Introduction

Particularly from the mid-1850s, photography became a powerful tool of a rapidly industrializing and expanding world. Considering the photograph artistically, technically, and critically as an influential cultural and commercial artifact, this selection of vintage photographic views reveals historic trends in the intersection of photography and tourism.

With the inventions of the wet-plate collodion negative and albumen photographic paper in the early 1850s, promising for the first time both impressive clarity and nearly infinite reproducibility, the new medium became itself a heated engine of the Industrial Revolution. During this Victorian period, hundreds of professional photographic firms quickly sprang up in major cities in northern Europe and America, and in farther-flung travel destinations such as Rome, Naples, Athens, Jerusalem, Egypt, India, and Asia, producing and publishing by the early 1860s and later, hundreds of thousands of views for the upper classes as well as rising middle classes. Marketed in formats that varied from larger to smaller, more affordable sizes such as the popular stereograph, the sheer range of subject matter offered to travelers and would-be travelers was vast and encyclopedic—a virtual catalogue of the world.

Photography’s convincing descriptive capability held a novel purchase on the mid-Victorian imagination. The medium’s realism or verisimilitude, combined with its affordability and its important status as a multiple, lent unprecedented authority—and dominance—to the enterprise of marketing destinations and views to tourists. Early photographic views—along with the tour book’s complementary itinerary—were highly influential in the establishment of consistent travel expectations and experiences. The marketability of popular views of destinations led to a predetermined and relatively fixed selection of the images. Although counterintuitive, we may posit that the availability of the well-produced, consumable photograph contributed to the simplification and ultimately the diminishment of travel itineraries, which had been considerably longer and more ambitious before photography.

Archival research reveals the hegemony of popular images (and popular sites) over time, spawning generations of nearly identical views across a range of photographic and later photomechanical media. Indicating a homogenization of imagination and perception, a more or less direct line of lineage may be drawn, for example, from eighteenth century engravings of the Roman Colosseum (and other prominent tourist destinations in Rome and other locales) to later nineteenth century photographs of the same, to postcards and other present-day tourist paraphernalia. Considered artifactually, a number of photographs in this exhibition bear conspicuous titling corresponding to the photographic firm and place depicted, suggesting that the commercial branding and codification of place—evident in postcards today—was well-established during the medium’s early years.

Nineteenth century photographs and the way in which they contributed to the production of location visibility and awareness played a fundamental role in determining the development of modern routes and transportation providing access to tourist sites. Images, of course, also play an important function in circumscribing on-site identification and perception. At every turn, their influence is felt at park and heritage sites today: in the naming and easy recognition of places and points of view made familiar by photographs and tour books; in gift shops and their offerings of postcard racks, picture tour books and maps; and finally in the images taken by visitors, which likely resemble the pictures they have seen and purchased.

Dan Younger

Director

The Grand Tour

Often an extended three-to-four year tour of the European continent taken by artistocrats, particularly British noblemen, the grand tour began in the late sixteenth century and emerged full flower by the mid-eighteenth century.

The term, grand tour, was introduced by Richard Lessels in his 1670 book, Voyage to Italy.

Italy was considered an important focal point of the western world with Rome—an ancient civilization, a seat of classical antiquity—at its center. As an ultimate destination of the grand tour, the Eternal City became not only an essential training ground for European and American artists and writers of upper class stock, but also a mecca for well-to-do tourists and related photographic commerce.

By the mid-to-late 1850s paper photography had begun to supersede the audience and market for the production of earlier hand-rendered views of grand tour sites. In 1862, the Art Journal concluded: “It has been left to photography to picture Rome in such detail as it is not the province of painting to attempt.” Photographers acted not only as artists, but as entrepreneurs, outdoing the production of lithographers and engravers by marketing their works for a broader tourist trade. Giuseppe Ninci’s advertisement for his photographs of Rome (to the right of this panel) is indicative of the commercialization of the industry—the codification of sites and topographic views. British photographer Francis Frith’s level of production of images of the Near East was nearly industrial, typifying the field. In 1859 he opened an extensive printing establishment at Reigate, Surrey, producing large quantities of albumen prints and illustrated books to satisfy the considerable demand for his pictures.

The infrastructure for European tourism, with its modes of travel (aided by the recent development of railroads), Baedeker tour books and their itineraries, and guides and hotels, was relatively well-established by the mid-nineteenth century. Thomas Cook, realizing the potential of the railroad for recreational touring, organized the first domestic packaged tour in 1841, shortly after the official announcement of the invention of photography in France in 1839. As photography was introduced into these already standardized mechanisms, sites and viewpoints became further fixed, instituting desired lexicons and grammars of tourist behavior and expectation.

The nineteenth century British “reverie” for quasi-mystical locales (Egypt, the Near East and India), and their indigenous peoples, exotic dress and customs was, in part, the product of a colonial mindset, and tourism and its imagery. Based in Ceylon, British descendant W. L. H. Skeen (much like his celebrated counterpart the British photographer Samuel Bourne) documented the people and landscape of India, and as well, the extensive scale of England’s exploitative colonial economic interests there. Such uses of photography worked in concert with sponsoring geopolitical and economic powers to both symbolically, and in fact, possess the people and resources of distant lands.

Dan Younger

Director

Tatsiana Zhurauliova ‘06

European Tourism

Concern over the growth and modernization of cities in the nineteenth century engendered an insistent nostalgia for a pre-industrial time. As a result, images of outlying, agrarian regions untouched by the Industrial Revolution were quite popular.

