A great advantage of early photographers using buildings as subjects instead of people is that buildings hold still. No messy business of a smile gone wrong or an inadvertent cough; a building can maintain a lengthy pose.
Perhaps that is why Édouard Baldus chose to photograph buildings — indeed he seemed to prefer the built environment to the natural one.
When he retreated to the country — at least as the small show of his work at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Building Pictures: Architectural Photographs by Édouard Baldus, suggests — what he chose to photograph was the splendid skeleton of the Pont du Gard in Provence, France, built in the first century B.C. to carry water into the town of Nîmes. The river that flows across the lower portion of this scene reflects not nature — although it’s clearly in the country — but the Pont du Gard itself. The result is a handsome and deservedly famous photograph.
Baldus, who had trained as a painter and worked as a draftsman and lithographer before taking up photography, found in the new art the perfect outlet for his talent. Photography was still an extremely young profession when he turned to it in the middle of the 19th century, but it proved to be one in which his skills excelled. It’s a treat to see this little exhibition, only 12 works in all, pulled from the museum›s permanent photography collection.
Building Pictures: Architectural Photographs by Édouard Baldus is on view through Oct. 26 at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Eden Park. Free. cincinnatiartmuseum.org.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2014.