Slideshow of the images can be found at:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/slid...70305onslpo_01
Above Town
Eugene de Salignac’s early-twentieth-century photographs of New York, showing the construction of the East River bridges and more. From the New York City Municipal Archives. Introduced by Michelle Preston.
Issue of 2007-03-05
Posted 2007-02-26
Introduction by Michelle Preston
No one in my family remembered much about my great-grandfather de Salignac. He was divorced from my great-grandmother soon after 1900, and lived the rest of his life alone, in New York City. My mother had a vague idea that he was a stockbroker; as a child, I never even saw a picture of him. So we were surprised when, a few years ago, we received a call from Michal Lorenzini, of the Municipal Archives of the City of New York. He had been examining a large collection of images—nearly twenty thousand glass negatives and a hundred and thirteen scrapbooks of prints—when he realized that they had all been shot by a single unknown photographer, Eugene de Salignac.
De Salignac, it turned out, had worked for the Department of Bridges (later the Department of Plant and Structures) from 1903 to 1934. Vast reaches of infrastructure were laid down in those years, and his job was to provide a record: he shot the construction of the Manhattan and Queensboro Bridges and the Municipal Building; subway tunnels, trolley lines, and ferries. His images have an odd beauty and, at times, a subversive wit. In September, 1914, he took a picture of painters dutifully at work on the Brooklyn Bridge; the department used it in an annual report. Two weeks later, de Salignac returned, and, in what seems like a magnificent gesture of playing hooky, the painters climbed freehand, with no safety equipment in sight, spreading out on the wires as though they were circus performers, or the notes of a jazz riff playing above the skyline. Lorenzini has gathered many of de Salignac’s most compelling images in “New York Rises” (Aperture; $40); an accompanying exhibition opens May 4th at the Museum of the City of New York.
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