris-born Paul Perier was a serious amateur photographer and noted photography critic and theoretician. The son of Casimir-Pierre Perier, premier and minister of the interior under Louis-Philippe, he was a wealthy man whose fortune came not only from the family banking business but also from railroad speculation and shipping. His riches allowed Perier to collect 17th-century Dutch painting and works from the Barbizon School, both of which greatly influenced his own photographic vision—especially his interest in photographing landscape and trees. In the mid-1850s Perier's early landscape work was done in albumen with paper negatives, and it appears that he preferred the soft, blurred images this process produced, since glass negatives were used for all of his portrait work during the same period. He eventually switched entirely to glass negatives, using them exclusively by 1859. Perier was a founding member of the Société française de photographie and served as the charter vice president. He became a critic for the Society's Bulletin and is a major literary source for early photography today. Perier actively exhibited his images from 1855-65, participating biannually in the society's expositions, the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris (where he was awarded an honorable mention), and exhibitions in Brussels. Confusion occasionally arises over Perier's last name, for in 1878 his older brother, Auguste, a minister of the French Republic, changed the family surname to Casimir-Perier. K.L.C.