Falls of the Reichenbach

Dramatic vertical composition of the Reichenbach Falls in the Bernese Oberland (Switzerland), the same site that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would later choose as the scene of Sherlock Holmes's 1893 confrontation with Professor Moriarty. The photograph is part of the « Helvetia » series produced by Jean Adolphe Braun (1812-1877), the Alsatian photographer-industrialist who founded the Braun studio at Dornach in the 1850s and elevated it to a full industrial enterprise by 1860, when he began systematic Alpine campaigns aimed at the booming bourgeois tourism market. The Swiss views established Braun internationally as the leading Alpine photographer of his generation and prefigured his industrial pivot to carbon transfer, of which he secured a Swan licence in 1864 and became the first European industrialiser — employing up to 200 staff at Dornach to produce permanent carbon reproductions for the Louvre, the Vatican and the British Museum. The vertical framing, with the cascade falling through a deep gorge into the foreground, deliberately answers Romantic landscape painting and asserts photography's claim to fine-art status. Holdings of the « Helvetia » series are dispersed between the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar (principal Braun studio archive), the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: this Alpine view is reinterpreted as a direct-monochrome charbon print using the non-toxic chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, with pigmented gelatin in Noir Musée or Couleur Profonde tissues transferred onto 640 g/m² cotton paper — the direct contemporary equivalent of the carbon transfer Braun industrialised, preserving the deep tonal range of rock, foam and shadow without the dichromate hazards of the original Swan-Braun workflow.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / MFA Houston / Google Art Project