2017 | In the winter of 2017, the album After Baldus, featuring fifty photographs by Cary Markerink and Theo Baart, was on view at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.

This project was inspired by the album Le Chemin de Fer du Nord, which Baron de Rothschild presented to Queen Victoria in August 1855 on her arrival in Paris. Victoria travelled on the new railway connecting Boulogne-sur-Mer and the French capital. Edouard Baldus photographed—photography was still a new medium at the time—what Victoria could not (quite) see from the train: the viaducts she crossed, stations, and cultural heritage near the railway line. Today, the album is regarded as one of the high points in the history of photography.

In 2009, Cary Markerink and Theo Baart were able to leaf through one of the copies of the album in the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY (Rothschild had twenty-five copies made to promote his railway).

The knowledge that the railway was still there, that the area had industrialised with the arrival of the train, and that two world wars and the effects of globalisation had left their mark on the landscape inspired them—just as it had Baldus—to travel freely through and photograph the same area. A hundred and fifty years later, like E. Baldus, we chose the album as the format for presenting the new work.

Alison Nordström, former curator of the photography collection at the George Eastman House, travelled with them and wrote the essay After Baldus, Travels in a Wounded Landcape.