Edgar Degas

Degas became  interested in photography at the end of his life and only pursued this form of expression for a short period of time. His photographic work carries us to the heart of what defined him as an artist; a vital emotional need. Degas suffered from melancholy and deep dissatisfaction, which he expressed through photography. Black and white was his passion, on whose subject he wrote: "While my blacks were too intense and my whites not enough, both are clarified as in the works of the masters." His search for higher standards and a particular sensitivity for darkness revealed themselves during the numerous pose sessions during which he used lamps. The intensity he achieved in his work created an ambivalence between art and photography. His experiments prompted him to take important technical risks. They consisted in exposing twice the same photographic plate, the second time at 90 degrees. The result is an original mixture of faces and paintings presented cautiously by Degas as an " amusing failure ". This failure can also be seen as a photograph of photography: " Nothing in art should look like an accident, even  movement ", he said.

Of his photographic work we conserve about forty exceptional compositions, of which we feel that Degas captured simultaneously the possible and the impossible.

However, Degas would endlessly experiment with unusual techniques. He would sometimes mix his pastel so heavily with liquid fixative that it became amalgamated into a sort of paste. He would do a drawing in charcoal and use layers of pastel to cover part of this. He would combine pastels and oil in a single work. He would even pass through a press a heavily pigmented charcoal drawing in order to transfer the excess of pigment onto a new sheet so as to make an inverse proof of the original. In his monotypes he used etching in a new way: he inked the unetched plate and drew with a brush in this layer of ink; then he removed all the ink in places to obtain strong contrasts of light and dark or painterly effects in this printing medium. Thus, in a variety of ways Degas succeeded in obtaining a richness of surface effects.