Picturing Place

Photography and the Geographical Imagination

Joan Schwartz, James Ryan, Joan Schwartz, James Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000548785
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Art General

The advent of photography opened up new worlds to 19th century viewers, who were able to visualize themselves and the world beyond in unprecedented detail. But the emphasis on the photography's objectivity masked the subjectivity inherent in deciding what to record, from what angle and when. This text examines this inherent subjectivity. Drawing on photographs that come from personal albums, corporate archives, commercial photographers, government reports and which were produced as art, as record, as data, the work shows how the photography shaped and was shaped by geographical concerns.

PART I

Picturing Place

ONE

La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France, 1851

M. Christine Boyer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268260-3

§ IN THE summer and autumn of 1851, five men burdened with cumbersome camera equipment undertook arduous missions to five different regions of France. Armed with only sketchy lists of the monuments which they were to photograph, they comprised what we now call the Mission Héliographique.¹ By September 1852, some 300 negatives had been deposited in the archive of the Commission des Monuments Historiques without being given a proper showing or a systematic printing. The commissioners drew the following names from an emerging group of architectural photographers: Édouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray and O. Mestral. Relying on inventories drawn up by regional archaeological and restoration societies and supplemented by the inspection tours of Prosper Mérimée, the Inspecteur Général des Monuments Historiques, they sent Baldus to the valleys of the Loire and Rhône, Bayard to Normandy, Le Secq to Champagne and Alsace, and Le Gray, accompanied by Mestral, to the south and west of France.²

Launched just twelve years after Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s exciting announcement that he had finally been able to capture and fix for all time the images in a camera obscura – years in which the aid of photography in creating a visual archive depicting architectural monuments and exotic places obtained much recognition – this innovative mission raises many questions still to be answered. At the very moment when France was beginning to develop a preservation mentality, and its architectural patrimony had only recently been recognized as worthy of study, what did the Commission des Monuments Historiques expect to achieve by this mission? How did the idea develop that a people’s sense of place and national identity were embodied in its architectural artefacts, and furthermore that these artefacts and monuments should be placed under state protection and be the subject of a state-sponsored photographic survey?

These questions are not easy to answer for they involve two intertwined narrations: one concerns the establishment of a collective memory and the development of visual archives and imaginative geographies; the other involves architectural photography and its technical relation to both the procedures of restoration and the didactic aims of historians. In addition, these two stories are embedded in a larger multilayered dialogue swirling around the role that monuments play in developing the idea of a nation. Let us take up these narrations separately, knowing that a preservation mentality and collective memory are necessarily intertwined with architectural photography and the work of restoration. At the crossroads where these two stories of architectural preservation and architectural photography meet, lie the aspirations and work of the Mission Héliographique (Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 Henri Le Secq, ‘View between houses to the portal of the Cathedral’, Laon, France, 1851. Calotype, 305 × 220 mm. Courtesy: George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography and Film.

Architectural Preservation and the Collective Memory of France

Preserving the patrimony of France At the end of the eighteenth century, as Michel Foucault asserts, ‘history’ began to make a meticulous examination of things, developing unencumbered spaces in which objects and specimens could be classified and compared. In archives, dictionaries, catalogues and museums, objects and things were arranged and structured in tables, indexes and inventories. ‘What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history.’³ Examples and specimens once collected, then visually analysed, compared and contrasted, would enable the history of their development and the laws governing their evolution to be told. But how did this process of inventory aid architectural preservation and the collective memory of France, and how was this archive of visual information and the writing of this visual history rendered manageable by photography?

