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.
Gertrude Käsebier · c. 1899 (platinum print original; photogravure diffusion c. 1900 per NGA)
Self-Portrait
- Year
- c. 1899 (platinum print original; photogravure diffusion c. 1900 per NGA)
- Original process
- Platinum print
- Held at
- Wikimedia Commons
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- c. 1899 (platinum print original; photogravure diffusion c. 1900 per NGA)
- Original held at
- Wikimedia Commons
- Public domain
- Since 2005 (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
Self-Portrait (c. 1899) is Gertrude Käsebier's platinum-print self-portrait, made in her early New York years and showing the photographer at the moment she was establishing herself as a leading figure of American pictorialism. Käsebier had opened her commercial portrait studio at 273 Fifth Avenue in 1897, exhibited at the Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1898 and 1899 where her work was singled out by both Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day, and was about to be invited into the inner circle that would become the Photo-Secession in 1902. The self-portrait was made the same year as The Manger (1899), and the two images share a tonal logic: long platinum mid-tones, matt paper surface, soft modelling of skin against an unmodelled ground. As a self-presentation it is striking for its restraint — Käsebier, then aged forty-seven and a mother of three, presents herself with the grave intelligence she demanded of her sitters, never as an ingénue. The image circulated in pictorialist publications including Camera Work (which devoted its inaugural issue in January 1903 to her work, reproducing six of her photographs) and is widely held in public archives via the Wikimedia Commons distribution of period gravures. At Maison Picturale, the print is studied as a reference for self-portraiture in noble metals and as a document of authorial agency in early professional women's photography. The Procédé Transposition transposes Käsebier's platinum process to non-toxic platine-palladium reformulated by Vision Picturale on cotton 640 g/m², preserving the silvery long-scale tonality without the lead and chromium hazards of period chemistry.
Reference file : Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Procédé Transposition
Print like Gertrude Käsebier 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 €
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.
