Givors. Viaduc

Photography made its public debut in Paris in 1839, and France remained one of the most important global centers for the advancement of photography through the nineteenth century. Of all the celebrated photographers to emerge from the dynamic Parisian milieu of the 1850s, Edouard Baldus was among the most skilled, dogged, and inventive. By 1857, he had completed three major documentary commissions from the government of Napoléon III, as well as a private commission from Baron James de Rothschild to commemorate Queen Victoria’s 1855 trip aboard Rothschild’s Chemin de fer du nord (Northern Railway) with a spectacular photographic album. These projects cemented Baldus’s reputation as arguably the premier architectural photographer of his age.

In 1861, Baldus received another commission, this time to create an album documenting railway infrastructure and sights along the Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée line. This photograph of a viaduct near Givors, southwest of Lyon, belongs to that project (a second view in the album shows a single arch of the viaduct, rather than its full span). The careful attention to geometry, the stunning clarity of the details, the placement of the figures on the riverbank—all of these aspects of the photograph suggest Baldus’s mastery of his medium, from the preparation of the glass plate negative to the composition in the camera’s ground glass to the printing process. Wisps of smoke, just above the viaduct toward the right side of the image, are suggestive of the steam that billowed from nineteenth-century trains.

—Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography