Architecture In Nineteenth-century Photographs

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This article discusses the history and significance of nineteenth century architectural photography. It discusses the various themes that are often found in these photographs, and provides examples from both France and England. The book "Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs: Essays on Reading a Collection" is a compilation of essays that explore these themes in more detail.

Revealing that nineteenth-century photography goes beyond the functional to reflect the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural concerns of the time, this study proposes that each photographic image of architecture be studied both as a primary visual document and an object of aesthetic inquiry. This multi-faceted approach drives Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs: Essays on Reading a Collection. Despite three decades of post-colonial, post-structuralist and gender-conscious criticism, the study of architectural photography continues to privilege technical virtuosity. This volume offers a thematic exploration of the material, and a socio-historical examination that allows consideration of questions that have not been addressed comprehensively before in a single publication. Themes include exoticism and armchair tourism ; the absence of women from architectural photography; the role of photographs as commodities; vernacular architecture and the picturesque; and historic preservation, urban renewal, and nationalism. Micheline Nilsen analyzes photographs from France and England the two countries where photography was invented and from around the world, representing a corpus of over 10,000 photographs from the Janos Scholz Collection of Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. Review: 'The relationship between photography and architectural subjects - especially in the nineteenth century - has received some analysis by contemporary writers, but primarily within the context of the work of individual photographers or as a component of a general survey. Michele Nilson's book [...] provides a much-needed framework for an expanded discussion of this subject by offering categories and objectives that should be defined when assessing early architectural photography.' Visual Resources