Exquisite Reality: Photography and the Invention of Nationhood, 1851–1900

EXQUISITE REALITY
Photography and the
Invention of Nationhood
1851-1900

To view this online exhibition please visit
http://cantor.2.vu/exquisite

EXQUISITE REALITY
Photography and the
Invention of Nationhood
1851-1900
Danny Smith

EXQUISITE REALITY
Photography and the
Invention of Nationhood
1851-1900
fig. 1
Félix Bonfils (French,
1831–1885), Caliph’s Tomb,
19th century. Albumen
print. Gift of Joseph Folberg,
1994.86.10
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
In 1867, a young French bookbinder named Félix Bonfils opened a photography
studio in Beirut. From the Lebanese capital he traveled across the
Middle East, making portraits and capturing architectural images and sweeping
landscapes. 1 On one visit to Cairo, Bonfils took a picture of the mausolea of
the medieval Abbasid Caliphate in Cairo’s al-Qarafa ‏,(ةفارقلا)‏ the sprawling
cemetery known in English as the City of the Dead (fig. 1). In the photograph,
in front of the domed mausolea and minarets of the mosques, five camels
stand in perfect profile. A small child in dark robes holds the first camel on a
lead. Others, similarly clad in Bedouin robes and turbans, congregate around
the other camels. Bonfils’s photograph is taken from a distance such that fully
the bottom third shows Cairo’s dusty, rocky soil. The solemnity of the figures,
the silence of the tombs, and the almost geometric rigidity of the camels all
project the formal air of a funeral. Bonfils’s own distance from the scene puts
the viewer at a respectful remove. At the base of the image, an inscription
reads “Ensemble des tombeaux des Califes.” The figures and their wellbehaved
camels go unmentioned—they are simply the anonymous, living parts
of this funerary ensemble.
5

Around the same time, the photographer Pascal Sébah framed an image
of the same landscape (fig. 2). His picture has no figures, simply the domes
and minarets of al-Qarafa, stark against a white sky. In the earth in the foreground
are rectilinear pylons, unmistakable signs of new construction. Unlike
the French Bonfils, Sébah was an Ottoman, born in Istanbul to a Syrian father
and an Armenian mother. 2 Whereas Bonfils frequently stylized and dramatized
an exotic Middle East for European audiences—in his studio, he and his wife
and son dressed in robes and acted out scenes from the Bible against orientalizing
backdrops—Sébah generally depicted the Middle East and its diversity
as proof of the breadth of the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled Cairo.
He captured landscapes and portraits, and even undertook an anthropological
study of local fashion in the distant corners of Ottoman control for the painter
Osman Hamdi Bey.
fig. 2
Pascal Sébah (Turkish,
1823–1886), Tombs of the
Caliphs, Cairo, 19th century.
Albumen print. Gift of
Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.115
6

Bonfils framed his scene as a glimpse into a remote, oriental past despite
the fact that the Bedouins were likely hired for the purpose and the tombs in
the background were the burial sites not of their elders but of the leaders of a
caliphate that hadn’t held power in Cairo since the mid-sixteenth century. He
effectively rendered the buildings as part of a continuous and unchanging history
in the present. Sébah’s photograph draws a hard line between the ancient
tombs and the new buildings soon to rise beside them: a stone wall keeps
history to one side and the future in the foreground. Both Bonfils and Sébah
catered in part to the tourist trade, selling their work to Europeans visiting the
Middle East and shipping prints to sell in the capitals of Europe. But European
tourism funded a greater part of Bonfils’s work, and his photographs captured
Cairo as Europeans imagined it. Before his lens, it was still a city in the past.
Sébah, whose studio became the official photographer first to the Prussian
state and then to the Ottoman sultan, depicted Cairo as a modernizing city,
part of an empire looking toward the future under the stabilizing force of the
Ottoman government.
Emerging as an art form just as the modern boundaries of Europe
were being established in the nineteenth century, the medium of photography
became an ideally modern means of illustrating what a nation was.
Governments commissioned photographic surveys documenting the history
of their nations to build and bolster collective identity. Other photographers
ventured abroad, their images fueling popular support for foreign invasion
and colonization in the name of nation building. Sébah’s and Bonfils’s dueling
images of the same setting reflect the ideological function of photography in
nineteenth-century Europe. Both faithfully reproduce the same scene at the
same historical moment, but they suggest two sharply different realities, and
serve two drastically divergent political goals.
RIEN N’EST BEAU QUE LE VRAI
In February 1851, sixteen years before Bonfils opened his studio in Beirut,
France’s nascent Société Héliographique announced the birth of a new medium
in the first issue of its new journal, La Lumière. They called the process heliography,
a name drawn from the Greek words for sun (helios) and for drawing
or writing (graphein). The medium used the careful exposure of light-sensitive
material, invented in 1825 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, to create a faithful
7