In 1794, Abbé Grégoire coined the word vandalism to describe the hostile acts of revolutionaries who smashed and pillaged buildings, sculpture and artefacts associated with the aristocracy, monarchy or church. Since church possessions had been nationalized in 1789, and property from aristocratic and royal households confiscated, the state had the task of safeguarding these artefacts from the wrath of the people. Hence it began, in 1792, to send whatever fragments it deemed worthy of salvaging to different depots throughout France where they were assessed as to their value and potential sale. A Commission des Monuments (renamed Commission Temporaire des Arts in 1793) was formed to inventory and preserve objects of aesthetic interest lest they be overlooked and either sold or destroyed. Although the Commission was able to save a number of buildings from demolition, such as the Porte Saint-Denis and the Château de Chantilly, still much seditious material, items that had feudal, religious or royal connotations, continued to be destroyed. Thus, Grégoire’s proclamation held a special meaning: how to relink the people’s memory to their own past embedded in mnemonic devices such as monuments or artefacts, and how to reassess this offensive patrimony so that it might unify the nation. In a series of reports to the Commission, Grégoire advocated preserving all records and monuments of the past because gazing upon these objects led to moral improvement. He went even further, calling French Gothic architecture ‘one of the most daring conceptions of the human spirit’.⁴ As we shall see, the Middle Ages and Gothic architecture would be a domain in which a preserva tion mentality and the collective memory of France would flourish.

Of particular concern was the Abbey of Saint-Denis where kings of France had been buried since the seventh century, for it was brutally sacked for seventy-two hours in August 1793. After this onslaught, cartloads of funerary remnants from fifty-one tombs plus other valuable fragments and sculptures were hauled to the depot at the former convent of the Petits-Augustins on the Left Bank of Paris. A young painter and theatrical devotee, Alexandre Lenoir, received these fragments and many others, sorting them according to artistic worth in the cells of the convent and identifying them as best he could by using illustrations found in antiquarian treatises. His inventory enumerated each object by the arrival date at the warehouse, but his methodology was unique, including descriptive details, compositional materials and dimensions. Quite clearly Lenoir’s operation was one of salvage, but he became interested in preserving these objects for pedagogical display, forsaking the traditional mode of listing items by their value or price. If arranged in a didactic order, these objects of French national patrimony might establish a visual history through which the public could stroll and learn to re-evaluate their past. He produced his first catalogue of more than 500 pieces of sculpture and architectural elements in June 1793, turning the former convent into the Musée d’antiquités et monuments français in 1795.⁵

Following the temporal and stylistic theories of Winckelmann, who taught that Greek art developed in a cycle of epochs from birth, development, mature perfection, decadence to rebirth, Lenoir arranged his items in an innovative chronological order revealing the rise, fall and regeneration of French art across the centuries. Between 1796 and 1800, he rebuilt the rooms of the convent for the purpose of exhibiting items from fragments of the tomb of Clovis to artefacts from the late eighteenth century. Each room of the convent contained statuary and sculpture belonging to a given century, theatrically displayed to reflect ‘the character, the exact physiognomy of the century that it should represent’.⁶ As visitors progressed through the rooms, they advanced in time through the chapters of a three-dimensional book. An introductory room offered a survey of the infancy of art among the Goths, its progress under Louis XII, its perfection under François I and the origin of its decadence under Louis XIV. Lenoir suggested this room be read as a preface: ‘if one considers the chronology of past centuries like a book open for instruction, in which one reads the march of events’, then the museum became ‘a learned school and an encyclopedia where the young will find, word by word, all the degrees of imperfection, perfection, and decadence’.⁷ By stressing that these objects belonged to specific historical epochs and stylistic modes, Lenoir was telling the history of France in a unique manner, severing associative links that bound an artefact through its visible features to the ancien régime. Even more important than these comparative lessons in visual history was Lenoir’s re-evaluation of supposedly ‘decadent’ art forms opening the way for the rediscovery and reinterpretation of Gothic architecture as the patrimony of France.⁸

