1361
including Gustave Le Gray and Henri Le Seq, had been
formally trained in the studio of the painter Paul Delar-
oche; many of the several hundred images produced for
the mission were thus endowed with a pictorial artistry
and a marked skill with the variant paper processes of
the period. Though the photographs were not utilized
in any offi cial capacity, this tentative embrace of the
medium was soon to change. From the late 1850s
to the end of the century the engineering school had
amassed an enormous collection of pictures of public
works, railways, bridges, and other constructions taken
within France as well as other countries. Some of the
photographers who had been affi liated with the earlier
Mission and contributed to this and other archives,
including Édouard Baldus, who produced views in the
early 1860s of railway bridges for civil engineers who
had worked on these projects. Charles Marville, who had
also engaged in earlier documentary projects published
by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard’s printing establish-
ment Imprimerie Photographique, was commissioned
by Georges Haussmann’s Travaux historiques in 1865
to photograph the city streets while undergoing mod-
ernization under the latter’s supervision.
As the major industrial powers extended their reach
into other parts of the world, photography was employed
to extract visual evidence from lands of scientifi c,
archeological, architectural, and ethnological signifi -
cance, economic promise, and political importance to
probing western nations. In this respect, the medium
was found useful by offi cers in the British army and
the Government Civil Service. India especially was the
site of an emergent economy of British intelligence and
imperialism in which the camera was adopted readily
enough for specifi c activities that may fall under the
broad rubric of surveying: of reconnaissance, surveil-
lance, and exploration of places and their inhabitants.
One Philip Henry Egerton, for instance, was Deputy
Commissioner of Kangra in the western Himalaya when
he made a photographic excursion through the rugged
mountain environment near the Tibetan border in 1863.
His Journal of a Tour through Spiti, to the Frontier of
Chinese Thibet, illustrated with thirty-six of his views
of particular ethnographic and geological interest, was
published by Cundall, Downes and Company the fol-
lowing year. Egerton’s intentions to stimulate further
exploration and encourage trade in the region were
clear. British enterprise “would bring manufactures
into the heart of Central Asia, extending civilisation to
the barbarous hordes which people those vast tracks,
and enriching the manufactures, exporters, and carri-
ers of European produce, as well as Tartar Shepherds.”
(Egerton, 1864, pp. iv–v) More systematic efforts were
to come almost immediately thereafter, with increased
use of the camera for surveying the antiquities of the
subcontinent in conjunction with the establishment of
the Archaeological Survey of India. Photographs by
various military and civilian operators would also be
selectively acquired by professional and government
agencies. Such collections as formed in the 19th century
at the South Kensington Museum (which became theSURVEY PHOTOGRAPHY
Watkins, Carleton E.. Cape
Horn near Celilo.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gilman Collection,
Purchase, The Horace W.
Goldsmith Foundation Gift,
2005 (2005.100.109) Image
© The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.