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that are his most carefully crafted and clearly articulated
demonstrations of photography’s unparalleled capacity
to represent architecture, fully exploiting the medium’s
ability to render the play of light, the volume of archi-
tectural forms, and the most intricate details. Baldus’s
photographs of the New Louvre were assembled in
albums (four volumes in each set) and presented by the
emperor to government ministers, the imperial family,
and the reigning monarchs of Europe as New Year’s
gifts in 1858.
In June 1856, in the midst of his work at the Louvre,
Baldus set out on a brief assignment, equally without
precedent in photography, that was in many ways its
opposite: to photograph the destruction caused by tor-
rential rains and overfl owing rivers in Lyon, Avignon,
and Tarascon. From a world of magnifi cent man-made
construction, he set out for territory devastated by natu-
ral disaster; from the task of recreating the whole of a
building in a catalogue of its thousand parts, he turned
to the challenge of evoking a thousand individual stories
in a handful of transcendent images. Baldus created,
in the words of Ernest Lacan, a “painfully eloquent”
record of the fl ood without explicitly depicting the
human suffering left in its wake. The “poor people,
tears in their eyes, scavenging to fi nd the objects most
indispensable to their daily needs,” described by the
local Courier de Lyon, are all but absent from his pho-
tographs of the hard-hit Brotteaux quarter of Lyon, as
if the destruction had been of biblical proportion, leav-
ing behind only remnants of a destroyed civilization.
In Avignon Baldus stood on the cathedral terrace from
which, a few days earlier, Napoleon III had surveyed the
fl oods, and pivoted his camera to compose a sweeping
six-part panorama that encompasses the entire Rhône
valley—the inundated island of Barthelasse, the town of
Villeneuve-les-Avignon, and the river, slowly returning
to the confi nes of its banks.
In the late 1850s, Baldus expanded his highly suc-
cessful series of large-format views of historic monu-
ments in both Paris and the provinces, and around 1860
he photographed the rough alpine regions of southeast-
ern France. At the height of his success, he employed
a dozen assistants and sold his work through a dozen
merchants in Paris and through print and book dealers
in Nîmes, Hamburg, Florence, Venice, Turin, Milan,
Vienna, and London.
In the second of his two railway albums, commis-
sioned in July 1861 by the Chemins de fer de Paris à
Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM), Baldus again pioneered
new aesthetic ground and drew from a decade’s work to
speak forcefully and eloquently about the relationship
of history and progress. The album is a masterfully
composed sequence of sixty-nine photographs of the
landscape, towns, principal sites of interest, and railroad
structures along the line from Lyon to Marseilles and
Toulon. By interspersing boldly geometric images of the
railroad tracks, stations, tunnels, and viaducts with his
classic views of historic architecture—the ramparts of
Avignon, the Maison Carrée, Saint-Trophîme, the Pont
du Gard—Baldus presented Second Empire engineersBALDUS, ÈDOUARD
Baldus, Èdouard. Entrance to
the Donzera Pass.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gilman Collection,
Gift of the Howard
Gilman Foundation, 2005
(2005.100.364.20) Image ©
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.