Matador

A Spanish matador, seen here wearing his ‘traje de luces’.

Photographed by Juan Laurent of Madrid.

Jean Laurent Minier (born at Nevers, France, in 1816) was the most active promoter of photography in Spain in the nineteenth century and its most representative and emblematic figure. He moved to Spain in 1843 and took his first known Spanish photographs in 1857. Over the course of half a century he and his studio took thousands of photographs in all the various genres of the time, from reports on public works or street scenes to series on monuments, bullfights, popular types, works of art and celebrity portrait galleries. These he sold in all formats from his shops in Madrid and Paris. His shots of street scenes and human subjects stand comparison with the best of his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe and his portraits of popular types are, as a rule, excellent, and invaluable for our understanding of Spain at that time.