Eugene de Salignac New York City Archives

September 24, 2007

Occasionally we veer off the digital path just so we can bring you some great photography. And this is one of those occasions.

Eugene de Salignac was born in Boston in 1861 and descended from French nobility, he married, fathered two children and, after separating from his wife in 1903, started working for the City of New York at age 42. He was the official photographer for the Department of Bridges from 1906 to 1934. At that point, his work—including original plate-glass negatives, corresponding logbooks in his elegant script and more than 100 volumes of vintage prints—began collecting dust in various basement storerooms. He died in 1943, at 82, unheralded.

In 1999, Michael Lorenzini, the senior photographer for the New York City Municipal Archives, was spooling through microfilm of the city’s vast Department of Bridges photography collection when he realized that many of the images shared a distinct and sophisticated aesthetic. They also had numbers scratched into the negatives. “It just kind of hit me: this is one guy; this is a great photographer,” Lorenzini says. Months of trawling through the archives revealed the photographer to be Eugene de Salignac.

Now the Museum of the City of New York is exhibiting his work through October 28, and Aperture has published a related book, New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac.

link: Smithsonian Magazine.com

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