French history, however, was not to be viewed merely as fragments stored in a museum, no matter how theatrical the display. A diplomat and traveller, Constantin François Volney, lecturing at the École Normale in 1794, called for a new understanding of history based less on archaeological findings and more on what he termed ‘monuments vivants’ or the customs, rites, religions and languages of different people. He proposed that academies be established to study the history of France for it was a shame that all attention was focused on the Greco-Roman world leaving one’s homeland to be a foreign country. Following his advice, the Celtic Academy, established in 1804 and meeting at Lenoir’s museum, would be the first group to study systematically the history of France. Travel was an essential part of this new field of study in order to acquire first-hand exposure to the stories, songs, legends and popular practices across the regions of France. Linking social customs, language, monuments and places together, Academy member Jacques-Antoine Dulaure began to study the primitive megaliths located all over France (Figure 1.2). He believed that:

[t]he stones or columns that serve as landmarks offered the first repository of human knowledge, and they were the most ancient library of nations, because it was on those columns that all findings in the arts and sciences, laws, great events, political, moral and religious principles, were engraved. Philosophers, scholars, historians, princes, legislators, all came to consult these inscriptions and to draw from them the principles of their doctrine or customs.⁹

FIGURE 1.2 Gustave Le Gray, ‘La Petite Pierre Couverte’, a monumental stone from the Celtic past, Bagneaux, France, 1851. Modern print from original paper negative, 250 × 342 mm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Courtesy: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Travellers began to search the countryside for stones that spoke the lessons of France. A new monumental territory arose, drawing places and historic events together – an imaginative geography defined by landmarks standing in for national events and allowing the transfer of meaning to place. The tourist re-enacted the memory of these events by following a pre-established itinerary marked on the map, visiting historic sites belonging to a collection that now contained France’s architectural and artistic patrimony. If the museum constituted a history book, and the monument or landmark a repository of knowledge, then both offered the viewer a panoramic survey of the nation’s collective memory and a condensation of its geographical terrain. A place on the map of France marked by a megalith, a church, a tomb or a square, became a place in the history of the nation (Figures 1.3, 1.4).¹⁰

FIGURE 1.3 The objective, outlined by Arcisse de Caumont in Cours d’Antiquités Monumentales, was to locate geographically, describe stylistically and classify chronologically all of the monuments of north-west France, from the mute stones of the Celts to the donjons and castles of the Middle Ages. From Arcisse de Caumont, Cours d’Antiquités Monumentales: Atlas (Paris: T. Chalopin, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1830–41), Vol. 1, Plate III. Courtesy: Marquand Library of Art and Archeology, Princeton.

FIGURE 1.4 This map of landmarks, executed by the antiquarian and archaeologist Arcisse de Caumont between 1830–41, linked specific sites and monuments with grand and small events and traditions, tying these souvenirs from the glorious past of France to the collective memory of the nation. From Arcisse de Caumont, Cours d’Antiquités Monumentales: Atlas (Paris: T. Chalopin, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1830–41), Vol. 2, Plate XVI. Courtesy: Marquand Library of Art and Archeology, Princeton University.

The rise of a Gothic taste and a preservation mentality Coincident with the interest in travelling through France to see and meditate on monuments of the past arose the task of writing a new national history. The mission of historians was shifting, and the preservation and decipherment of aristocratic documents becoming a republican affair. The École des Chartes was established in 1821, and the historian François Guizot encouraged the formation of other national archives and undertook a massive task of translating many ancient documents into modern French. His thirty-volume Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France was published between 1823 and 1835, but his most famous work was the Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, depicting the origins of representative government in Europe.¹¹ Another advocate of the new history, August Thierry, wrote Lettres sur l’histoire de France in 1827. He believed: ‘[i]f we know that, even in the most difficult times, justice and liberty were never without defenders in the country’, then France would have faith in its future. The real France was Gaulish, only usurped by parasitic aristocrats. Now that t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Figures Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Contributors Page
• Introduction: Photography and the Geographical Imagination
• Part I Picturing Place
• Part II Framing the Nation
• Part III Colonial Encounters
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index