The Engraved Photograph as Architectural Evidence

In an 1875 article, the English architectural periodical The Builder presented conflicting theories as to the origins of a bell tower at Evesham, in England. While the Reverend Mackenzie Walcott had argued for a fifteenth-century date using documentary evidence, The Builder supported the customary sixteenth-century date using the evidence of the “building itself,” which was presented in its pages using an engraving “made from a fine photograph by Mr. Earl, of Worcester.” While the tower is thus posited as the definitive source for its own history, in its absence, a representation from a photograph is used to present The Builder’s case. This example is one of many from the nineteenth-century architectural press in which photographic evidence is disseminated through its remediation into engraving. While sometimes motivated by the constraints of mechanical reproduction, the practice of engravings made from photographs is most significant because of what it reveals about the photograph's status as evidence in nineteenth-century architectural discourse. Re-mediated images such as those from Evesham testify both to photographs' supposed truthfulness and to the necessity for subjective intervention in another medium so that they could be persuasive. Rather than detracting from the photograph's objectivity, the engraver's manual interventions often amplified it. This paper will consider the means and mediations by which photographs were admitted as evidence in the discursive context of the nineteenth-century architectural magazine. Examples will be drawn from instances in which engravings made from photographs were used to support historical arguments by authors including James Fergusson and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.