Images by Eugene De Salignac at the Museum of the City of New York

Written by Oliver Oberman Sunday, 05 September 2010 22:44

New York City - Photographs by Eugene de Salignac, selected from an archive of some 20,000 glass plate negatives and 10,000 vintage prints will be on view at the Museum of the City of New York through September 4.  New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac will exhibit for the first time a treasure trove of images made by an obscure municipal employee.  A systematic record of a period of unprecedented growth in New York City—1906 through 1934—the photographs are remarkable not only for their technical virtuosity and aesthetic quality, but for their historic significance.  The photographs document the creation of the city’s modern infrastructure, and they portray everything from nuts and bolts to cantilevered sections of the city’s most iconic bridges as they were being built; from workers surveying construction sites to the elegant geometry of steel beams and concrete girders; from the fretwork of cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge to an early image of the hotspot now called DUMBO with the Manhattan Bridge only partially completed; the opening of the Queensboro Bridge and the 50th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge; and much more.

Commented Susan Henshaw Jones, President and Director of the Museum: “These images are revelatory: they are a study of a work in progress, how the city was built, literally, from the ground up. And they are a portrait of proud artisans in the process of creating a masterpiece.”

A book of the same title, New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac, accompanies the exhibition; it is published by Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to advancing photography in all its forms, and contains essays by Michael Lorenzini, who discovered the photographs, and by Kevin Moore.

Eugene de Salignac (born 1861, Boston; died 1943, New Jersey) was the official photographer of New York City’s Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures from 1906 through 1934.  It was his job to document the building of bridges, buildings, roadways, and other major structures throughout New York during a time of prosperity and dramatic change: skyscrapers were on the rise, steel bridges being built, and the automobile was introduced.  Yet horses and trolleys remained plentiful on the streets, and astonishingly, dirt roads still pervaded parts of the city.

It is apparent from the photographs, and from his detailed logbooks, that de Salignac took seriously his role as the primary photographer documenting the modernization of the city, applying the formal concerns of art to what had been commissioned as purely utilitarian images.  When Michael Lorenzini, a photographer and cataloguer working at the Municipal Archives, discovered the photographs—arranged in chronological order corresponding to five handwritten logbooks—he at first assumed that the massive body of work was the output of many people.  It was only upon studying the handwriting in the logbooks that it became clear that the archive was the work of a single photographer. Mr. Lorenzini was able to contact de Salignac’s great-granddaughter and information about the photographer’s personal life began to emerge.

Questions about his body of work are many.  It is not known whether he received formal training in art or photography, or whether he was influenced by surrealism or other art movements of the day, as some of his photographs suggest.  The exhibition reveals a previously unknown and complex of body of work that was overlooked by great photographers and dealers of the period.  Ironically, de Salignac's obituary appeared in The New York Times on November 4, 1943, the same day that the paper announced opening of the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of works by Stieglitz, Weston, Abbott, and others, an official recognition of photography as an acknowledged art form.

The exhibition is organized by Thomas H. Mellins, Curator of Special Exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York, and Diana Edkins, Director of Exhibitions and Limited-Edition Photographs at the Aperture Foundation.

Aperture was founded as a publication in 1952 by six gifted individuals: photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and writer/curator Nancy Newhall.  As the medium of photography flourished, so too did Aperture Foundation, which now includes publications, limited-edition photographs and portfolios, artist lectures and symposia, and a traveling exhibitions program that has presented more than one hundred exhibitions at major museums and cultural institutions throughout the county and abroad.

The Museum of the City of New York presents and interprets the past, present, and future of New York City and celebrates its heritage of diversity, opportunity, and perpetual transformation.  The Museum has long collected and exhibited historical and contemporary photography focusing on New York City; highlights of the Museum’s collection of photographs include large bodies of work by Jacob Riis, Samuel H. Gottscho, Sherril Schell, and Berenice Abbott, as well as the LOOK magazine archive, which includes photographs by including Stanley Kubrick and Arnold Newman, among others.  Recent Museum of the City of New York exhibitions drawn from these renowned collections include: New York Changing: Douglas Levere Revisits Berenice Abbott; The Mythic City: Photographs by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940; Sherril Schell: Unknown Modernist; and Willing to Be Lucky: Ambitious New Yorkers in the Pages of LOOK Magazine.

New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac is made possible with the generous support of the Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation. Support for New York Rises is provided by the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Visit The Museum of the City of New York at: www.mcny.org/