eproduction of the world: a perfect drawing made by the sun itself. Writing in
La Lumière’s introduction, the critic Francis Wey championed heliography as the
first modern art form: the true marriage of laboratory science and the fine arts.
The technique that Niépce had perfected in 1825 produced a single
image through a lengthy and complicated process. In the decades between
Niépce’s invention and La Lumière’s proclamation, the bulky camera obscura—
the contraption that regulated the light reaching the prepared photosensitive
material—was refined into a small wooden box fitted with glass lenses. In
1839 Niépce’s partner, Louis Daguerre, adapted the camera obscura to expose
small pieces of copper plated with light-sensitive silver. These images, called
daguerreotypes, could be produced in as little as ten minutes, as opposed to the
hours-long exposure required of Niépce’s early experiments, but daguerreotypes
are unique and cannot be reproduced. At almost the same time, the
English scientist Henry Fox Talbot applied a similar photosensitive silver iodide
material to paper. When the treated paper was “drawn upon” by light in the
camera obscura, it created a translucent negative, an exact inversion of what it
was exposed to. That paper negative could then be used to create an infinite
number of identical positive prints.
Heliography was true to its name, Wey stressed—its result was a pure
expression of reality, as if drawn by the sun. In La Lumière’s introduction he
wrote that the medium would, therefore, be untouched by politics, that it
would only ever tell the absolute, natural truth. The “steadfast motto” of the
new craft, he wrote, would be: “Nothing is beautiful but the truth.” Yet even
as the Société Héliographique cheered the new process as a science, an art, an
apolitical medium, Wey added a telling coda to his “steadfast motto”: “Nothing
is beautiful but the truth, but it must be chosen” (Rien n’est beau que le vrai;
mais il faut le choisir). 3 Heliography, or photography, as it later became better
known, could reproduce the world in its exact, honest beauty, but it still
needed the hand of a discerning artist to “choose” the truth to depict: to guide
the natural process of creating the honest and beautiful image.
EXQUISITE REALITY
In the decades that followed Wey’s pronouncement that photography would
be an apolitical medium of honest beauty, quite the opposite proved true.
In the late nineteenth century, as the newly formed and unified nations of
8

Europe and the Middle East sought to define themselves and their distinct
histories, photography served a critical political role. Photographers in Italy, a
state whose modern boundaries were only established in 1861, depicted the
monuments and legacies of disparate and once warring regions as the history
of a common nation. In France, photographers were sent from Paris to rural
parts of the nation to record the architectural history as part of a program of
centralizing political and cultural power in the capital. In Britain, photographers
likewise took to the countryside, fueled by the popular Gothic Revival
movement to document the monuments of the Middle Ages, imagining
them as the source of modern British power and an antidote to the ills of the
Industrial Revolution.
At home, images of the past stood for a collective history, the foundation
of a modern state. Abroad, images of the past represented an omnipresent
and unchanging force that needed to be overcome, tamed in the name of
modernization. In France in particular, a nation whose boundaries expanded
dramatically in the nineteenth century through conquest and colonization,
photographs like Bonfils’s of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Holy Land
of Jerusalem fueled the popular imagination of the Maghreb and the Levant
as an exotic other trapped in the past, a land equally alluring and repugnant, a
region primed for the civilizing force of colonization.
In the fifth issue of its journal, the Société Héliographique celebrated
the success of its medium but failed to notice the full extent of its political
ramifications. “Every day,” Wey wrote, “the Société Héliographique receives
images representing distant and unknown sites, historical monuments, the
ruins of Greece, of Egypt, or of India; subjects indeed of a particular interest
to a scholar, to a naturalist, to an artist, or to an antiquarian: subjects depicted
for the first time in their exquisite reality, and that, oftentimes, defy precision
of the most adroit pencil or the most minute brush. These images are, themselves,
revelations.” 4 But these images of history and of nationhood were not
simply the purview of artists, scholars, and antiquarians; they were tools for
politicians, rulers, and kings, who saw in their “exquisite reality” the political
ideologies they wished to project. By depicting these “distant and unknown
sites”—monuments and landscapes both at home and abroad—photographers
provided a visual language with which governments defined their nations and
their national desires.
9

