Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs

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 Englandthe two countries where photography was inventedand from around the world representing a corpus of over 10000 photographs from the Janos Scholz Collection of Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame.