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of places. Daguerreotypes and calotypes offered the
traveler excellent “diary” potential and in the second
half of the nineteenth century, other photographic
processes documented, besides architecture and monu-
ments, the countryside and mountain scenery. The
Roman campagna, the ultimate landscape considered
worthy of pictorial representation since centuries,
was photographed abundantly. In the 1850s, Giacomo
Caneva made a series of impressive views, some of
them intended for French artists staying at the Villa
Medici. During the following decades, many others,
such as Ludovico Tuminello, Pietro Dovizielli, Pietro
Poppi, and Federico Faruffi ni, made numerous studies
of nature, with or without fi gures. At the end of the
century, professional studios, such as that of the Alinari
brothers in Florence, a fi rm specialized in pictures of
artworks and architecture, also provided landscapes
for the tourist market. Foreign photographers as well,
such as Robert MacPherson in the 1850s, made vedute
for tourists. With an exceptional mastery of technique,
MacPherson photographed, mostly in large formats,
the Latium countryside and he made many beautifully
composed landscapes, such as his pictures of the ruins
of Tivoli, which seem to be organically connected with
the natural surroundings.
Some specific impressive locations, such as the
Vesuvius, which combined classical references with a
romantic fascination for the sublime, attracted many
photographers such as the pioneer Calvert Richard
Jones in the 1840s and Giorgio Sommer in the 1860s
and 1870s. From across the bay, Sommer made spec-
tacular photographs of the enormous plume of smoke
during the eruption of the volcano in 1872. Others of his
photographs, as well as pictures taken by John Buckley
Greene earlier, show an exceptionally modernist sensi-
bility for abstract shapes by focusing their attention to
the volcanic concretions instead of the broad view of
the Naples Gulf.
Another spectacular landscape explored by many
European photographers were the Alps, which both had
fascinated northern artists on their way to Italy since the
renaissance and which had become a locus classicus
of romanticism and the cult of the sublime in the late
eighteenth century. Noël Marie Lerebours included an
Alpine view in his famous Excursions daguerriènnes
(1840–44), John Ruskin commissioned Frederick
Crawley to make daguerreotypes of the Mont Blanc
in 1854, and William England immortalized the snow-
covered tops in a series of stereographs. In addition,
Vittorio Sella depicted the Italian Alpine topography
with an already modern dedication that evaded the of-
ten superfi cial curiosity of the Grand Tour. Sella even
specialized in mountain pictures operating, between
1887 and 1908, in such remote and exotic areas as the
Caucasus, the Himalayas, Karakorum, and Alaska. The
Italian Alps, however, were his favourite terrain. Here,
in 1879, he made his fi rst of several panoramas consist-
ing of four or fi ve adjacent pictures. His photographs
became an important reference point for geographical
and botanical societies, cartographers, geologists, and,
of course, alpinists.
Some prominent French photographers explored the
Alps as well. The German but Paris-based pioneer Frie-
drich Martens made daguerreotypes of the high moun-
tains in 1853–54, Ferrier made a series of stereographs
in 1856, and Charles Soulier made a series of views in- The most spectacular examples of Alpine photog-
raphy, however, were created by the Bisson Brothers and
Adolphe Braun. From 1854 onwards, Louis-Auguste
and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson made increasingly better
shots of the high mountains. In diffi cult conditions,
they not only managed to get the fl uid collodion under
control, they also produced a series of impressive large
prints (as big as 70 × 100 cm) characterized by subtly
balanced tonal values—no sinecure in the midst of the
high contrasts of the snowy landscapes. Initially, their
carefully selected viewpoints, which render a sense of
depth to the landscape, were unmistakably indebted
to the tradition of the picturesque. Later on, however,
their snowscapes were characterized by a more austere
approach showing mountaineers dwarfed by the fanci-
ful shapes of the glaciers, and the imposing formations
of the terrain and the mountain tops. Together with the
seascapes of Le Gray and the architectural photographs
by Baldus, the Bisson’s Alpine views can be considered
one of the highlights of the golden age of French pho-
tography around the middle of the century.
Sparkling Alpine scenery was also a favorite subject
of Adolphe Braun, who was one of the largest producers
of commercial landscape views in France during the
second half of the nineteenth century. In 1866, an ob-
server claimed that it was virtually impossible to take a
step in Switzerland without stumbling upon a shop sell-
ing Braun prints and stereoviews. Based in Mulhouse,
Braun turned his attention to scenic photography in
1859 with the publication of his L’Album de l’Alsace,
a collection of large-plate views of sights, monuments,
and landscapes, which were clearly indebted to previ-
ously published engravings of Alsatian views, such as
Jacques Rothmuller’s Vues pittoresques. Braun depicted
the Alps, especially in Switzerland, Northern Italy, and
the then recently acquired Haute-Savoie region, not
only by means of large-plate views (sometimes using
panoramic techniques) but also by stereographs, which
were especially suited to the introduction of fi gures
because of their palpable sensation of depth.
Braun’s collection of landscapes also includes scen-
ery in which picturesque ruins have been exchanged
for tokens of modernity, such as the construction of the
Gotthard Pass rail tunnel in the 1870s. This celebra-