Construction of the Viaur Viaduct, anonymous, 1901

cyanotype, h 225mm × w 285mm More details

After its invention photography was soon deployed to record the progress of building projects. The status of such photographs was rather modest: they were utilitarian, not art. Accordingly the simplest method of printing photographs was sometimes chosen, namely the cyanotype or blueprint. In our modern eyes, however, the intense blue colour is an aesthetic elementthat only enhances the image’s expressive power.