Le Blondel took up photography during its earliest years, traveling in northern France as an itinerant photographer before settling in Lille, the region’s expanding urban center. There he supported himself by making city views and studio portraits, and his experimentation with a range of processes garnered the respect of the wider French photographic community. Reviewers were entranced by the rigor of Le Blondel’s gaze; much of the charm of his work is due to the amount of detail he was able to coax from his negatives. Suffused with an air of nostalgia, Le Blondel’s photograph of an aging farmhouse in Pérenchies, a village near Lille, records a style of architecture—and a way of life—disappearing in the maw of 1850s industrialization.
