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[Towards Modernity. 19th Century in the Liège District],
Liège: Université de Liège/ Les Musées de Liège, 2001.
——, Gustave Marissiaux. La possibilité de l’art [Gustave
Marissiaux. The possibility of Art], Charleroi: Musée de la
Photographie, 1997.
Pinet, Hélène; Poivert Michel, Le Salon de Photographie. Les
écoles pictorialistes en Europe et aux Etats-Unis vers 1900
[The Photography Salon Pictorialist Schools in Europe and in
the United States around 1900], Paris: Musée Rodin, 1993.
MARKETS, PHOTOGRAPHIC
When Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William
Henry Fox. Talbot announced their eponymous process-
es, neither could have envisaged the range of markets to
which their inventions would be applied before the end
of the century—although both men offered some early
suggestions. Daguerre foresaw the primary applications
of his invention being of benefi t to travelers, archaeolo-
gists and naturalists—as well as the more obvious uses
such as portraiture.
Also foretelling the public’s enthusiasm for por-
traits, landscape and pictures of buildings and places,
Talbot additionally predicted some novel applications
of his invention. In Pencil of Nature (1844) he not only
pioneered the photographically illustrated book as a
potentially massive market for photographs, but sug-
gested, amongst other applications, that a photographic
inventory of a collection of antiques would be infi nitely
more useful than a written one, asking his readers, “‘and
would a thief afterwards purloin the treasures—if the
mute testimony of the picture were to be produced
against him in court—it would certainly be evidence
of a novel kind?”
Others were just as enthusiastic about the potential
applications of photography. The Scottish engineer
Alexander Gordon, suggested to the Institution of Civil
Engineers in London as early as 1840 that photography
would enable “views of buildings, works, or even of
machinery when not in motion, to be taken with perfect
accuracy in a very short space of time and with com-
paratively small expense.”
Such a use of photography, he suggested, would be of
great value to architects and engineers, especially when
managing projects at a distance. History proved him
correct. The minutes of the fi rst meeting of the newly
formed Photographic Society of London on February
3, 1853, record that the engineer Charles Blacker Vi-
gnoles, who,
... made a few remarks in illustration of the great service
which the new art would be likely to render to engineers
and others having to superintend important works which
they could only occasionally visit, or having to make
intelligible to foreign employers speaking a different
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 go-
ing on at Kieff for the suspension bridge he was erecting
for the Emperor of Russia, over the Dneiper, on which
photographic views had been taken weekly during the
whole time of its construction, and especially of the
method of raising the chains from the fi rst tightening of
the ropes to the fi nal elevation of the whole to its proper
position, which have been shown with the greatest ac-
curacy and detail.
Here he was referring to the work of John Cooke Bourne,
who reportedly chronicled every stage in the bridge’s
construction through to its opening later that year.
By the end of that decade, industrial photography had
established itself as an essential market for photogra-
phers worldwide, with progress photography becoming
an essential feature of every major construction project,
from Ben Mulock’s images of the construction of the
Bahai Railway, 1859–1862 (another Vignoles project),
through to Evelyn Carey’s record of the construction
of the Forth Bridge in Scotland as the century drew to
a close.
The accuracy and reliability of the “evidence” offered
by a photograph inspired and drove most early com-
mercial applications. The fi rst photographs brought back
from ancient Egypt were avidly collected by academic
institutions and scholars, who saw the value of the pho-
tographs as enabling studies to be undertaken without
the time and expense incurred in actually visiting the
locations. The subscription list for Francis Frith’s Egypt
and Palestine Photographed and Described (London,
James S. Virtue, 1857), for example, includes many
universities and colleges, and many leading academics,
alongside the rich and infl uential.
Roger Fenton’s contracts with the British Museum in
the 1850s permitted the establishment of an independent
sales point within the museum foyer, through which
Fenton sold copies of many of the images of museum
objects which the Trustees had commissioned him to
produce, thus establishing the prototype for today’s
ubiquitous museum shop. This took the marketing of
images of antiquity one stage further as, in addition to
sales to academics and specialists, these photographs
were sold to the more affl uent members of the museum-
visiting general public.
Just as with the Egyptian images of Frith and others,
many of Fenton’s commissions for the British Museum
were published in bound editions. His 1856 photograph-
ic copies of the Museum’s Clementine Epistles were pro-
duced in an edition of fi fty sets, with printed introduction
and bound in blue covers. Again, like Frith’s Egyptian
volumes, these were predominantly sold to museums,
universities and wealthy historians, with at least three
copies going in to the Museum’s own library.
Photography was fi rst exhibited at London’s Hyde
Park Great Exhibition of 1851, and by the time of
the Exposition Universelle in Paris four years later,
MARISSIAUX, GUSTAVE
