A Street in Mentone

Mediterranean street view of Menton (anglicised 'Mentone') on the French Riviera, published in Camera Notes vol. 3 n° 3 — Alfred Stieglitz's pre-Camera Work journal of the Photo-Secession. The work testifies to Demachy's travel practice in the south of France, an extension of the bourgeois itinerary of a Parisian banker who turned his vacations into pictorialist material. Geographically, Menton sat at the edge of Italy and was, around 1900, one of the Riviera resorts most associated with British wintering and Belle Époque tourism — a context Demachy treats not as travel reportage but as a tonal exercise: light architecture, calligraphic shadows, the picturesque dissolved into pigment. By 1900 Demachy, co-founder with Maurice Bucquet of the Photo-Club de Paris (first Salon de Paris 1894) and member of the British Linked Ring since 1895, had positioned French pictorialism as a peer of British and American photo-secessionism. The Camera Notes appearance is itself significant: it places Demachy directly in the orbit of Stieglitz seven years before their 1907 public quarrel, when the American would turn against the gum process as overworked and pictorially mannered. Technically the print is a gum bichromate: gum arabic sensitised with potassium bichromate, charged with watercolour pigment, exposed under the negative and brushed selectively under tepid water — the Mediterranean street is sculpted as pigmentary planes rather than recorded as architectural detail. At Maison Picturale, this kind of Mediterranean townscape is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper, preserving the master's pictorial vocabulary while removing the bichromate hazard.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, Camera Notes 1900 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons