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regions then under British rule, and Felice Beato in
Japan by 1863, very soon after it was open to the West.
He published his Photographic Views of Japan with
Historical and Descriptive Notes fi ve years later.
Under the direction or commission from an offi cial
body, or independently, photographers made images
of groups of vernacular structures, such as churches,
and both very new and very old architectural marvels,
starting with Hippolyte Bayard, one of the founding
fathers of the medium. Among these, Charles Marville,
documented the transformation of streets and alleys of
Paris, during and after Baron Hausmann’s moderniza-
tions. This he did for the Prefecture of the Seine, City
of Paris, starting in about 1857. It appears that France,
the United States and Great Britain all commissioned
photographers to preserve visual records for their ar-
chives, but it was not widespread elsewhere.
Baron James de Rothschild commissioned Edouard
Denis Baldus in 1855 to record the construction of the
rail line from Boulogne to Paris, Lyons and the Mediter-
ranean, which he did through 1859. These were gathered
into presentation albums and exhibited at industrial exhi-
bitions, to great acclaim. Baldus, who had photographed
the effects of Rhone fl oods earlier and the building of
the new Louvre museum, was the quintessential docu-
mentarian of the era, in that he succeeded in applying
an artist’s mastery of formal pictorial conventions with
a prolifi c provision of detailed information.
Decades later, as the pictorial images of immense en-
gineering marvels became the norm in publications and
in the thriving stereo card market, images of the surreal
difference in scale between the workers and their prod-
uct were popular. These are exemplifi ed by the Albert
Fernique photographs of the Statue of Liberty’s creation
in France and installation in the United States.
Nadar (Felix Tournachon) brought a breadth of
experience with him to found his Paris photographic
establishment in 1853, having been a medical student,
journalist, spy, critic, caricaturist, novelist and balloonist.
All of this contributed to his catholic interests in subject
matter, photographing both above Paris and below. In
1858, he devised a fl oating darkroom and camera mount
for a balloon, creating aerial photographs of the city
and later, when electric lights were able to adequately
illuminate it, he photographed the catacombs and sewers
below, using early arc lamps attached through manhole
covers to their batteries.
Documenting wars was the most “modern” mani-
festation of photography during the century, since they
were used as conduits for relaying information about
events of wide import. Hippolyte Bayard made calotype
images of the barricades in the 1848 revolution in Paris,
but it was really with the introduction of collodion glass
plates that war became more feasible to document.
Roger Fenton was commissioned to photograph the
Crimean War in 1855, in part to allay public fears about
the manner in which the war was being conducted by
the British authorities. He arrived at Balaclava Harbor
in March of 1855 with 2 assistants, 5 cameras and 700
glass plates, all to be fi t into a horse-drawn darkroom
van. Despite all of the obstacles, he managed to make
360 images. Later, James Robertson, Superintendent of
the Mint at Constantinople, began photographing and
their images were collected for use in albums, exhibited
in London and Paris.
After that, the best-known confl icts captured photo-
graphically were the Second Opium War, which Felice
Beato photographed, presumably at some peril to him-
self, and, of course, the American Civil War.
Matthew Brady, and 22 photographers working for
him, made a tirelessly prolifi c record, the most compre-
hensive of the century. From the fi rst Battle of Bull Run
of 1861 to the surrender at Appomattox in 1865, thou-
sands of images were made and transmitted to the press
for publication. Using 16 × 20, 8 × 10 and stereograph
cameras, his men photographed literally everything ex-
cept the actual battles, due to the still lengthy exposure
times. The fi rst publication to come of it was Incidents of
Wa r, which only recorded Brady’s own name, although
he was primarily working as an impresario.
The period after the war was one of increasingly
rich documentary possibilities for photographic art-
ists, who set out on offi cial missions, creating a body
of images uniquely evocative of the American idea of
Manifest Destiny, and very much prized by the public
worldwide.
Timothy O’Sullivan, one of Brady’s war photog-
raphers, joined the geological exploration of the 40th
Parallel Survey in 1873, photographing Canyon De
Chelly National Monument in Arizona. William Henry
Jackson went on the Geographic Survey of the Territo-
ries in 1870 and in 1875 was shooting 20 × 24 in. plates
of the Rocky Mountains to adequately express their
grandeur (naturally, all prints were at that time were
contact prints). Both Carleton Watkins and Edweard
Muybridge were photographing Yosemite with large
plates in that decade.
Edward S. Curtis, an established Seattle photogra-
pher, made a monumental work of photographing the
Native tribes of North America, which he recognized
were already endangered, and with fi nancial support of
the banker J.P. Morgan, produced a 20 volume survey.
These are heroic, formal and romantic, rather more
pictorial than objective record, but, nevertheless, these
minutely detailed renderings were long used as reference
points for identifying tribes.
Photography’s evolution was towards ease and ra-
pidity of operation and, hence the capability to capture
more ordinary life. Thomas Annan’s images were of the
closes, wynds and buildings in which the poor lived and