The Neurdein Fréres and the photography of medieval architecture

Abstract

For those engaged in the study of historic architecture, nineteenth-century photography has been an essential avenue of research. For many scholars nineteenth-century photographs continue to be documents of choice for publication and research, both for their frequent superiority to modern photographs and for the evidence they supply of buildings and their structural features that have been altered or obliterated. The superiority of early photographs of historic architecture has a foundation, apart from their technical excellence, in their makers' knowledge of the buildings and in the cultural centrality of these structures that have no real equivalent in photography today. From the beginning the first generation of photographers in Paris elevated architecture to a distinguished category, in part because the technical capabilities of photography in the first two decades of its development were ideally suited to the photographing of still subjects in wide-angle view. More important, there was a very early association of photography with efforts to classifY, preserve and revere the monuments of France. 1 The revival of interest in the Middle Ages, initially an expression of romantic nationalism, corresponded almost precisely to the advent of photography in France. Much of the pioneering work was done in the service of recording monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic styles, together seen as the pure expression of a native French architectural idiom. The experimental photographers who created and recreated the medium in its infancy all produced master series of national monuments — Henri le Secq at Chartres, Reims and Strasbourg, Charles Nègre at Chartres and in Romanesque sites in Provence, Edouard Baldus in his albums of Romanesque architecture in Burgundy and the Rhone Valley, Charles Marville in Paris, and the Bisson freres in Gothic monuments of Paris and Rouen.