60
Roger Fenton went to Russia, just to name a few out
of dozens. They were accompanied by true amateurs
seeking the splendour of antiquity in ruins depicted
in the best quality possible. Among them are Robert
McPherson, Frédéric Flacheron, and Jakob August
Lorent in Italy, James Robertson in Greece, Wilhelm von
Herford in Egypt, Wilhelm (Guilleaume) Berggren in
Constantinople, and Désiré Charnay and Paul de Rosti
in Mexico and Brasil. Most of these photographers had
either been painters before and therefore developed an
interest in the aesthetic qualities of ruins as a base of
their drawings and studies, or they were archaeologists
and art historians by training. One exception is the
Prussian diplomat von Herford who refers to the large
number of British amateurs in India, mostly military
offi cers: Linnaeus Tripe, Captain Biggs, John Murray,
and later John Burke and Melville Clarke.
The introduction of the wet Collodion process
and the albumen print in the early 1850s brought the
technological shift for photography from an artistic
practice towards a medium of visual communication.
Immediately, early entrepreneurs like Louis-Désiré
Blanquardt-Évrard and Adolphe Braun star—among
them a number of titles with architectural photographs.
From the mid 1850s onwards, the production of larger
quantities of copies reached a semi- industrial status;
the times of the well-known suppliers of travel pho-
tographs began. Be it the brothers Alinari in Florence,
Giacchino Altobelli in Rome, Carlo Naya and Carlo
Ponti in Venice, Giorgio Sommer in Naples, Giacomo
Brogi and Constantino Brusa in Milano, or the Studio
Incorpora in Palermo—only for Italy one can easily
name more than a dozen studios, each of them sending
out dozens of their own photographers and processing
thousands of prints a month by hundreds of employees.
Within three decades, the brothers Alinari piled up a
stock of 150.000 pictures; at least, one quarter of these
are architectural photographs.
Important names and countries in this fi eld include
William J. Stillman, Petro Moraites and Dimitrios Con-
stantinou in Greece, J.Pascal Sebah and the brothers
Zangaki in Constantinople, Tancrède Dumas in Beirut,
Francis Frith, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, Antonio Beato,
Désiré Ermé and the Bonfi ls family in Egypt, Charles
Clifford and Vicomte Vigier in Spain, Charles Shepherd,
Samuel Bourne and Lala Deen Dayal in India, John
Thomson and Felice Beato in China, the latter in Japan
where he sold his establishment to the Austrian Baron
Raimund Stillfried who gave his studio to Kusakabe
Kimbei. The stylistic approach of the architectural pho-
tographs from all of these sources is rather conventional
and responsible for most of all forms of architectural
photography still today. The building or complex is ac-
cessed by panoramic views from a higher stand-point.
Then there are strictly axial views of each important
facade from a middle height, followed by a number of
details in ornament, doors, or sculptural additions. The
scenes are mostly lit with bright sunlight and strong
shadows, although the heavens stay white due to the
emulsions’ unsensitivity. A common practice these days
was the combine printing of the architectural view with
one or two negatives of cloudscapes fi tting the subject
and light given. Personnage is found on most images of
architecture; as in industry, the humans depicted func-
tion as measurements of the edifi ces.
Travelling and collecting travel photographs was
refl ected in architecture after a short while - historism
was the clear determination of the earlier preservation
campaigns. “In which style should we build?” was the
main question of the 1850s to World War I, and it was
answered by the use of architectural photographs. Indus-
trialisation and the movement of people from the land
into the cities in the middle of the 19th century caused
the erection of new quarters and buildings, and for this
purpose architects were needed. Nearly all European
countries installed a university specializing in training
architects after the model of the Parisian Académie des
beaux arts, and a growing number of Americans came
to Europe to study, like Henry Hobson Richardson. The
young architects of the early 19th century studied after
the plans and portfolios of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand,
and they now began to work from larger collections
of photographs—mainly from the sources of travel
photography but as well from local compendia like the
‘Mission héliographique’ or the new collection of the
South Kensington museum.
When students started their own trips around Europe
and the Mediterrean Sea to study architecture old and
new, they drew after the originals and establish collec-
tions of images—and when some of these students be-
came teachers, again these collections formed the ground
of each curriculum. Gradually photography crawled into
these collections, not only as a help in producing studies
in perspective, but as a base of exact measurement, too.
An integral part of study in architecture was an exact
account of one building, like mediaeval cathedrals, clois-
ters, or antique structures and ruins. These accounts were
to be delivered in outlines, transverses, and orthogonal
projections of each frontage—the most hated work in
the education of an architect. One of these students,
Albrecht Meydenbauer, after a severe accident decided
to introduce photography into this process of account-
ing. Architectural photogrammetry was born, the use of
military cartography for the reconstruction of buildings.
To fi nance his project which consisted of documenting,
exactly every important historical building in Europe,
Meydenbauer not only established the Preussische
Messbildanstalt in Berlin but offered his photographs
in subscription sales to universities, administrations,
and private investors. When the Messbildanstalt was