743
struction project throughout Europe was chronicled
with the camera.
While the majority of industrial photography at this
time was produced by generalists rather than specialists,
and was the result of infrequent specifi c commissions,
some people began to use photography on such a scale
that employing outsiders no longer made any economic
sense. Thus, the idea of the ‘in-house’ photographer was
pioneered, with photographers on the company payroll
carrying out the wide range of assignments, including
industrial ones formerly contracted out. One of the
fi rst so to do may have been the Krupps steel-making
company in Essen, Germany, who reportedly employed
their own photographers from the later 1860s, and in the
decades which followed, built up an archive of several
hundred thousand images refl ecting every aspect of the
company’s business.
In America, while the real expansion of industrial
photography came during the nation’s recovery after the
Civil War, many photographs which fi t within an indus-
trial context survive from earlier dates. The extensive
coverage of the California Gold Rush does offer a unique
view of a young industry at a time when entrepreneur-
ship rather than large corporate organisations still held
sway. It is unlikely, however, that any of these pictures
were taken within commissions which we would today
recognise as industrial. More likely they were taken
simply as records of the activities going on, or as the
basis for wood or steel engravings to be reproduced in
news periodicals.In the 1860s, photographers crossed America with
the teams of naval and civil engineers to build huge rail-
roads, which produced pictures that were often as much
about the grandeur of the scenery as they were about
the engineering itself—and in so doing, they produced
images which placed the engineering fi rmly within the
context of the landscape. Amongst the photographers
who chronicled these great unifying projects were Al-
exander Gardner, Captain A. J. Russel, John Carbutt and
many others. In a fascinating image taken on 10 May
1869 by Andrew J. Russell and Charles Roscoe Savage
at Promontory Point, Utah, the role of the industrial
photographer and news photographer become one, and
are themselves set in context, as the tracks from east
and west met, and two huge locomotives stood head
to head and a few feet apart. In the foreground, the
photographer’s second camera stands in one corner of
the image.
The photography of mammoth ship-building projects,
like the construction of Brunel’s 22,000 ton Great East-
ern, then the largest ship in the world by quite a margin,
resulted in iconic images. Robert Howlett’s pictures of
the huge ship under construction at John Scott Russell’s
shipyard on the Thames at Millwall demonstrate that,
as early as 1857, industrial photographers recognised
the importance of camera position. Howlett placed his
camera in such a way that the magnitude of the con-
struction was emphasised, creating images which could
hardly be bettered a century and a half later. Yet it is the
iconic portrait of Brunel himself—the classic industrialINDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Durandelle, Edouard
Charles Marville. Nouvel
Opera, Details et Modeles
Artistiques.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gilman Collection,
Gift of The Howard
Gilman Foundation, 2005
[2005.100.377.1 (14)] Image
© The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.Hannavy_RT72353_C009.indd 743 7/5/2007 11:33:30 AM