PUHAR, JANEZ

After secondary school graduation, P. intended to study painting, but at his mother's request, enrolled in theology. In 1838 he was ordained into the priesthood and he served as a curate in various places across Slovenia. According to the ecclesiastic standards of the time, he was too much involved in secular matters, thus he never got his own parish.
In 1839 he started to work with photography and was in particular dedicated to photochemistry. By 1842 he had developed his own complete procedure for taking pictures; he chose to use a transparent material as a basis – a glass plate - and thereby opened the way for the future development of multiple-reproductive photography. He covered a glass plate with a transparent layer of sulphur and then exposed it for a few seconds to iodine vapour. The prepared plate was then exposed to light from between 15 seconds to one minute in a camera obsura. Simultaneously, mercury vapour would coat the exposed places on the picture. The resulting picture was only faint, so P. further exposed it to bromine vapour. The resulting negative on the glass was then fixed in alcohol.
The entire process, which took place within the camera obscura, lasted for 5 to 8 minutes. The transparent negative on a glass plate could be observed as a positive if held at a certain angle and against a dark background. About ten of P's photographs have been preserved, including two self-portraits. In addition to their high technical quality, these works also have an artistic value.
In 1843, P. described his invention in Ljubljana and Graz newspapers. Between 1846-53 he lived in Bled where in addition to the process described above, he also developed original processes for paper photography and thus got very close to the technique of copying and enlarging negatives from a glass plate onto a paper positive. He did not protect his inventions by a patent however, and the Frenchman Joseph Niepce patented his own similar technique for glass plate photography in 1847. In order to sustain his primacy, P. reported his already seven-year old invention to the Natural Science Association in Ljubljana, in 1849.
In 1852 he was awarded a diploma by the French Academy of Agriculture, Trade and Commerce in Paris, referring to him as an »inventor of glass plate photography«. In 1851 P. appeared with his photographs at an exhibition in London, and in 1852 in New York.
During the last years of his life he suffered lung conditions that can be attributed to his work with corrosive chemicals, sulphur, halogens and mercury. His contribution to the development of photography was only rediscovered in the 20th century.