Pascal Sébah
Pascal Sébah’s prolific photographic career blurred lines between nationalist
documentation, anthropological illustration, and outright exoticizing orientalism.
From his studio, known as El Chark Société Photographic (The Orient
Photography Company), Sébah sold images of Istanbul primarily to French
tourists. He also worked closely with the painter and curator Osman Hamdi
Bey, who likewise promoted an orientalizing image of the Middle East popular
with French audiences.
The Ottoman government chafed at the simplistic and racialized image
of the Middle East as a land of Bedouins, pyramids, and snake charmers that
was marketed to European tourists. Eager to cast its empire as rooted in history,
not trapped by it, the Ottoman state commissioned Sébah and Hamdi
to write and illustrate a history of fashion and style across the empire for the
Ottoman pavilion at the 1873 Vienna Universal Exposition. Their volume, Les
Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873, shows the diverse people of Turkey
and surrounding nations dressed in their traditional finery, and its French text
and European distribution demonstrated the Ottoman interest in controlling
the image of their peoples abroad.
After Sébah’s death in 1886, his son, Jean, carried on this project. He partnered
with the French photographer Polycarpe Joiallier to depict the Ottoman
Empire from a distinctly Ottoman perspective and eventually became Sultan
Abdul Hamid II’s official photographer. Their view of the city of Bursa in
northwestern Turkey, labeled with the city’s French name, Brousse, exemplifies
their approach. The depicted landscape could be any French village if not for
the gleaming white mosque that anchors the center, asserting its Ottoman
identity. These images have a political afterlife even today, as nationalists in
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party turn to Ottoman images not
to illustrate the diversity of modern Turkey, but to stress the centrality of Islam
in the secular state.
Sébah & Joaillier (Turkish,
active 1888–c. 1950),
Panoramic View of Brousse,
19th century. Albumen
print. Gift of Joseph Folberg,
1994.68.120
10

THE GATE AND THE PYRAMID
The themes of nationalism and colonialism—building a nation at home and
expanding it abroad—were not separate or distinct in nineteenth-century photography.
Often a single image or a portfolio of photographs could encompass
both, as exemplified by a portfolio by a number of French and Italian photographers
entitled Views of France, Algeria, and Italy, acquired by the Cantor Arts
Center in 1980. The portfolio, which contains nineteen images taken between
1875 and 1890, collapses the experience of a tour of the Mediterranean into
a volume small enough to display at a dinner party. Through its images a
viewer visits the ruins of Pompeii, sees the artistic marvels of the Vatican (with
reproductions of a scene of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by the painter
Guido Reni and the famed classical sculpture of the Trojan Laocoön and his
sons writhing beneath the bodies of sea serpents), and takes in sweeping views
of urban life.
The portfolio opens with an image of the Bay of Marseille, then bounces
between sundrenched French cityscapes and the romanticized ruins of ancient
civilizations in Algeria. These themes merge in images of Italy, which the
portfolio depicts as a kind of hybrid of the two: the roots of European identity
shaped by foreign forces of history. A photograph by the Italian studio
Fratelli d’Alessandri of the Porta San Paolo in Rome depicts architectural
marvels from two different eras side-by-side: a third-century CE gate in the
Aurelian walls that protected the city of Rome, and the Pyramid of Cestius,
an Egyptian-style pyramid built in 12 BCE as a tomb for a Roman magistrate
(fig. 3). Both illustrate moments in the history of Rome. Built less than two
decades after Mark Antony’s establishment of a Roman colony in Egypt, the
pyramid was once a monument to the sprawling reach of Roman culture and
power. The gate, by contrast, was constructed in the waning days of Roman
imperial power as a defensive perimeter.
The Fratelli d’Alessandri image inverts these histories, celebrating the
gate and walls as Roman and framing the pyramid as the edifice of a distant,
foreign past. Vines climb the sides of the pyramid, and the crenellations of the
gate appear to be crumbling. But while the former appears forbidding and
ancient, solid and visually impenetrable, the city of Rome glows through the
open porta. The open gate operates as a kind of visual bridge, the city just
fig. 3
Fratelli d’Alessandri (Italian,
active 1870s), 144. ROMA–
Piramide di Cajo Cestio e
Porta S. Paolo, c. 1875–90.
Albumen print. Art Gallery
and Museum General Gift,
1980.102.1.12.b
12

