Category:Franz Laforest

Franz Thiard De Laforest 

Austro-Hungarian photographer
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Date of birth	26 April 1838 Vienna
Date of death	4 April 1911 Kotor
Country of citizenship	Austrian Empire
Occupation	photographer writer
Field of work	photography literature
Work location	Dalmatia
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Franz Thiard de Laforest (Vienna 1838 - Kotor 1911), Austro-Hungarian photographer active in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

"Franz Thiard de Laforest, the descendant of the renowned Burgundy lineage Thiard de Bissy, was born in Vienna in 1838. Although he graduated cum laude from the merchant school (1856), he chose photography as his life’s calling [7, p. 63], at that time a completely new and astounding medium. He set out on a journey throughout Europe with a wooden camera given to him by his parents. Taking photographs of scenes whose beauty enchanted him, he captured the natural and cultural heritage of many European lands and cities, particularly those along the Adriatic coast, thereby becoming one of the pioneers of the art of photography. However, this was more than just art. Today his photographs are a source of data about life as it was at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, a testament of the people of that time, clothing and fashion, events and holidays, landscapes, architecture and interiors. Franz Laforest was a man with artistic and restless spirit who loved to travel a lot, and was also fond of frequent change of residence. He spent the first twenty years of his life in his home town Vienna (Austria). After his studies at the end of the 1850s, he lived and was employed for some time in Trieste (Italy) and he spent the next two decades in the territory of the present-day Republic of Croatia. After living in the area of Rijeka and Bakar, he moved to Zadar where he lived from 1860 to 1868, working with his business partner Stiger [6]. Afterwards he stayed briefly in Šibenik and by 1870 was active in Split. He spent a short period in his home town, Vienna, where he married Gabriella von Lachmann, and in 1883 moved to Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), where four of their children were born. He finally settled in Kotor (Montenegro) in the 1890s, where he got three more children and where he lived until his death in 1911. He ventured out along the Dalmatian coast and occasionally went inland, filming also in Pula, Omiš, Livno, Metković, Dubrovnik [1, 8] and some other places, creating documents of the time with the camera. Laforest also published two books illustrated with his own photographs: Spalato und seine Alterhümer (1878) and Die Bocche du Cattaro (1898) [3]. After Laforest’s death, his wife Gabriella employed photographers who continued to work in his atelier in Kotor. His children, daughter Marija (Mitzi) and son Feliks, continued the tradition, so that the Atelier Laforest in Kotor kept its door open until some time after 1960 [4, p. 281]." (Koraljka Kuzman Šlogar, Преглед НЦД 25 (2014), 45–51)

• "Album von Dalmatien — Photographien aus der Anstalt von Franz Laforest in Cattaro."

[1], [2]

• Foto album narodni nosnji
• https://www.dorotheum.com/en/l/6183819/#

• Franz Thiard de Laforest (1838-1911) — Author of the Book Die Bocche di Cattaro, 1898