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these were taken to fulfi l an industrial or simply picto-
rial remit.
The immense value of the easily duplicable paper
print was ably demonstrated in the very early 1850s,
and the illustrations produced for the The Reports of the
Juries produced after the Great Exhibition of 1851 at
London’s Crystal Palace stand as one of the fi rst com-
missioned uses of the medium to record, preserve and
celebrate industrial achievements. Indeed, amongst the
fi rst images produced in Britain which might be clas-
sifi ed as ‘industrial’ Mayall’s dramatic views of the
interior of the Crystal Palace at its original Hyde Park
location might be included. Numbered within the one
hundred and fi fty four calotypes printed for the Reports
by the Juries—of which one hundred and thirty copies
were printed—are detailed studies of the latest designs
and inventions in agricultural machinery, railway loco-
motives, philosophical instruments, equipment for sugar
refi neries and other manufacturing processes, the latest
designs for massive ship’s anchors, and other products
of the world’s industry.
But it was a year earlier, in Philadelphia in June 1850,
that the brothers William (1807–1874) and Frederick
(1809–1879) Langenheim produced their fi rst indus-
trial photographs—presented as mounted salted paper
prints of an eight-wheel steam locomotive built by the
Norris Brothers of Philadelphia. Apparently taken as
part of their, largely unsuccessful, attempt to promote
the value of the ‘Patent Talbotype’ process in the USA,
these images also served to demonstrate the value of
photography in helping market engineering products.
In England a few years later, James Mudd (1821–
1906) would fully exploit that market, when he em-
barked upon his long working relationship with the
Beyer-Peacock locomotive engineering company in
Gorton, Manchester. Starting initially with Gustave le
Gray’s waxed paper process in 1855, and later migrating
to collodion, Mudd produced a priceless visual archive
of the company’s engineering output over a quarter
of a century which survives to this day. Alexander
Gorton’s prophecy concerning photography’s value to
engineering proved correct when the engineer Charles
Blacker Vignoles undertook the construction of the fi rst
permanent bridge over the River Dneiper at Kiev. While
Vignoles was able to spend some of each year on site,
his other commitments made it vital that he return to
Britain for at least some of the year. He voiced his ap-
preciation of the value of photography in helping him
keep abreast of progress at the fi rst ordinary meeting
of the Photographic Society of London on 3 February
1853, and his comments were reported in the Journal
of the Photographic Society a month later
‘Mr Vignoles made a few remarks in illustration of the
great services which the new art would be likely to renderto engineers and others having to superintend important
works which they could only occasionally visit, or having
to make intelligible to foreign employers speaking a dif-
ferent language, with whom they could interchange ideas
only imperfectly in conversation, the details of blocks and
ropes, and complicated constructions. He instanced the
pictures taken of the works now going on at Kieff for the
suspension bridge he was erecting for the Emperor of Rus-
sia, over the Dneiper, on which photographic views had
been taken weekly during the whole time of its construc-
tion, and especially of the method of raising the chains
from the fi rst tightening of the ropes to fi nal elevation of
the whole to its proper position, which have been shown
with the greatest accuracy and detail.’
Some of those photographs were taken by Roger
Fenton during his single visit to the site in October 1852,
but the majority of the pictures, taken throughout the
three years of the bridge’s construction (1851–1853),
were, as far as can be ascertained, the only major pro-
fessional photographic commission undertaken by the
engraver and railway illustrator John Cooke Bourne
(1814–1896). Bourne, Fenton and Vignoles were not
unique in the mid 1850s. Contemporary with their
endeavors in Kiev, the value of ‘progress photography’
was also ably demonstrated in London by Philip Henry
Delamotte, whose remarkable photographic account
of the dismantling of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,
and its subsequent rebuilding in Sydenham, 1852-54,
was eventually published in 1855 by the Photographic
Institution, London, as Photographic Views of the Prog-
ress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. Taken during the
Progress of the Works, by Desire of the Directors. The
one hundred and sixty albumen prints from collodion
negatives contained in these two volumes comprise the
fi rst comprehensive photographic document of a civil
engineering project ever to be published.
The Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855 was one
of the undoubted spurs which moved French industry to
recognise the value of the photograph. Macauley (1994)
recounts the part played in this awareness-raising by the
entrepreneurial photographer André Adolphe Eugène
Disdéri who, after establishing a company specifi cally
to market photographs during the exhibition, circulated
letters to potential exhibitors drawing their attention to
the potential sales growth which might accompany the
use of photography in the promotion of their products.
In describing his photography as ‘artistique et industri-
elle’ Disdéri may well have been the fi rst to recognise
industrial photography as a specifi cally focused disci-
pline. By 1856, in France, according to Macauley, ‘the
term ‘industrial photography’ referred not only to the
recording of architectural and engineering constructions
but also to the cataloguing of manufactured goods for
use by travelling salesmen or for general publicity.’
Thereafter, the progress of almost every major con-INDUSTRIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
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