Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs: Essays on Reading a Collection

By Micheline Nilsen

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138251151
• ISBN13: 9781138251151
• Release Date: September 2016
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"