Nouveau Louvre. Pavillon Rohan, Parijs 1855 - 1857

Edouard Baldus made this photograph, titled "Nouveau Louvre. Pavillon Rohan, Parijs", using the salted paper process. Baldus was a master of this technique, which involved coating paper with a salt solution, then with silver nitrate, making it light-sensitive. The resulting print has a soft, almost painterly quality. Look closely, and you’ll see the texture of the paper itself contributes to the image. It also gave Baldus the capacity to create very large-scale photographs, which were prized by his patrons in the French state. This wasn't just a matter of artistic preference; it reflected the ambition of the French state to document its rapid modernization under Emperor Napoleon III. Photography, with its promise of objective representation, was seen as the perfect medium to record these transformations. Think of Baldus less as a lone artist, and more as a skilled technician, embedded within a larger system of labor and power. His work, however beautiful, is inseparable from the social and political context in which it was produced. Recognizing this link is crucial to fully appreciating the photograph.