This dramatic rock formation alongside the small port of
La Ciotat on the Côte d’Azure was one of several landscapes at the end of a
photographic album tracing the railroad line from Lyon to Marseilles and along the
Mediterranean coast. At a time when some worried that the expanding railroad network
was homogenizing regional cultures and spoiling the landscape, Baldus’s album—commissioned
by the railroad company—blended images of viaducts, tunnels, and stations with
Gothic cathedrals, Roman ruins, and the natural landscape, linking Second
Empire engineers with the great builders of the past and celebrating newly
accessible features of the natural world.