A photographic device Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir et Stéphane Mallarmé (1895)

On December 16, 1895, Edgar Degas photographed Renoir and Mallarmé at the home of Julie Manet. Through this double portrait, he compared two contemporary movements: Impressionism and Symbolism. Using an internal mise en abyme, he portrayed photography as a non-realist art form, a matter of “fiction”—understood as a principle of néantisation (reduction to nothing) of the real. Finally, he showed how painters were resistant to it, positively contrasting their use of color with the “photographic negative”.