Silent Waters, 1897

Edouard Hannon (1853-1931) was an engineer and later director of Solvay in Brussels, but also made a name for himself as a critic, painter and photographer. From 1904 he lived in a luxurious mansion on the Avenue de la Jonction in Saint-Gilles, designed by the Belgian architect Jules Brunfaut, to which French Art Nouveau artists such as Paul-Albert Baudouin and Emile Gallé contributed. During his world travels for Solvay and in his spare time, Hannon emerged as a remarkable photographer. As a young man in his twenties, he was a founding member of the Association belge de photographie. Hannon's reputation grew around the turn of the century through his participation in national and international salons for fine arts, where photography received growing attention. His work was also shown at major photography exhibitions in Europe, including in 1894 at the first exhibition of the Photo-Club in Paris, where he won the gold medal. A year later, he was co-organiser of the Salon photographique belge in Brussels. Together with Gustave Marissiaux and Léonard Misonne, Hannon is considered today as one of the protagonists of the so-called pictorialist direction in photography. In this direction, he had a great merit in the field of portrait, reportage and landscape photography. The intact and exceptionally well-preserved print of the photogravure is characterised by tight composition, sophisticated framing and alienating light-dark effects, which lend it a strong symbolic charge. Silent Waters had a European resonance because of the photogravure that the Association belge de photographie had made of it.