After a photograph, before photography (takes command)

Abstract

The best part of a century separates photography's public unveiling in 1839 and its predominance in architectural representation in the first decades of the 1900s. In the intervening decades, as photography laboured to find its place within architecture's representational economy, photographs frequently made their way into print as engravings. Often bearing the caption ‘after a photograph’, such remediated images challenged the ontological distinction between drawings and photographs. Whilst photographs were understood—at least to a certain extent—to be unmediated objects, they required multiple remediations not only to become reproducible in print but also in order to live up to their promise. Engravings from photographs transmitted photography’s supposed guarantee of facticity whilst correcting its perceived flaws; in so doing, they contributed to the discursive construction of photographic objectivity—in another medium.Drawing on a wide range of examples from British and French publications, including popular magazines such as the Illustrated London News and professional journals such as the Builder and the Revue générale, this article argues that by studying engravings made from photographs—with their numerous additions and omissions in the mediatory process—we are better able to understand photography's appeal to architects as a medium than we would be by merely studying photographs. These constructions of idealised photographic images in another medium challenge myths of technological progress, myths that mask the persistent continuity of existing economies of image making. Whilst photography changed the expectation of what a truthful, accurate and useful image should be, extant means were crucial to meeting this new standard.