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To see New York through cyanotype prints of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is to behold a dreamscape of almost-familiar scenes rendered in a very unfamiliar palette, neither silver nor sepia.
he Prussian blue was not an effect, but the product of a printing process that used a solution of iron compounds that was briefly popular among photographers â€" and still claims a following â€" for its economy, its simplicity and (if the prints are stored correctly) its permanence.
There is a pleasing symmetry in the use of cyanotype prints to record the built environment, because they are directly related to blueprints, the architectural documents that helped create the structures in the first place. But the color also calls attention to our distance from the subjects, as if a veil had been drawn between viewer and photographer. And it definitely depresses the mood. Bleu was the old noir.
Manhattan’s fabled night skyline flickers against an immense darkness in these photos. The beacons atop the Park Row Building, then the world’s tallest office building, do nothing to illuminate the shadowy hulk below â€" an enormous post office that occupied what is now the south half of City Hall ! Park. An architectural ornament on what may be the Home Life Insurance Building, in the right foreground, could be a brooding gargoyle at Notre Dame.
How perfectly appropriate the cyanotype is for the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx, photographed in its original location on the east side of Kingsbridge Road. Little imagination is needed to conjure the moment described by Poe â€" in a poem written here â€" when “the wind came out of the cloud by night, / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.â€
Courtesy of Winter Works on Paper Subway construction in Manhattan in 1901.Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.