A rather brief but significant period of amateur photography in Great Britain and France preceded the advent of the commercial view in the 1860s. Wealthy amateur photographers in Great Britain—usually landed gentry—worked in the 1850s without a wide audience beyond their own immediate circle, and thus with little or no commercial intent (an example from this amateur period may be seen in the salted paper print by Maxwell Farnham Lyte displayed on the wall to the left of this panel). Privileged amateurs (nearly exclusively men) sought through small exchange clubs to communicate about the technical and aesthetic challenges of early paper photography.

Early amateur photographers considered the quiet images they produced as experimental applications of the chemistry and optics of the medium, and as studied approaches to problems of aesthetics. Professional photographers, who would follow in a few short years, understood the photographic medium differently, more as a means of reliable illustration—a form of mass-communication. By comparison with earlier amateurs, commercial photographers—many of them highly skilled—often relied on formulaic approaches to composition and point of view, necessarily conforming to well-established prescriptions for the visual appearance of sites.

Amateurs and professionals alike hewed to the popular taste for countryside subject matter. Ruined abbeys, old churches, cottages, castles, riversides, and hedgerows predominated. Amateur photographers—and later, commercial photographers—who wished to portray England as stable, non-industrial and picturesque, were no doubt influenced by Romantically-inclined publications such as J. M. W. Turner’s Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1826-1838), William Howitt’s Rural Life of England (1844), and the poetry of Lord Byron, Walter Scott, P. B. Shelley, and William Cowper. Later commercial views, like those exhibited here, would increasingly include evidences of man’s presence and incursion in the natural landscape: figures posed on or nearby modern bridges and newly constructed walkways.

Dan Younger

Director

European City Views

The commerce of early domestic tourism tended to favor peaceful views of the countryside. However, some industry- and government-sponsored commissions and publications during this period countenanced the modernization of the city, and occasionally addressed underlying social conditions.

Following 1855, the French photographer Edouard-Denis Baldus was commissioned by large railroad interests to produce mammoth-plate views for limited edition, deluxe albums presented to company shareholders. He produced many views similar to his Lyon, Viaduc du Rhône (1861), on view to the right. A visual metaphor for engineering, progress and modernity, sweeping views of bridges with their apparent superstructure featured prominently in Baldus’s (and others) compositions in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In 1868, Thomas Annan of Glasgow, Scotland was commissioned by the Trust of the Glasgow City Improvements Act of 1866 to document old tenements and other neighborhoods that had been slated for demolition. The Improvements Act had responded to a growing awareness of the relationship between urban slum conditions and the problems of debilitation and disease. Bell Street from High Street, on display here, is one of thirty-one photographs produced for the series.

An important photographic work that presaged the Progressive Era, John Thomson’s and Adolphe Smith’s serially-issued Street Life in London (1878) depicted London’s poor laborers who plied their wares on the street. Though Thomson’s images (Street Doctor is on display here) tend to stereotype and make picturesque their genre subjects, the work is an earnest attempt to address the under-recognized social problems of London. In their preface to Street Life in London the authors credit Henry Mayhew’s earlier groundbreaking publication, London Labor and London Poor (1861).

London and Paris, dominant urban and industrial centers in the nineteenth century, sponsored early international expositions that featured the latest examples of technology, design, architecture and the visual arts. Pierre Petit, the official photographer of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, in an image on display here (around the corner of this wall), records an outer perimeter of a hall exhibiting heavy machinery and architectural motifs. Increasingly featured at these expositions on its own merits as an art form, photography was a thoroughly modern medium, and thus entirely suited to recording the new products and machinery of the industrial age.

Dan Younger

Director

United States East and West Views

Today, with benefit of hindsight and recent scholarship, nineteenth century photographs of the American west and east reveal more if we consider them as products of culturally received ideas, such as Manifest Destiny, than as mere topographic records.

Following the Civil War, photographers accompanying U. S. government-sponsored survey expeditions in the late 1860s largely sought to portray the west—formerly thought to be a sublime, forbidding wilderness—as an inviting Garden of Eden. Though not a virgin land, Yosemite Valley in California was imagined and represented as a pristine paradise untouched by man (see stereograph by Carleton E. Watkins to the right). Established as a national park by Congress in the nineteenth century on the basis of photographic evidence brought back to Washington, D.C., Yosemite still serves to symbolize a national ideal of the American west as natural and unspoiled.

A slightly later episode of American western landscape photography purposefully incorporates tangible evidence of railroads, settlement and industrial activity. By the 1870s, western photographic practice had become thoroughly enmeshed with the interests of railroads, commerce and tourism. Manifested especially in the work of photographers commissioned by railroad companies (examples by W. H. Jackson, employed by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, are on view here), we see ample documentation of railroad tracks and telephone lines dominating the landscape. Also on view (in the case behind you) is a Tourist’s Handbook, published by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. In the handbook, reproductions from Jackson’s (and others’) celebrated photographs of natural wonders accompany detailed information on the population, real estate, business prospects, and natural resources of recently surveyed western frontier towns.

Of eastern U. S. areas, the White Mountains in New Hampshire was one of the last tourist destinations to be developed. Similar to the American west, the White Mountains was an idea—popularized by artists and later, photographers—before it was a reality. Photographs and photo-based travel literature advanced the notion that idealized visions of an untamed wilderness and illustrations of modern conveniences and travel were not incompatible. Popular tourist books and guides like M. F. Sweetser’s Views in the White Mountains (on display in the case behind you), commonly included well-composed pastoral and mountain views alongside more mundane images of hotels and passenger railways.

Dan Younger

Director