Eugenio Courret was a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 photographer who was based in Lima

Lima

Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...

, Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

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Biography

He came to Lima in 1860 to work as a cameraman in the photographic studio of Eugene Maunoury. In 1863 founded the "Photo Central" studio with his brother Aquiles. In 1887, he founded a studio with Adolphe Dubreuil, and in the 1890s, he returned to France, where he continued his photographic work. The Courret studio went bankrupt in 1935, by which time it housed more than 150,000 negative

Negative (photography)

In photography, a negative may refer to three different things, although they are all related.-A negative:Film for 35 mm cameras comes in long narrow strips of chemical-coated plastic or cellulose acetate. As each image is captured by the camera onto the film strip, the film strip advances so that...

s. Many of the creditors received these glass negatives as part payment in lieu of the money they were owed. Among those who received such payment was the Rengifo family, who kept 54,000 plaques. In 1987 that family gave the negatives to the National Library of Peru to be protected.