Salmar, Genova - Società Saline Mar Rosso - (Colonies...

( Italian Colonies) Eritrea — Salmar — Uachiro — Massawa. Original 20 x 26 cm photographic album devoted to the layout of the Red Sea saltpans and their industrial installations. 1928-1930. The album consists of 31 original photographs (28 of 16 x 21 cm and 3 of 6 x 11 cm), mounted on thick paper leaves, several numbered and accompanied on the verso by contemporary technical captions, handwritten or typed, some dated 1928 and April 10, 1930. Exceptional photographic testimony on the establishment and development of the industrial installations of the Società Saline Mar Rosso — “Salmar,” of which several leaves bear the oval stamp of the company with its Genoa address. The collection documents with remarkable precision the works carried out at Uachiro, in Italian Eritrea, in the Massaoua region: seawater intake channel, dikes and hydraulic works, salt works installations, silos, mills, Diesel plant and especially the system of mechanical transport and industrial aerial ropeway linking the different exploitation sectors. The captions, evidently drawn up in a technical rather than touristic context, describe the progress of the works: “Stazione di partenza della teleferica,” “Stazione di carico della teleferica,” “Fondazioni dei mulini,” “Centrale Diesel… completamente ultimata,” or the “silos coi rulli per i nastri trasportatori.” Some photographs thus constitute authentic site documents dated, showing successively the infrastructures under construction and then completed. Other versos bear especially precise handwritten annotations on hydraulic works: depth of the canal, distance from the sea, the line of the dyke and water circulation. The repeated presence of the Salmar stamp considerably reinforces the documentary and likely internal character of this set. More than a simple album of colonial views, it is an industrial photographic archive created at the very moment of the saltworks development, offering first-hand documentation on salt extraction, infrastructures and transport techniques implemented on the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea during the interwar years. The joint conservation of the 31 prints, their old mounting, their numbering and especially their original dated captions and provenance stamps confer to the whole a remarkable coherence and historical interest. Rare item of photographic documentation on the industrial history of Italian Eritrea and the exploitation of the Red Sea saltworks.

Estimation:€1,700

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