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of scenes along the way. Similar justifi cations can be
adduced for the photo-sessions and group picture oppor-
tunities that started to appear after 1860 in organizations
of every kind, from army regiments to school faculties,
for which photography provided collective or corporate
visual identities. At the same time, however, vast quan-
tities of photographs were produced and accumulated
with little ascribable justifi cation under the aegis of
armies, government agencies and other educational,
scientifi c or medical organizations. Collections such as
those of French and British expeditionary photography
to the Middle East and the Far East, or those of U.S.
surveys in the American West, are often loosely labeled
“documentary.” Yet beyond the general notion that they
refl ected colonial or strategic motivations, it is often hard
to account precisely for their purpose, except by sug-
gesting that the constitution of a photographic archive
was a self-justifying practice, or a sign of modernity
and technicality, which was as such suitable to illustrate
the effi ciency of the organization that produced it. Such
archives were routinely described to budgeting authori-
ties in terms of numbers of items secured, as opposed to
informational content. Most of these photographic col-
lections never reached the general public, or were only
briefl y and partially shown at exhibitions. In some cases,
however, as with some of the U.S. federal surveys of the
American West after 1865, photographs and especially
stereographs were distributed or sold to the public, and
special services were created to that effect, in response
to an explicit public demand. Whether or not they were
distributed, however, these large photographic collec-
tions induced procedures of archiving, cataloguing,
serializing, captioning, describing, and in some cases
publishing, which are historically signifi cant as such,
for they amounted to early systems of photographic
documentation. Such documentary ventures contributed
to making photography a customary adjunct to almost
every undertaking of description, identifi cation and
analysis of visible phenomena, to the extent that around
1880 the photographic representation of many subjects
had become an integral part of their cultural percep-
tion. This perception was often framed by and limited
to one particular image which tended to function as an
icon, as in the case of portraits of great historic fi gures
(Queen Victoria, Napoleon III, Abraham Lincoln, Victor
Hugo, etc.) that were also carried in engraved form by
illustrated magazines and even reproduced as postage
stamps. But it was no less common for photographic
representation to emphasize accumulation, multiplicity,
and seriality. Thus, the abstract concept of photogra-
phy as an apparatus of truthfulness was enacted either
through the treasuring of memorable icons or through
the accumulation of many different views, but both
practices refl ected an aspiration to obtain total depiction
of the visible world.
Yet for a variety of reasons, one of them being that
no single photograph or collection of photographs could
produce the total view that the idea of photography
seemed to promise, many 19th-century photographic
practices embodied the opposite assumption that photo-
graphs as such were incomplete messages, semantically
defi cient, particularly because lacking in context. The
photographically illustrated book was only one major
example of practical and discursive apparatuses that
served to endow photographs with meaning, and which
consistently surrounded the apparition of photographs
in social life. Mounts with imprinted serial numbers,
captions, and decorative motifs, and the ideal picture
collections that they referred to, were more common
manifestations of a general practice (which in fact
predated photography) of anchoring visual messages
in textual and more generally cultural contexts. Thus,
the scope of large-scale institutional ventures such
as the expeditionary photography campaigns already
mentioned could only be legitimized by ascribing the
thousands of photographs gathered to didactic, memo-
rial or scientifi c purposes, even though as noted above
the mere achievement of these large collections appears
to have served as de facto justifi cation in many cases. In
these large-scale documentary ventures, pictures were
often made or presented in serial form (for instance in
albums, sets of stereoviews, or descriptive catalogues
that were used for marketing prints), emphasizing a
requirement for descriptive exhaustiveness that none-
theless remained a utopia. Many procedures of pho-
tographic description, such as multi-plate panoramas
and grouped views of the same subject from different
angles, answered the same concern for a totalizing de-
piction, while at the same time acknowledging failure
to achieve it and denying the sense of self-containment
that would, in the 20th century, be associated with a
great photograph. In more specialized uses such as
police and medical records, the specifi c methodolo-
gies of picture-taking, fi ling, and comparison that were
devised in the late 19th century aimed at bringing out
clues or signs that photographs of a more lay kind, or
considered in isolation, would not convey. Meanwhile,
in many ethnophotographic collections the actual
documentary content was largely if not exclusively a
function of captioning and commentary. Exhibitions of
photographs, especially in the context of world fairs,
often grouped them by process and then by topic or
geographical area, rather than by author or style, and
thus they interpreted pictures not on formal or even
strictly technical grounds but in relation to what they
represented, and to what in 20th century art-historical
terms would be considered external categories. It should
also be remembered that for most of the 19th century
photographs were structurally incomplete with respect
to the printed media, which could not incorporate them