visible through its archway. The image elegantly demonstrates how the political
project of nineteenth-century photography leveraged the monuments of
history. The photograph simultaneously depicts the glorious past that frames
a modern nation (the glowing city through the gateway) and a foreign other
trapped in the past (the vine-covered pyramid). Although both are monuments
of Roman history, they are portrayed as two different pasts—one foreign
and one domestic—only one of which leads to the present.
13

DEPICTING A UNIFIED ITALY
Italy’s history and artistic legacy had long made it a destination for French and
British artists who wished to study the ancient world within a safely European
setting. In 1663 France’s King Louis XIV established the Grand Prix de Rome,
an annual prize awarded to painters and sculptors to travel to Italy to study the
legacies of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. In the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, members of the English upper class, and more than a few
Americans, embarked on what became known as the Grand Tour, traveling
around the European continent, and particularly across the Italian peninsula, to
study the monuments of classical and neoclassical art and culture.
Artists and printmakers catered to the tastes of the Grand Tourists by
making stylized souvenir views, known as vedute. An ink sketch by the Italian
fig. 4
Carlo Labruzzi (Italian,
1748–1817), Ruins in the
Roman Forum, c. 1790. Ink
on paper. Committee for Art
Acquisitions Fund, 1974.208
14

fig. 5
Gaetano Pedo Studio
(Italian, active 1880–90), The
Roman Forum, Rome (Roma,
Foro Romano), 19th century.
Albumen print. Museum
Purchase Fund, 1973.63.2
artist Carlo Labruzzi made circa 1790, for example, depicts three men in togas
standing amid the Roman Forum (fig. 4) Labruzzi’s scene conflates the Forum
as a Grand Tourist would have found it—largely in a state of ruin—with living,
breathing figures of ancient Rome, as though the same senators who occupied
the Forum in Caesar’s day still wandered there.
A photograph of the same ruins by the nineteenth-century photography
studio of Gaetano Pedo steps back, depicting the Forum in the foreground
and the city in the background behind it (fig. 5). Beyond the picturesque
ruins rises the Palazzo Senatorio, built in the thirteenth century—largely from
stones taken from the ruins of the Forum—to house the Roman senate. The
palazzo to this day is the seat of the Roman city council. Beyond that are the
15

