Kaltenbacher was a photographer who worked from a studio in the Passage or Rue du Commerce in the centre of Amiens, France. Studio portraits with his name attached show that he was working as a photographer by the mid 1860s. 20 years later, John Ruskin used him to photograph the front of Amiens Cathedral, suggesting that he was also a competent landscape and architectural photographer.

Ruskin wrote of him as ‘M Kaltenbacher’, possibly referring to his initial or more probably as an abbreviation of the French ‘Monsieur’. He wrote to his assistant William Ward, describing Kaltenbacher as a German photographer, whose 2 daughters also worked for him.