York Minster: Into the North Transept

Soaring view into the Five Sisters lancet windows of York Minster's north transept, photographed by Frederick H. Evans in 1902 during one of his cathedral campaigns and published as photogravure plate 4 of Camera Work, October 1903 — the issue that Alfred Stieglitz devoted entirely to Evans, two years after the British pictorialist's major exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in London (1900). A former London bookseller who counted Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw among his early portrait sitters, Evans had become by then the British pictorialist authority on cathedral architecture, working exclusively in platinum print on large-format plate camera with very long exposures and famously refusing all retouching, on the principle that the negative alone must hold the building's geometry and its light. The five 13th-century grisaille lancets of York rise nearly sixteen metres into the Early English vaulting and remain the largest such window of medieval glass in England; Evans positioned his camera to let them dictate the entire vertical reading of the frame — a portrait of light rather than of a window. Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (accession 84.XM.444.45), with the Camera Work photogravure 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 preserved without the historical dichromate toxicity, signed by our master printers.

Reference file : Getty Museum via Google Art Project / Wikimedia Commons (PD)