Ely Cathedral: Across Nave and Octagon

Diagonal view across the Romanesque nave of Ely Cathedral, opening onto the famous 14th-century Octagon lantern — the eight-sided wooden vault built by carpenter William Hurley between 1322 and 1328 after the collapse of the original Norman central tower, an engineering solution still considered unique in Gothic Europe for its scale and its method of converting a square crossing into an octagonal lantern. Photographed by Frederick H. Evans in 1897 and published as photogravure in Camera Work no. 4 (October 1903), the issue Alfred Stieglitz devoted entirely to the British pictorialist following his major Royal Photographic Society exhibition of 1900. Evans, a London bookseller before turning fully to photography around the time of his friendships with Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw, treated cathedral interiors as exercises in pure tonal recording: large-format plate camera, very long exposures, no retouching, and platinum print as exclusive medium for its extended grey scale and archival permanence. The diagonal angle deliberately stages the Norman nave bays as a rhythmic prelude before the Gothic crossing dissolves them into the lantern's diffused zenithal light, the contrast of architectural periods made legible in a single shutter opening. Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (accession 84.XM.448.7); the Camera Work photogravure is also conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Alfred Stieglitz Collection) and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. At Maison Picturale, the image is reinterpreted as a contemporary platinum-palladium print on 640 g/m² cotton paper, using the reformulated non-toxic chemistry of Vision Picturale — the noble-metal signature of platinum preserved without the historical dichromate toxicity, signed by our master printers.

Reference file : Getty Museum / Wikimedia Commons (PD)