Gezicht op Genève en de Mont Blanc before 1880

Auguste Garcin produced this albumen print of Geneva and Mont Blanc, using a process that was quite labor-intensive. It's a reminder that even photography, which we think of as mechanical, always has an important element of making to it. The albumen in question? Egg whites. These were whipped, allowed to settle, then coated on paper, and sensitized to light. A glass negative, itself a handmade object, was then placed on the paper and exposed to sunlight. It’s the conjunction of all these things – skilled darkroom practice, painstaking preparation, and of course, the patient exposure – that gives the final print its particular tonal range. Because each print was made individually, photography in this era was not yet a fully industrialized medium. You could say it occupied a middle ground – a kind of craft-industry. So, when we look at this image, we’re not just seeing Geneva; we’re also seeing the history of work, and the emergence of new visual technologies.