Mississippi Blue brings together Henry P. Bosse’s cyanotypes of the Mississippi River, made during his work for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The photographs follow the river between Minneapolis and St. Louis. Banks, islands, bridges, and engineering works appear within a landscape continually shaped by water and human intervention. Their documentary purpose coexists with a strong sense of distance, light, and the arrangement of forms.

The blue image characteristic of cyanotype gives this record a distinctive visual continuity. In the reproduced photographs, the river can occupy a broad, quiet expanse while a shoreline or structure supplies a point of orientation. Oval image areas and their surrounding paper remain visible in the book’s illustrated pages. These features preserve a sense of the photographs as historical objects, while allowing the landscapes themselves to hold the viewer’s attention.

Charles Wehrenberg provides the book’s principal text, accompanied by reprinted writing by Mark Twain and John Anfinson. These contributions place Bosse’s work beside different ways of describing the river and its history. Published in English by Twin Palms in 2002, the hardcover contains 172 pages and 65 four-color plates. Its approximately nine-by-eleven-inch format brings the cyanotypes into a volume whose reproductions retain the blue tonal character of the originals.

The book can be read both as a river record and as an inquiry into the visual possibilities of a practical assignment. Looking from one image to another draws attention to the balance between open water, vegetation, settlement, and constructed edges. The photographs describe a working landscape without exhausting it through description. Their measured viewpoints leave room to consider how a record made for engineering purposes can also sustain prolonged aesthetic attention.