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Édouard Baldus was born in 1820 in France and worked as a painter in the 1840s photography peeked his interest. He was a founding member of the Societe Heliographique and an important influence to the art of heliogravure, a photomechanical process. He used the calotype process from 1851 and began using collodion wet-plate negatives and albumen prints in 1956. A pioneer of the photographic medium, he documented architectureal monuments of France as well as landscpes, paintings and the documentation of the Rhone Floods. In 1851 he was commissioned by the Comite des Monuments Historiques to photograph monuments in Paris, Fontainebleau, Burgundy, the Dauphine, Normandy, Auvergne and Provence. During 1854-1855 Baldus created 1,500 photographs of a new wing of the Louvre in Paris and was commissioned by Baron James de Rothschild to photograph the railroad lines in France.