Unquestionably, it 
is the world’s most talked-about and photographed city. Pictures 
of early New York – workers atop the Empire State Building with lunchboxes but scant regard for health and safety – have become familiar images along with moody views of the Flatiron building or Times Square at night. And the yellow cabs and steaming ventilator shafts that pockmarked the concrete canyons have also been turned into visual clichés by generations of photographers. But who, outside his own family, has heard of Eugene de Salignac, the journeyman photographer who produced the images that appear on these pages?

Many of de Salignac’s pictures are now regarded as iconic studies of a city in its infancy. Yet for many years very little was known about him, or the scope and provenance of his pictures. For decades, nearly 20,000 of his plate-glass negatives lay in repose at New York City’s Municipal Archives – and although every one of his originals bore his name, few imagined that just one photographer could be responsible for such an extraordinary collection. Yet all of this work, 
each print carefully minuted and archived, was carried out by de Salignac – at the behest of the 
city authorities.

As photographer-in-chief, his brief was to photograph a city in the making. On behalf of the marvellously arcane-sounding Department of Bridges/Plants and Structures, he would photograph construction sites and the people who worked on them with a view to providing the city fathers with a visual record of the transformation of a collection of villages into a teeming concrete metropolis.

His principal projects involved documenting the Queensboro Bridge. He would photograph new technologies and techniques, ostensibly for the benefit of officialdom – but with a firm 
eye on the photographer’s art. 
He gave his images a trademark style that far exceeded the 
limited brief that he had been 
given by the authorities.

The emerging city that he documented was inspiring, overwhelming, but also riven with tragedy. The haste with which 
New York pursued progress meant there would inevitably be casualties along the way, and de Salignac’s job involved him documenting accidents almost as soon as they happened. His collection includes pictures of sunken barges in the Hudson, a catastrophic fire over the Manhattan Bridge, and the twisted metal of trams in the immediate aftermath of traffic accidents. In one picture, he is on the scene so quickly that none of the other passengers have thought to get out of the wreck. Was he a paparazzo before his time?

For a photographer detailed to produce what were primarily intended as PR pictures, he had a surprisingly subversive knack of dwelling on the city’s failings – the (literal) cracks in its superstructure, the blemishes and blots that give this fantastically photogenic city its human face. De Salignac retired in 1934, at a time when the city was facing great challenges, in the throes of the Depression. Naturally, he had not balked at depicting the tremendous levels of human suffering that had accompanied the economic disaster. His pictures, like New York itself, would transcend the difficulties that man and 
nature would place in their way s

The book New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac (Aperture, £22) is out now. It is available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £19.80, including p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585

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