Rouen

Atmospheric townscape of the Norman capital, published in Camera Notes vol. 1 n° 3 — Alfred Stieglitz's pre-Camera Work journal of the Photo-Secession. Rouen 1898 stands among Demachy's earliest internationally circulated gum bichromate prints, four years after he and Maurice Bucquet had inaugurated the first Salon de Paris (1894) at the Photo-Club de Paris, and three years after Demachy's election to the British Linked Ring (1895). The choice of Rouen is not innocent: the city carried the painterly memory of Monet's cathedral series of the 1890s, and Demachy, son of the banker Charles-Adolphe Demachy and intimate of the Alphonse Daudet literary circle, was deliberately importing into photography the vocabulary of late Impressionism. Technically the print is a single- or double-coat gum bichromate: gum arabic sensitised with potassium bichromate, tinted with watercolour pigment, exposed under a large-format negative and brushed selectively under tepid water until the desired atmospheric softness emerges. The result is the opposite of an architectural document — Rouen is reduced to grey-blue planes, the spires dissolved into pigmentary haze, what Demachy would later describe in Procédés d'art en photographie (1906, with Constant Puyo) as the photographer's right to subtract from the image as a painter subtracts from a sketch. The work also testifies to Demachy's Norman attachment: he would later retire to Hennequeville and traverse Normandy as his territory of choice. At Maison Picturale, this kind of townscape is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper, allowing the heavy painterly matter of the master to be revived without the bichromate toxicity that defined his original workshop.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, Camera Notes 1898 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons