Foreigners and Romanians immortalized landscapes, people, places and everyday situations, in the first half of the 19th century. Romanian war photography is associated with names such as that of Carol Popp of Szathmary, who took part in the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Franz Duschek was the author of some of the oldest photographs of Bucharest. The photographer of the Romanian War of Independence from 1877-1878 was Franz Mandy, Ioan Spirescu introduced color photography, and Iosif Berman was, at the beginning of the 20th century, the father of Romanian photojournalism. Adolphe A. Chevallier, a photographer of Swiss-Romanian origin from the city of Piatra Neamț, made a name for himself among all these personalities.
Born to a Swiss father and a Romanian mother in 1881, in northern Moldavia, Chevallier decided, as a child, that he would become a visual artist. He studied photographic art in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was sent by his father. He obtained a license as p