Charles Baudelaire, “On Photography,” from The Salon of 1859

Charles Baudelaire, father of modern art criticism, was deeply ambivalent about modernity.  Some of his concerns about the creative situation for the artist in a mechanically progressive age are displayed in this commentary on photography from the Salon review of 1859, the year most Baudelaire scholars consider his most brilliant and productive.  In the twelve years between the 1846 review and this one, the poet’s contempt for the values of the middle-class establishment and the egalitarian “mob” had deepened. After a brief, disillusioning engagement at the barricades in 1848, the 1851 Bonapartist coup d’état, and the coronation of Napoleon III the next year, whatever hope he might have held for the politics of his era vanished.  His alienated modernism gained further assurance in early 1852 from his discovery of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American poète maudit whose vision Baudelaire recognized as his own.  Poe’s influence can be detected in the 1857 Flowers of Evil, a collectio

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