Nineteenth Century Photographs And Architecture

Eschewing the limiting idea that nineteenth-century architecture photography merely reflects functionality, the objective of this collection is to reflect the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural concerns of the time. The essays hold appeal for social and cultural historians, as well as those with an interest in the fields of art history, urban geography, history of travel and tourism. Nineteenth-century photographers captured what could be seen and what they wanted to be seen. Their images informed of exploration, progress, heritage, and destruction. Architecture was a staple subject for the first generation of photographers as it patiently tolerated the long exposures of the early processes. During its formative decades photography responded to evolutionary cultural forces of market and artistic production. Photographs of architecture reflected a specific political or social context modulated through individual points of view. For this reason, the examination of each photographic image as a primary visual document and an aesthetic object rather than a technical milestone on a chronological trajectory affords a richer multi-faceted approach to the extensive and complex corpus of photographs taken by photographers all over the world. This project acknowledges the importance of technique in the early decades of photography but focuses on the thematic content of the material. It places the photography of architecture in an international context under the contemporary critical lens sharpened by theoretical and cultural examinations of the topic.

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.

"This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition In focus: architecture, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, from October 15, 2013, to March 2, 2014"--ECIP data view.

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.

Ever since its invention, photography has enjoyed a close and mutually stimulating relationship with architecture - an association underlined by one description of photography as "building with light". So well established is this link that photography is now regarded as the easiest and most reliable means of making architecture and its ideas accessible to a wider public. Our first, sometimes our only, impression of a building often comes from a photograph, and the skilled photographer can help us to see even the most familiar structures with a fresh eye. This book offers a lively exploration of the development of architectural photography and some of its key themes. From the earliest examples of the genre in the nineteenth century to today's digital revolution, Robert Elwall skilfully focuses on the changing aesthetic of the medium worldwide. Included are such topics as the early influence of architectural drawing; the growth of specialist photographic firms documenting the nineteenth-century building boom; the influence of photography on both architectural practice and history; the invention of half-tone reproduction; the role of photography in the spread of Modernism; the impact of colour photography during the 1970s and 1980s; and the increasing use of computers to shape a new direction. Authoritatively written by a world-renowned expert and illustrated with arresting images from collections throughout the world, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in architecture, photography and the history of their special relationship. Book jacket.

A complete survey of European architecture during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Typical architectural photography freezes buildings in an ideal moment and rarely captures what photographer Berenice Abbott called the medium's power to depict "how the past jostled the present." In Beyond the Architect's Eye, Mary N. Woods expands on this range of images through a rich analysis that commingles art, amateur, and documentary photography, genres usually not considered architectural but that often take the built environment as their subject. Woods explores how photographers used their built environment to capture the disparate American landscapes prior to World War II, when urban and rural areas grew further apart in the face of skyscrapers, massive industrialization, and profound cultural shifts. Central to this study is the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Marion Post Wolcott, but Woods weaves a wider narrative that also includes Alice Austen, Gertrude Käsebier, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Morgan and Marvin Smith, Eudora Welty, Samuel Gottscho, Walker Evans, Max Waldman, and others. In such disparate places as New York City, the rural South, and the burgeoning metropolis of Miami, these unconventional architectural photographers observed buildings as deeply connected to their context. Whereas Stieglitz captured New York as the quintessential modern urban landscape in the period, the South was its opposite, a land supposedly frozen in the past. Yet just as this myth of the Old South crystallized in photographs like Johnston's, a New South shaped by popular culture and modern industry arose. Miami embodied both of these visions. In Wolcott's work, agricultural fields where stoop labor persisted were juxtaposed with Art Deco hotels, a popular modernism of the machine age that remade Miami Beach into a miniaturized "Manhattan on the beach." Beyond the Architect's Eye is a groundbreaking study that melds histories of American art, cities, and architecture with visual studies of landscape, photography, and cultural geography.