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popular subjects and distributed through international
networks. The format was commercially exploited well
into the 20th century.
William and Frederick Langenheim of Philadelphia
patented their photographic lantern slide process in
1850 and called it the ‘Hyalotype.’ This photographic
format had enormous impact both as a form of entertain-
ment and for learning. The dual projection of ‘slides’
was exploited by 19th century art historians to form a
cornerstone of the discipline’s ‘comparative’ methodol-
ogy. Both this and the stereoscopic format were pivotal
moments in the development of visual perception.
The reproduction of two-dimensional graphic art
encapsulated a number of the dimensions of 19th
century photography. This ranged from engineering,
architectural and technical drawings and maps through
fi ne art engravings and old printed texts, to oil paintings.
Photography was also used to reproduce itself, as in the
case of photographic copies of unique Daguerreotypes.
Another dimension here was the rise form the 1860s of
photographic ‘piracy.’
Photography was applied to technical drawings in
fi elds such as architecture and civil engineering. By 1847
the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859)
was using the Daguerreotype for professional purposes.
He sent Daguerrotypes of his engineering drawings to
prospective railway builders across Europe. By the 1850s
Brunel was using photography as a contractual tool dur-
ing the construction of his vast ship the Great Eastern,
built at the yard of John Scott Russell (1808–1882) at
Millwall on the River Thames. From the 1860s most
major civil engineering projects were being documented
photographically. By the 1870s there was wide spread
use of photolithography to reproduce architect’s and
engineer’s drawings.
Photolithography was also used to reproduce important
historical texts ranging from Shakespeare’s original folios
to William Griggs’s 1871 reproduction of the Mahab-
hasya (an authority on Sanskrit grammar), consisting of
some 4674 pages. This was carried out for £6000 less
than the estimate for a manual tracing of the original
manuscript. Between 1899 and 1903 Griggs produced
the sixty plates for one of the landmarks of 19th century
colour photolithography, George F. Warner’s Illuminated
manuscripts in the British Museum. Such applications
underline aspects of photography’s role in 19th century
scholarship.
The use of photography to reproduce maps became
well established by the 1860s. In the late 1850s Colonel
Sir Henry James, (1803–1877) director of the Ordnance
Survey Offi ce in Southampton, introduced his photo-
planographic process called Photozincography. The func-
tion of the Ordnance Survey and the politics involved in
its funding dictated that the primary application of this
process lay in its reproduction of maps. James regularly
pointed out that Photozincography reduced the cost of
map making by several thousand pounds a year. However,
James also used Photozincography to reproduce historical
and illuminated manuscripts in the British national col-
lections, the chief example of which was the 11th century
Domesday Book published by the Ordnance Survey Of-
fi ce between 1861 and 1863.
Both Daguerre and Talbot considered the reproduc-
tion of the fi ne and decorative arts and architecture a key
application for their respective photographic processes.
Talbot’s experiments in particular covered a wide range of
the fi ne and decorative arts. From engravings, printed texts
and paintings, through porcelain, glass to sculpture. These
subject matter were used within his landmark publication
The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846).
Technical innovation in 19th century photography
was also connected with a number of reproductive appli-
cations of the medium. For instance, the limited spectral
sensitivity of photographic emulsions caused problems
for the reproduction of polychrome objects such as oil
paintings. In the late 1870s Gaston Braun (1845–1923),
the son of the great photographic publisher Adolphe
Braun (1812–1877) of Dornach, exploited develop-
ments in photochemistry to create orthochromatic col-
lodion-bath plates to reproduce paintings in the Prado
Museum, Madrid and the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
These photographs caused considerable astonishment
in the photographic and art world but since Braun
kept completely silent about his system, it could not
be adopted by other companies, thus permitting Braun
et Cie to achieve pre-eminence in this specialised fi eld
However, orthochromatic (also known as isochromatic)
fi lm was not sensitive to the entire visible spectrum and
it was not until 1902 that Professor Adolph Miethe and
Dr Arthur Traube, of the technical college in Berlin-
Charlottenburg, discovered that by using a red-violet
dye, subsequently called ‘ethyl-red,’ it was possible
to produce truly panchromatic plates and thus to cor-
rectly register in monochrome the colours of the visible
spectrum in their proper tonal relationships.
The principles of colour photography had been largely
established by James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) in the
1860s. Charles Cros (1842–82), another pivotal fi gure
in the history of colour photography, produced colour
photographs of paintings by the entrepreneurial and con-
troversial avant-garde artist Edouard Manet (1832–83).
One of these photographs was used by the collector of
Impressionist art Ernest Hoschedé (1837–1891) for the
cover of his review Impressions de mon voyage au Salon
de 1882 (A. Tolmer, Paris, 1882). However, during the
19th century the use of photographic colour reproductions
were frequently the result of a combination of photo-
graphic and manual processes. One of the more complex
of these ‘hybrid’ processes was the photochromie of Léon
Vidal (1834–1906), which combined chromolithography