1455
Vignoles and Camilla Hutton, daughter of Dr Charles
Hutton of Woolwich. A Civil Engineer with a wide range
of interests, he was engaged in Railway Engineering in
England, Ireland and on the Continent of Europe.
Vignoles was a founder member of the Royal Pho-
tographic Society, and was an early advocate of the use
of photography as a means of recording construction
activities.
In 1848 he employed John Cooke Bourne and in 1852
Roger Fenton to take record pictures of the Tsar Nicholas
I Chain Bridge which he was constructing at Kiev.
In 1859 he encouraged John Watson, the contrac-
tor on the Bahia and San Francisco Railway in Brazil
to employ a photographer to record the progress of
the works. From 1859 to 1862 this was carried out by
Benjamin Mulock.
In 1860, while working in Northern Spain, he fa-
cilitated an expedition to view the Eclipse of the Sun,
when Warren de la Rue photographed the Corona for
the fi rst time.
President of the Institution of Civil Engineers from
1870 to 1872, Vignoles died in Southampton in 1875.
John Vignoles
VILLALBA, RICARDO
(active 1860–1880)
Ricardo Villalba (sometimes spelled Villaalba), was
active in Perú and Bolivia, between 1860 and 1880.
He may have been born in Corocoro Bolivia, but very
little is known about his life. Villalba’s images are found
on cartes de visite and cabinet cards and his albumen
prints include views of the Peruvian Southern Railroad,
Lake Titicaca and the devastating 1868 earthquake of
Arequipa and Arica. During the 1870s, Villalba had a
studio in Arequipa and is thought to have been the fi rst
to photograph the city’s famed volcano, El Misti. When
Villalba left Arequipa, his studio and perhaps some of
his negatives may have been acquired by the photog-
rapher Carlos Heldt. According to Dan Buck, Villalba
relocated to Paris in the 1880s, where he was listed as
a member of the Societe Francaise the Photographie.
He also submitted several photographs for an exhibit
sponsored by the Photo Club de Paris in 1894.
The Harvard Peabody Museum owns a Villalba
album containing ethnographic cartes de visite of Bo-
livians. There are also over thirty Villalba photographs
in the James Maxwell Collection at the University of
Delaware. The ENAFER Corporation in Perú owns an
album of images of the Ferrocarril del Sur (which ran
from Mollendo to Puno). The William Darrah Collection
at Penn State contains one carte de visite (c. 1872) of a
sunken ship off of the port of Callao (near Lima). On this
card the photographer’s name is spelled Villaalba.
Yolanda Retter Vargas
VOGEL, HERMANN WILHELM
(1834–1898)
German inventor, photographer
There are not many ‘fi rsts’ in the history of German
photography but there is one man who collected most
of them: he wrote the fi rst thesis on photo-chemistry
in German language; with the Photographische Mit-
teilungen, he founded one of the fi rst and most lasting
periodicals; he gave photography the “second half of
light” (J.M. Eder, 1880) by fi nding the substances for
the colour sensitisation of photographic plates. In the
German speaking countries, he was the fi rst to criticize
an exhibition at length, and among the fi rsts to curate
another one, dedicated to the aesthetic qualities of
photography gained throughout the fi rst 25 years of
existence. Hermann Wilhelm Vogel was a remarkable
thinker about photography whose interests were as
wide-spread as the medium itself:
Thus we see photography active into the most diverse di-
rections. Animals, plants, minerals have to draw their im-
ages onto the light sensitive plate as well as the products of
art and industry, and as the motions of the barometer and
thermometer. The photographer directs his instrument into
the icy regions of the North Pole as well into the thicket of
the tropical jungle; into the gorges of our high mountains
as well as into the depths of the endless universe. His art
is applicable to all branches of human knowledge and
wisdom. There is no fi eld in the great world of the visible
where it [photography] could not be introduced fruitfully;
it is shaping the history of towns and countries, and when
we will be no more existant, our photographs—more
loquacious the all historical works—will tell the cultural
history of our time to our successors. (Hermann Wilhelm
Vogel, Die Photographie auf der Londoner Weltausstel-
lung des Jahres 1862, Braunschweig 1863, 28)
Neither photography nor fame were laid in his cradle.
Hermann Wilhelm Vogel was born in 1834 in the small
town of Dobrilugk (today: Doberlug-Kirchhain) fi fty
miles southeast of Berlin. He was the son of a material
merchandiser who wanted him to follow in his footsteps,
and so young Hermann became an assistant sales agent
at the age of fourteen. In 1850 he fi nally managed, ac-
cording to records, with the help of some of his father’s
friends, to inscribe at the trade school in Frankfurt/Oder
which had a technical department. From 1852 to 1858
Vogel visited the technical school at Berlin, then the
best-known institute for all kinds of applied science.
After fi nishing this institute with a diploma in 1858, he
was installed as a scientifi c assistant at the Mineralogical
Museum of the Berlin University. It was there that he
fi nally met his life-long interest: photography.
Two infl uences can be reported for this determina-
tion: At the Museum he had to reproduce cuttings of
rock with the aid of photography, and a friend from the
technical school, the architect Albrecht Meydenbauer,