MR LAWRENCE’S GREAT PHOTOGRAPHIC BAZAAR

Abstract

On 20 March 1865, an advertisement appeared in the Dublin press announcing the opening of William Mervin Lawrence’s Great Bazaar and and Photographic Galleries, which throughout much of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries was to become the dominant commercial photographers of Irish tourist imagery. Although the majority of Lawrence’s tourist imagery was of rural tourist sites and landscapes, the company also began to forge an image of the city through stereoscopic cards, tourist pamphlets and postcards. Indeed, the opening of Lawrence’s Bazaar coincided with the changing visualisation of Dublin through photography that projected the city’s status as the second city of the British Empire. As time progressed, however, a more complex history of the city began to be visualised through the photographic image, an image that portrayed the political complexities of Dublin’s streetscapes. This article examines the visualisation of Dublin’s streetscape in Lawrence’s photographic tourist booklets and postcards throughout the nineteenth century. It will examine how tourist photographic imagery negotiated the changing political significance of social space towards the closing decades of the century. Drawing on historical sources from the period as well as theoretical material from photography studies, the article will examine the intersection of the aesthetics of the photographic image with the politics of urban space in the visualisation of the cityscape.