Picturing Place Photography and the Geographical Imagination

The advent of photography opened new worlds to 19th-century viewers, who became able to visualize themselves, their immediate surroundings, their communities, and the world beyond. The geographical imagination--the ability to know the world and situate oneself in space and time--fostered the expectations and applications of photographic technologies, and photographic technologies expresses the form and reach of the geographical imagination. This dialectic is the basis of this collection of intriguing essays, which explore the diverse ways in which the relationship manifested.

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.

Contents vi Figures vii Acknowledgements x Contributors xii Introduction: Photography and the Geographical Imagination 1 Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan PART I Picturing Place 19 1 La Mission Heliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France, 1851 21 M. Christine Boyer 2 Retracing the Outlines of Rome: Intertextuality and Imaginative Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Photographs 55 Maria Antonella Pelizzari 3 Visualizing Eternity: Photographic Constructions of the Grand Canyon 74 David E. Nye 4 Family as Place: Family Photograph Albums and the Domestication of Public and Private Space 96 Deborah Chambers PART II Framing the Nation 115 5 Picturing Nations: Landscape Photography and National Identity in Britain and Germany in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 117 Jens Jager 6 Capturing and Losing the 'Lie of the Land': Railway Photography and Colonial Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa 141 Jeremy Foster 7 Constructing the State, Managing the Corporation, Transforming the Individual: Photography, Immigration and the Canadian National Railways, 1925-30 162 Brian S. Osbourne PART III Colonial Encounters 193 8 Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839-1914 195 Derek Gregory 9 Mapping a Sacred Geography:Photographic Surveys by the Royal Engineers in the Holy Land, 1864-68 226 Kathleen Stewart Howe 10 Home and Empire:Photographs of British Families in the Lucknow Album 1856-57 243 Alison Blunt 11 Negotiating Spaces: Some Photographic Incidents in the Western Pacific, 1883-84 261 Elizabeth Edwards Epilogue 281 12 Wunderkammer to World Wide Web:Picturing Place in the Post-Photographic Era 283 William J. Mitchell Notes 305 Index 347

Joan M. Schwartz is Senior Photography Specialist at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. James R. Ryan is Lecturer in Human Geography at The Queen's University, Belfast.