Alsace

réf. 6927 — Complete set of 20 original albumen photographs image sizes: 170 x 250 mm. & 230 x 190 mm. by Charles David Winter mounted on card boards 440 x 350 mm. Folio orig. portfolio with large printed title pasted on upper cover cloth spine a little worn some rubbing to boards orig. cloth ties. Strasbourg: Winter Fassoli 1870. A fine set of this extremely rare portfolio of 20 albumen photographs by the Strasbourg photographer Charles David Winter 1821-1904. These photographs reveal the devastation that took place during the siege of Strasbourg in August and September 1870 by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War. This siege was the first example of “total war” a new kind of warfare with indiscriminate violence. Winter began his career as a lithographer but later turned to photography and opened his own daguerreotype studio in 1848. By 1852 he was making salted paper prints and using the collodion process. Winter made portraits landscapes and studies of sculptures. The photographs in this album were made in October 1870 under the supervision of the German engineer Major Albrecht. “Winter’s greatest accomplishments however are his photographs documenting the urban transformation of Strasbourg in the second half of the nineteenth century including the building and demolition in the city center 1855-1880 the construction of a railroad bridge over the Rhine 1858-61 and the restoration of the Cathedral in 1857-59. Striking for both their large size and their fine detail his photographs revealed the formal beauty in new forms of architecture and engineering. Winter also recorded in wrenching detail the devastating destruction of Strasbourg following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.”–Sarah Kennel in John Hannavy ed. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography p. 1501. “In contrast to Germany’s triumphal framing of Strasbourg’s damaged cityscape Charles Winter one of France’s most eminent nineteenth-century photographers provided an alternative Alsatian perspective on the disfigured city in his album of the Siege of Strasbourg the present work. The album’s photographs silent witnesses to Strasbourg’s devastation offered a dark premonition of the total wars to envelop Europe in the twentieth century.”–Dunlop Cartophilia p. 172. Apart from some dustiness to the covers and boards a fine and complete set of photographs with strong tonality. The boards are a little foxed. unknown