Picturing Nations: Landscape Photography and National Identity in Britain and Germany in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This chapter examines the important role played by photography in the nineteenth century in the projection of the idea and image of the nation-state. It focuses on the contribution of landscape and monument photography to the construction of the national identity in Britain and Germany. In contrast, mid-nineteenth-century Germany consisted of more than thirty sovereign states, and unification was a major goal that the middle classes wanted to achieve. The production of landscape and monument images, especially in Britain, was boosted by the rise of tourism. In Britain, landscape photographs of the United Kingdom and of the British Empire as well as of ‘foreign views’ were popular. In Germany, the national movement discovered the German forest as a national symbol, and the Rhine valley became prominent after the French threat of 1840. The most popular song of this period was the ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’.