After Baldus
After Baldus
After Baldus (2012/'14) a collaboration with photographer Theo Baart and curator Alison Nordström, draws its inspiration from the Eduard-Denis Baldus (1813/'89) photographic album
Le Chemin de Fer du Nord which Baron de Rothschild commissioned to commemorate the opening of the newly built railroad between Boulogne-sur-Mer and Paris in 1855.
Theo and I both have been fascinated by the 19th Century documentary photographic albums as we consider them to be the archetypes of the photo-books as we know them now, even if these albums basically mostly are a set of (albumen) prints glued to cardboard and bound together to form a book.
Baron Rothschild gave the first copy (of the 25 copies of the album produced) as a souvenir to Queen Victoria who on his invitation traveled by the railroad to visit the Exposition Universelle in Paris. This lavishly produced first copy is still in the Royal collection at Windsor Castle.
Baldus followed the railroad-track but freely photographed towns, monuments and landscapes of heritage along with the railway infrastructure (viaducts, stations) thus rendering a view of Picardy not visible to the travellers from the train.
For our project
After Baldus we photographed in the same free manner as Eduard Baldus did some 160 years before us, sometimes choosing the same locations but including modern elements like the highway as well as remnants of the two World Wars which ravished the cities and landscape to tell a story of Picardy at the beginning of the 21st Century.
As author and fellow-traveller we invited Alison Nordström, then Senior Curator of the George Eastman House In Rochester NY where, thanks to Alison, we were lucky to be allowed to leave through one of the five known surviving copies of
Le Chemin de Fer du Nord, being part of GEM’s immense collection.
We produced After Baldus
as an handprinted and hand-bound album the same size as the original Le
Chemin de Fer du Nord
in an edition of 25 copies.
After Baldus
has been exhibited in Lodz, Poland in 2016 and in the winter/spring 2016-2017 in Huis Marseille, Amsterdam.
Below a selection of my photographs, for photographs by Theo Baart visit theobaart.nl
