38
technicians who adapted to the “market” of photogra-
phy. For technical reasons his exposure time was short.
Paris seems deserted in most of his images with only a
few people appearing them. In some images by Taupin,
Ferrier, and Lecadre, fi res and such are evoked by crude
touching-up of the prints with paint.
This photographic production has a two-fold implica-
tion. The images not only serve as historical documents
of the event, but they serve as documentation of histori-
cal problems of censure and politics as captured in the
image and how that image was taken. The power of im-
ages like these resides in the reproducibility of them, a
market which continued to grow in size and importance
with the development of photography, especially cinema
and television.
In this market, the Commune of Paris proved to have
an economic ground that bore fruit. Reproductions of
monuments on fi re, of the Vendôme column, and of Paris
completely devastated were sold as rolls in Provinces
and abroad. In London particularly, these photographs
achieved enormous popularity to the extent that the
Agency Cook Travel began organizing visits for groups
of people.
The photographs entitled “Desastres de la guerre” by
Andrieu are silver prints on albumenized paper measur-
ing approximately 29 by 38 cm, most probably made
from wet collodion glass negatives, the technology over-
whelmingly preferred at the time. To date, forty-seven
separate images of “disasters” have been identifi ed by
their identical presentation and their shared dimensions
and subjects of Parisian architectural ruins of 1870 and
- All these photographic prints are mounted on
much larger blue-gray cardboard with a red embossed
stamp, centered underneath the print, bearing the series
title, Desastres de la guerre. It was on October 30, 1871,
that Andrieu registered twenty-one prints with the Depot
Legal, the government bureau regulating commercial
prints, under a series title Desastres de la guerre, along
with individual titles, which he numbered by hand from
one to forty-four, skipping numbers. A photographic
album now in the Canadian Centre for Architecture,
La Guerre et la Commune, includes twenty-one of
Andrieu’s Desastres in conjunction with other pictures
that offer a rare example of the manner in which such
Commune photographs were sold and collected in the
later nineteenth century.
Jules Andrieu and his studio were primarily devoted
to the commercial production of the ruins of the among
others such as Hyppolite Collard, Alphonse Liébert,
Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, Disdéri and Pierre
Edmonds, and others as well. The political actors in
confl icts also used photography and called upon these
studios to take images for them. The government of
Common often had photographs taken of the killed
National Guards whose identity could not be proven. As
of April 1871, the authorities of Versailles made photog-
raphy profi table in the identifi cation and documentation
of the Communards operations. The image served many
purposes. Very quickly, censorship controlled the pro-
duction of images that were still being sold years later.
By the end of 1871, prohibition was enacted banning
the intent to hawk and put on sale images and emblems
likely to disturb public peace” and in particular the
“portraits of the individuals charged or condemned for
their participation in the insurrectionary facts.” The only
authorized exceptions were “reproductions, which are
made from a purely artistic point of view of the fi res of
ruins of Paris.”
Photography, like all media, is ambivalent and even
ambiguous and is perhaps both at the same times and
often a source of information and a tool of misinforma-
tion. An image of a tumultuous event is often more than
just an image. The photographs of the ruins of Paris are
images of war and the questions remains why did people
start to collect and admire them. Recent historical ap-
proach has proposed political and class-based readings
of the photographs of Andrieu. Historians of art, pho-
tography, and culture who are concerned above all with
determining the political positions of the photographers
have divided these images into pro-and anti-Commune
camps, clarifying the ambiguity of photographs so that
a consistent message can be sent instead of contra-
dictons. Historians however have tended to privilege
what they consider to be pro-Commune photographs
and photographers, linking them to the proletariat. The
so-called pro-Commune photographs constitute only a
small proportion of contemporary Commune-related
imagery, and these had indeed suffered in the earlier
ideologically driven (that is, anti-Commune) illustrated
histories of the political moment. Such scholarly efforts
to recuperate these images have provided a fuller view
of Commune representation, if not greater sensitivity to
their broader meanings outside the specifi c politics of
this radical movement.
Johan Swinnen
See also: France; Cartes-de-visite; Albumen Print;
Photogravure; and Photography and Reproduction.Further Reading
Auer, Michel & Michèle, Encyclopédie internationale des pho-
tographes des débuts à nos jours, CD-Rom, Neuchâtel: Éd.
Ides et Calendes, diffusion Hazan, 1997.
Frizot, Michel, ed., Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie, Bordas,
Paris, 1994.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison, The origins of photography,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Andrieu, Jules , Notes pour Servir à l’histoire de la Commune
de Paris de 1871. Paris: notes by an independent-minded
Republican, 1984.