Image: the public-domain reference file. Your print is a hand-made interpretation of it, produced at the studio in Platinum-palladium — its matter and tonality are its own.
Alfred Stieglitz · 1923
Spiritual America
- Year
- 1923
- Original process
- Gelatin silver print
- Held at
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- 1923
- Original held at
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Public domain
- Since 2017 (CPI L.123-1)
- Printer
- Maison Picturale — Paris 20e studio
- Lead time
- Hand-made · 3 to 5 weeks
Maison Picturale reinterpretation in platinum-palladium
About this work
Photographed in 1923 at Stieglitz's family estate at Lake George, New York, Spiritual America is a tight gelatin silver crop of the rear flank of a gelded workhorse cinched into harness — the harness buckle and the absence of the testicles legible in the same compressed frame. The title is Stieglitz's most biting allegory of American materialism: the spiritual castrated and harnessed to industrial servitude, issued the year after T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land and three years before Sinclair Lewis won the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith — Stieglitz operating in the same critical register as the literary modernists who diagnosed post-war American materialism. The image was published in MSS, Stieglitz's short-lived 1922-23 journal, and reproduced in the 1924 catalogue of his exhibition at the Anderson Galleries — the show that introduced the Equivalents to the New York public. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (DP232981) holds the print within the Alfred Stieglitz Collection donated in 1933 by the photographer himself, the foundational gift of 419 prints. Walker Evans, Paul Strand and the next generation of American modernist photographers cited the image as the moment photographic metaphor — not pictorialist allegory — entered American art. At Maison Picturale today, this gelatin silver idiom transposes most faithfully into a platine-palladium tirage on 640 gsm cotton paper: the noble-metal procédé delivers the long tonal scale Stieglitz required for the wet sheen of the horse's flank and the deep buckle shadow, without silver-halide toxicity. A charbon (carbon transfer) alternative in Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry would emphasise the muscular weight and the matte, deposit-rich surface — the transverse USP of the Maison Picturale atelier.
Reference file : MET Open Access via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Procédé Transposition
Print like Alfred Stieglitz today — without the toxics.
Each Maison Picturale print is a material reinterpretation of the image. Three readings of the same work — the original, its closest transposition, and a creative transposition into another procédé.
Noble metals — platinum and palladium — on 640 gsm cotton paper. The longest tonal range in all analog photography.
MP procédé — reformulated non-toxic chemistry, signed by Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour.
View the procédéHistory of the process
The platinotype was invented in 1873 by the British engineer William Willis, who patented the process that same year under the name Platinotype Process. In 1879 Willis founded the Platinotype Company, which sold platinum-sensitised papers across Europe for several decades. Palladium was introduced in the early twentieth century as an economical variant, giving nothing away on tonal quality.
Platinum-palladium quickly became the process of choice for the masters of fine-art photography. Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Frederick H. Evans made it their signature process, and their original prints held at the Royal Photographic Society in London, at George Eastman House in Rochester and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York still testify to platinum's tonal perfection. Stieglitz wrote that platinum offered a wider scale of greys than any other process.
Our approach
Every platinum-palladium print made at the studio at 1 passage Dagorno is a unique piece in a very limited edition, intended for serious collectors and institutions. The cost of platinum and palladium salts — noble metals whose prices follow the financial markets — makes this our premium process. Each print is prepared, sensitised and developed by hand by our master printers.
Our 640 gsm 100% cotton satin watercolour paper suits platinum-palladium particularly well: its pure cotton fibre, free of optical brighteners and alkaline additives, lets the metal salts embed deep in the paper, and its satin surface fully reveals the process's unique warm tonality and exceptional tonal scale.
Inside our studio
1 Passage Dagorno, Paris 20e. Each print is hand-crafted by Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour, using Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry. Limited edition, signed and numbered.
Commission this print
- Hand-printed and signed by Tristan Sidem & Raphaël Lebas de Lacour
- Reformulated non-toxic chemistry (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Limited edition, numbered, certificate of authenticity
- 1 Passage Dagorno studio, Paris 20e
- Delivery 3 to 5 weeks · ships worldwide from France
Formats and prices
- ProcédéPlatinum-palladium
- Coquille44 × 56 cm200 €
- Jésus56 × 76 cm400 €
- Grand Aigle76 × 112 cm600 €
- Univers100 × 140 cm1 200 €
Firm prices: they follow from the procédé and the paper format, as on our Process pages. 100% cotton paper, 640 gsm, deckled edges. Which formats are offered depends on the resolution of the reference file we hold for this work.
Contemporary print after a work in the public domain (CPI L.123-1, 70 years post-mortem). Hand-crafted reinterpretation by Maison Picturale's master printers — this is not an original vintage by the master. The mention 'after [Master]' is systematic on the print and on the certificate of authenticity.
