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.
Clarence H. White · 1898
Telegraph Poles
- Year
- 1898
- Original process
- Photogravure (Camera Work No. 3, 1903)
- Held at
- Camera Work No. 3 · Library of Congress
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- 1898
- Original held at
- Camera Work No. 3
- Public domain
- Since 1996 (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
A row of telegraph poles cuts the horizon of a Newark, Ohio field, dividing the landscape into bands of pastoral foreground, technological middle ground and pale sky. The 1898 image is one of White's rare ventures outside intimate domestic genre and into the industrial-pastoral juxtaposition that became a recurring American pictorialist motif — Stieglitz's locomotives, Steichen's Flatiron, White's wired countryside. Stieglitz selected the work for Camera Work No. 3 (July 1903), where it was published as a photogravure on India paper, the printing technique that defined the journal's tonal fidelity. The composition reveals White's compositional intelligence as much as his light: the verticals of the poles, the diagonal of the wires and the horizontal of the field together form a quietly modernist grid that prefigures Paul Strand's 1916 abstractions. The Library of Congress preserves a photogravure of the work, and the Camera Work plate has entered the U.S. public domain since 1996. For Maison Picturale, Telegraph Poles is a reference for our héliogravure workshops in Paris: the Camera Work India-paper photogravure tradition is transposed today through the héliogravure MP — a transposed Poitevin photogravure process developed in collaboration with Vision Picturale's non-toxic reformulation effort, which preserves the ink-on-paper continuous-tone signature of the 1903 plate without the dichromate hazards of the historical bichromated-gelatin photogravure resist. Telegraph Poles is among the earliest American photographic engagements with the industrial-pastoral motif and pre-dates by fifteen years the Precisionist iconography of Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth — a measure of how early White's compositional modernism arrived.
Reference file : Camera Work / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Procédé Transposition
Print like Clarence H. White 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
- PriceOn request
The reference file we hold for this work is too low-resolution for us to commit to a large-format print. We are looking for a better source: write to us and we will answer on this specific point before any order.
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.
