(b Charleston, SC, 12 Dec 1813; d Meran, Austria [now Merano, Italy], 9 July 1884). German photographer. He moved with his family to Mannheim in 1818, later studying zoology, botany and chemistry at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg. After taking his doctorate in 1837 he became a naturalist, undertaking research trips in North Africa (1840), Asia Minor and Egypt (1842–5), on which he named eight new types of plants. He took up photography because of his deep admiration for the Egyptian and East Asian culture and architecture. On a longer trip to England he learnt about William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative–positive process on paper. His first surviving photographs are of Venice and North Italy, signed ‘A. Lorent’ and dated 1853. He used the dry wax paper negative process (developed by Gustave Le Gray in 1850), whereby the paper negative is made more transparent by treating it with hot wax. According to his own description, he needed approximately 37 hours to process the negatives alone, from the first stage of production, through to the developing and drying. He used formats measuring from 380*470 mm (1853) to 570*800 mm (1857), and the time of exposure could vary depending on the type of motif and the brightness, from five minutes (marble in the sun) to three hours (interiors of a palace). About 50 albumen photographs have survived from this period. In 1858 he moved from Venice to Mannheim, and after inheriting a fortune from his foster-father devoted himself to photography without having to consider the saleability of his photographs. He made extended photographic trips to southern Spain (Granada) and Algeria (1858–9), to Egypt and Nubia (1859–60) and to Greece (1860–61). There are still 233 wax paper negatives (450*440 mm) and 133 original albumen prints from these trips. He received the highest honours at numerous European exhibitions, for example, Munich (1854), Paris (1855), Brussels (1856), London (1862), Berlin (1865) and Vienna (1881). His last foreign trips were to Palestine (1864) and Sicily (1865); the 35 photographs that have survived from the Sicilian trip were made according to the wet collodion process. In 1865 Lorent began to photograph medieval buildings, particularly complete or ruined Romanesque and Gothic monasteries in Württemberg. Around 400 photographs have survived of 23 places (wet collodion process, 190*240 mm). He also researched the early history of the places and buildings that he photographed, publishing three volumes of text with over 1000 pages. After his move to Meran in 1873 he developed his skills further with, for example, action shots and platinotypes. Over 100 photographs of South Tirol, taken in the last decade of his life, have been preserved.