63
to commission photographers like Charles Marville to
take photographs of all streets and places that were to
be torn down by Baron Hausmann’s new town plans
—a matter of political legitimation. A decade later, his
efforts were prolonged by Thomas Annan in Glasgow
depicting the old closes and wynds of the city just prior
to their demolition. Another decade later, his album
was widened by a new set of images, and the company
of Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon received a
similar commission by the newly founded Society for
Photographing the Relics of Old London.
All of these photographers, and dozens of their
colleagues alike, felt confl icted about these buildings,
on one hand it was clear that the photographed areas
had to be destroyed for reasons of social welfare and
hygienics, on the other hand the images represented
a substantial loss of each city’s morphology. The last
and greatest photographer in this line is, without doubt,
Èugene Atget who started his long series of Parisian
‘locations of a scene’ (Walter Benjamin) by 1890. His
work, rediscovered by the Surrealists in the 1920s,
in several ways marks the turn to modernism in both
documentation and photography. His pictures belong
to photography, in view and print, but belong to history
in composition and perspective. Street photography
as practised by Èugene Atget bore fruit to numerous
others, and lesser known photographers aiming to sell
their images to painters, illustrators, and the press. In
Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, around 1900 one can
fi nd in any city at least one ‘house photographer’ who
walked from street to street, from house to house, taken
images of each house in order to sell it to the landlords
and inhabitants.
Human beings served as an ornament of city photog-
raphy which was partly unavoidable, but on the other
hand partly served as picturesque additions to the moods
evoked. Additionally, some of the later photographers
conceived their series—commissioned or not—to show
human poverty and misery as caused by bad housing
conditions. Travel photographers like John Thomson
made the streets of London appear more human, while
painters like Georg Hendrik Breitner developed their
interest in the iconography of human labour by photo-
graphing workers in the canals and places of Amster-
dam. The New York police reporter Jacob August Riis,
born in Denmark, employed the camera to change the
situation of his fellow immigrants; his book on “How
the Other Half Lives,” published in 1890, led to major
changes in the city’s town planning. Well issued, his
example was followed around the turn of the century
by nearly every large city in the world; health insurance
companies ordered photographers to document tene-
ment conditions as well as their demolition. Riis and
his colleagues were the fi rst to introduce fl ash light into
architectural photography as there was no other lighting
source for their work. Just after the turn of the century,
Lewis W. Hine started his career by fi nding symbolic
forms and gestures for the imagery of social fate—as is
the case with Atget and some of the Fine Art photogra-
phers, his work seems to mark crossing the frontier of
historism and modernism.
Since the late 1880s, Fine Art photography arose as a
movement of autonomous search for the social integra-
tion of the new technique and medium into the art world.
Aesthetically, this movement was stuck to the classical
subjects and motifs—including landscape which just
had been added to the list after William Turner’s ef-
forts in establishing this subject within painting—and
therefore architecture simply happened within certain
images. Hugo Henneberg of the Vienna school had Ital-
ian palazzi included in his views on dark alleys; Peter
Henry Emerson directed his camera to Norfolk and Suf-
folk farm houses; Constant Puyo showed small villages
as integral part of his vertical and horizontal panoramas.
A singular position within the whole movement is held
by Frederic Henry Evans who started as a part of the
British Arts-and-Crafts movement and shared the ‘vi-
sionary spires’ of the late 19th century Gothic revival.
After a short period in close vicinity to William Morris
and his Kelmscott Manor Press he found his life-time
theme in English mediaeval church interiors which he
photographed for their subtlety of light direction and
for which he found the technical equivalent in using
the platinum print.
The Fine Art photography movement, as represented
by the Linked Ring brotherhood, did not regard archi-
tecture as a suffi cient subject of criticism but there were
a number of members within this movement who had
an urban background and traced themselves within it.
Alfred Stieglitz had begun with his own artistic work as
a student of photo-chemistry and while travelling to the
German south and Italy. His fi rst attempts in Fine Art
photography were taken in Berlin around 1890, and to a
great deal they dealt with the urban growth of this city,
both in the interior and in the exterior. When he returned
to New York, his view on the Manhattan shore shaped
his vision as well as Broadway by night—a concisely
modern subject in architecture and photography. This
vision was shared by several colleagues commuting
between the American and the European continent,
as Edouard Jean Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn
did. Their photographs of the big city were widely ac-
claimed in exhibitions on the old continent and praised
by critics as well.
Although they were made in 1904 and 1912, one
should consider two architectural photographs as the
last ones of the 19th century bearing in them all modern
elements but showing themselves as typical prints of the
century gone: Edouard Steichen’s view on the Flatiron
building on New York’s broadway and Karl F. Struss’