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The wooden boxes and brass tubes of the earliest camera
constructions had shaped into an unfoldable ‚traveling
camera’ which allowed separate movements of both the
plate and the lens holder for perspective corrections.
There were developments in the preservation of build-
ings, also. In 1837, the author and politician Prosper
Mérimée had founded the ‘Comission des monuments
historiques’ fi nanced by the French state, and in 1838 he
suggested an inventory of all buildings worth preserving.
When the invention of photography was announced in
January 1839, the forthcoming inventory was feeded
by the hope to include images of these buildings, as
was decided in the commission’s meeting in March
- It took nearly ten years until Hippolyte Bayard
was commissioned with the fi rst few photographs of
the restoration works at the cathedral of Nôtre Dame
in Paris. Finally in 1851, the commission founded the
fi rst photographic documentation project: the ‘Mission
héliographique.’ One of the founders was Léon de
Laborde who in the same year of 1851 co-founded the
Société héliographique whose interests were concerned
with the publication of photographs that were important
for commissions like the ‘Mission’.
Six photographers received contracts for the ‘Mis-
sion’ in 1851: Edouard Denis Baldus who subsequently
was to become Europe’s fi rst professional architectural
photographer; Henri le Secq who already had taken im-
ages of the mediaeval cathedrals of Amiens and Reim;
and Gustave le Gray who came from the Barbizon
school of painting and was an acclaimed practicioner
of photography. Hippolyte Bayard’s earlier contract
was renewed, and little in known about the fi fth man,
O. Mestral. A year later, the sixth photographer, Charles
Nègre was installed by a new contract. As with le Secq
and le Gray, Nègre had been a painter before and studied
with Paul Delaroche, even so, his contribution to the
‘Mission’ remains somewhat elusive. The six photogra-
phers received lists of buildings taken from the ‘Annales
archéologiques’—the most important periodical of its
fi eld—and delivered roughly 150 photographs by the
end of 1852. From then on, the Commission seemed
to have lost its interest in commissioning documentary
images but started to buy them from different sources
like the Parisian scenes mainly from Charles Marville.
At the same time, the Commission began to re-fi nance
this program by selling prints loose or in albums. When
the ‘Mission héliographique’ offi cially ceased to exist
in 1880, there were some 6,000 photos on sale.
There is no other project like this in the history of
architectural photography but, of course, there were
a number of self-commissioned documentations on
buildings worth being preserved by photography. Wil-
liam Henry Fox Talbot with the partnership of David
Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, followed by Benjamin
Brecknell Turner, Thomas Keith, Thomas Sutton, and
Roger Fenton formed the nucleus of the‚ Architectural
Photography Association’ which exhibited twice in
London in 1858 and 1859. The fi rst self-commissioned
documentation with a scientifi c approach in art history
in Germany was a comprehensive album created and
printed in 1856 by Hermann Emden. It showed the
interior and sculptures of the cathedral at Mainz. His
efforts were prolonged by the work of Carl Friedrich
Mylius, Friedrich Ferdinand Albert Schwartz, and
Georg Boettcher in the German countries, by George
Washington Wilson in Scotland, by Humbert de Molard
and André Giroux in France, by Giacomo Caneva in
Italy, and by a fast growing number of practicioners
in each European country with relics of history. Even
if all of these photographers started their work from
an interest in preservation, they gradually were swept
into a world-wide phenomenon that became the main
result of architectural photography for the 1850s and
1860s: tourism.
Travelling the Grand Tour through Europe and around
the Mediterrean Sea had become an integral part of any
cultural education—if there was money enough in the
family. By the efforts of a growing number of agents
in the mid 19th century, the Grand Tour gradually al-
tered into the forms of group tourism still well known
today. Tourists often visited the cultural highlights of
a country and then retreated to a resort for personal
comfort, all within one travel. Also, everybody needed
souvenirs as mnemic aids for later accounts of the travel
to the family and neighbours. Photographs were obvi-
ously the best possible means of remembering, often
representing the scenes visited with hitherto unknown
accuracy. Travel photography was comprised of more
than only architectural subjects but the main depiction
of monuments seen consisting of buildings and places,
and the conventions of travel photography were set by
the fi rst architectural photographs made of each edifi ce.
Concerning the difference between architectural and
archaeological interests in preservation of buildings and
the use of the same motives for travel souvenirs, one
has to consider a tiny time gap within the early 1850s,
exactly at the same time the ‘Mission héliographique’
was on its way in France.
After Lerebours’ photographers and their, more or
less, vain attempts to collect the most important build-
ings of the world in the ‘Excursions Daguerriennes’
in 1839 and 1840, there was nearly a decade without
photographic excursions. This was due, in part to the
technical differences between the exact but unprint-
able daguerreotype and the reproductable but inexact
calotype. Salt printing processes, however, had by 1850
developed a technical quality which enabled a number
of photographers to travel with a camera. August Salz-
mann went to Palestine, John Shaw Smith, John Beasly
Greene, and Maxime du Camp travelled to Egypt, and