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from coal fi res combined with moist air to limit the oc-
casions on which the atmosphere was quite clear.
Edinburgh, Scotland, was known as ‘Auld Reekie’—
literally ‘old smokie’—because of the combination of
damp air and smoke from fi res. Thus, in a lecture to the
Photographic Society of Scotland in 1856, the amateur
photographer and advocate of le Gray’s waxed paper
process, Dr Thomas Keith, lamented the persistent effect
of aerial perspective on his pictures:
I am quite satisfi ed that the commonest cause of failure
arises from the paper being exposed in bad or indifferent
light, especially in town, where the atmosphere is much
adulterated with smoke. I never got a good picture where
there was the slightest trace of that blue haze which smoke
produces between the camera and the object.
Yet, it is the spatial effect of that aerial perspective
which gives many of Keith’s pictures their character.
The same is true of Roger Fenton’s beautiful study The
Terrace and Park, Harewood House, where, thanks to
the haze of a Yorkshire summer, the picture reads as
a series of planes, like the layers of a stage set, each
lighter and less distinct than the one before it, receding
into the distance.
It is, arguably, the impact of moisture in the air that
enhanced the effect of aerial perspective in European
photographs, and gave the work of European pioneers a
quality distinctively different from the work produced in
drier climates. In order to assess the likely fi nal appear-
ance of a photograph, photographers were encouraged
to consider the scene without color, and thus to assess
the tonal impact of aerial perspective. In The Practice
of Photography —A Manual for Students and Amateurs,
1855, Philip Henry Delamotte suggested:
A black mirror, such as is used by artists, will be
found useful in making choice of a view, as, by neutral-
izing the colours of objects, it more nearly exhibits the
resulting photographic effect.
That was, of course, only partly true, due to thePERSPECTIVE
Howlett, Robert. Isambard Kingdom
Brunel Standing Before the Launch.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase,
Harriette and Noel Levine Gift,
2005 (2005.100.11) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.