Lincoln Cathedral: From the Castle

Distant skyline view of Lincoln Cathedral seen across the rooftops of the medieval city from the Norman castle ramparts opposite — the two Plantagenet-era strongholds, ecclesiastical and military, framing each other in a single composition. Lincoln's great Norman west front (begun 1072 under Bishop Remigius, the cathedral's founder appointed by William the Conqueror) and its later Early English central tower dominate the horizon line, the photograph compressing nearly nine centuries of English building history into one frame. Photographed by Frederick H. Evans in 1896, when the London bookseller — friend of Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw, whom he counted among his early portrait sitters — was beginning to turn fully to photography. By 1900 his architectural work would be the subject of a major exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society; three years later Stieglitz devoted the entire fourth issue of Camera Work (October 1903) to his English cathedrals. Evans worked exclusively in platinum (later platinum-palladium as palladium became more available during the First World War), on large-format plate camera with long exposures, and refused all retouching — the platinum process providing the extended grey scale and archival permanence his architectural subjects demanded. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession 33.43.388, Alfred Stieglitz Collection), under Open Access (CC0). 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 : Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)