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house, town hall, opera house, musical theatre, bank
or industrial site was opened without a luxuriously
designed album of photographs showing facades and
details, and sometimes images of the work in prog-
ress. Little is known about the photographers of these
albums; in most cases they were local practicioners of
the art with a good basic knowledge about the angles
and light conditions to photograph buildings, but had
little care of compositional structures developed in 18th
century vedute imagery or in 17th century architectural
painting. They saw their craft in portraiture, and thus
most of their images tend to please their buyers as did
average studio photography. But, as sets of portraits of
important people were published with great success,
some publishers thought of producing collections of re-
cent buildings, sometimes with a certain success. In the
late 1860s one could buy such collections as phototype
prints in larger portfolios of what was named ‘modern
housing,’ at least in cities like London, Paris, Berlin,
New York and Chicago.
American cities, both on the northern and the south-
ern continent, were looking for industrial entrepreneurs
to settle in their environments. From the late 1860s
on, one can fi nd larger and smaller portfolios of these
cities showing the beauty of their surroundings, the
quality of their traffi c connections, the opulence of their
town halls, churches, or assembly buildings. Mostly
these—anonymously manufactured—portfolios were
conceived as leporellos with a panoramic view of 360°
in twelve images on the front and twelve singular images
showing individual edifi ces on the back. Today, these
leporellos often mark the earliest records of the exis-
tence of these cities. They were shown and distributed at
fairs and promotional tours through Europe. The last of
these portfolios, made around 1900, show a new type of
important construction—grain elevators which, through
this form, found their way into European modernism.
On the other hand, a pictorial representation was often
necessary requirement of technical constructions like
large bridges and railway installations not only for the
fi nanciers but for the copyright of the engineers as well.
American and Canadian photographers like George
N. Barnard, Timothy O’Sullivan and William Notman
proudly recorded the wonders of technical engineering
around the railroad lines, and some of their images look
as modern as pictures from avantgarde constructivism of
the 1920s. Photography even fulfi lled a proof function
in the test of a bridge construction. When a large arch
of a bridge was spanned over a river or a valley, two
photographs had to be made of it: one under the pres-
sure of several locomotives on top of it, one without. If
the difference of height between the two photographs
was toomuch, then that indicated that the bridge had to
be strengthened.
The practice of advertising new edifi ces by pho-
tographic reproductions was not only used by local
authorities but also by the architects themselves. The
architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who owed an
important part of his vast success in the New England
states to the fact that each of his new buildings was im-
mediately published by magazines like The American
Architect—at his own cost. Amongst Richardson’s large
collection of photographs were pictures whose compo-
sition was developed from specifi c criteria determined
by himself. In these photographs, he gave the photogra-
phers working for his offi ce specifi c directions on how
to choose their stand-points and perspectives. Country
houses designed by Richardson had to photographed
from a low angle to make them more impressing, but
the large Chicago department store which was his last
design had to be shown from a middle height to give
the impression of just another block in the city. Court
houses, churches and town halls designed by Richard-
son were shown like singular masterpieces without any
reference to their neighborhood whereas his villas were
well integrated in the surrounding nature. Nothing is
known about the photographers he employed but he
surely had them trained by showing them his collection
of travel photographs.
By 1900, photography had become an integral part
of each architect’s economy. The beginnings of mod-
ern architecture (Nikolaus Pevsner) were marked by
the architects of the Arts-and-Crafts movement whose
‘reform’ houses were designed for a better living in
harmony between humans and nature. Besides beauti-
ful perspective drawings and etchings, these houses
were marketed by photographs published in illustrated
magazines which no longer addressed themselves to
other architects but to the open public. Photographers
like Henry Bedford Lemere in London, Waldemar
Titzenthaler in Berlin, and Clément Maurice in Paris
began with depicting luxurious interiors as samples for
a bourgeois life-style just after historism and before
modernism, thus practising modern tactics of public
relation for design with forms belonging to the century
passed. Careers of architects like Charles Francis A.
Voysey, William R. Lethaby, Charles R. Ashbee, and
even Charles R. Mackintosh would not have been pos-
sible without the aid of photography; by the beginning
of the 20th century, these images of exemplary interiors
were found in catalogues of the fi rst retail stores.
But there were dark sides of the architecture, indus-
trialization, and town planning in the late 19th century
as well, and they were documented with equal intensity
by photographers who had received their training in
front of great architecture on travels or at home. Carl
Ferdinand Stelzner and Hermann Biow had recorded
the great fi re of their home town Hamburg in 1842 on
daguerreotypes but were unable to sell these images
to the city. In the late 1850s, cities like Paris started