apartments and commercial buildings of urban Rome. In Pedo’s image, Rome
is hardly a city of toga-clad ghosts; it is a modern city with a lengthy history
built upon, and often even from, its imperial foundation.
Until 1861, when Italy was declared a unified nation under King Vittorio
Emanuele II with Rome as its capital, the Italian peninsula had consisted of a
number of separate republics, states, kingdoms, and duchies, each with a proud
and distinct history. The gradual process of unification, known in Italian as
the Risorgimento, had a precursor. During the Napoleonic wars of the 1810s,
Napoleon had conquered much of the peninsula and sought to unify it under
a French governor. Keen to distinguish his own rule from that of a foreign
power, Vittorio Emanuele sought to highlight the common cultural ancestry
of his new state. He commissioned photographers, including the Alinari brothers
in Florence and the German expatriate Giorgio Sommer in Naples, to
document and promulgate the patrimony of Italy as a shared cultural history.
Sommer, several of whose photographs are included in the Cantor portfolio,
took a particular interest in the ongoing excavations at Pompeii, the
Roman city near Naples buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE
and preserved beneath the volcanic ash (fig. 6). 5 Sommer’s image renders the
ruins of the central basilica (Pompeii’s central administrative complex, built
in the second century BCE) against Mount Vesuvius in the background. The
excavated city is neat and orderly, its streets wide and empty, the dark dirt
punctuated by the stark white of the few surviving marble floor tiles of what
was once a massive complex. Column bases, their shafts cut off abruptly at
uneven heights, recede into the background. Sommer took the image from an
elevated position, standing on the raised platform at the basilica’s end—what
would have been the seat of civic power in Roman times. The fine patterning
of the brickwork, which once would have been covered with sheets of gleaming
marble, is visible, as are the intricate networks of veins in the stone of the
surviving plinths and slabs. In the distance Vesuvius looms, dark and silently
smoldering. Sommer’s camera, which captures the details of the excavation in
precise detail, renders the volcano simply as a hulking mass, the steam from its
peak dissipating into the clouds.
In a painting created a half-century earlier by Théodore Caruelle
d’Aligny, a French painter who traveled often to Naples, a bored Grand Tourist
slumps against a low wall above the Bay of Naples while Vesuvius’s steam
16

fig. 6
Giorgio Sommer
(Italian, born in Germany,
1834–1914), 1202 Pompei,
c. 1875–90. Albumen print.
Art Gallery and Museum
General Gift, 1980.102.1.7.b
17

ises in the background (fig. 7). The scene is distinctly Italian only by dint of
Vesuvius’s subtle cameo; the landscape is otherwise nonspecific. But whereas
d’Aligny includes Vesuvius as a kind of quote, a simple assertion that the body
of water is indeed the Bay of Naples, Sommer’s remarkably similar-looking
Vesuvius appears as a kind of foe, a lingering threat not only to Pompeii but to
the century of effort and research devoted to excavating its remains.
A photograph taken in the 1870s by the Florentine Giacomo Brogi from
fig. 7
Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny
(French, 1798–1871), View
of the Bay of Naples, c. 1834.
Oil on canvas. Committee
for Art Acquisitions Fund,
1978.164
18

fig. 8
Giacomo Brogi (Italian,
1822–1881), View of Naples
from Tolentino, 19th century.
Albumen print. Gift of
Joseph Folberg, 1994.85.11
nearly the same vantage point as d’Aligny’s painting echoes Sommer’s assertion
that Vesuvius is far more than mere set dressing (fig. 8). Gone is the bored
tourist, and in their place is the sweeping expanse of Naples itself. Sommer’s
and Brogi’s images make clear both the stakes of Vesuvius’s threat and the
proud defiance of those who live in its shadow. Sommer’s Pompeii is not a
haunted ruin but proof that a civilization once flourished against the backdrop
of Vesuvius’s constant threat. Brogi’s Naples is proof that one still does.
19

Fratelli Alinari
In 1852 the brothers Leopoldo, Giuseppe, and Romualdo Alinari founded a
photography studio in Florence dedicated to documenting the artworks of
the city’s churches, museums, and civic buildings. Their success at producing
precise and detailed images of frescoes, sculptures, mosaics, and architectural
elements led to a commission by King Vittorio Emanuele II to expand the
scope of their work to encompass all of newly unified Italy. This royal assignment
afforded Fratelli Alinari access to aspects of Italy’s artistic and architectural
heritage that would be impossible for an ordinary tourist to visit, as in this
photograph, taken from the roof of Milan’s cathedral.
In addition to working with the nascent Italian state, Fratelli Alinari
also sold prints and glass plate slides of their photographs to academics across
the world, particularly art historians who used them to illustrate publications
and slide lectures. The reach and impact of their images is still felt across
academia; more than a hundred and fifty years later, the company remains one
of the largest sources of high-resolution images of Italian artworks. Through
Fratelli Alinari, Vittorio Emanuele II’s documentary campaigns of Italian patrimony
influenced not only how Italians see their own nation, but how scholars
around the world see Italy and its history.
Fratelli Alinari (Italian, active
1854–1920), The Cathedral
of Milan (Duomo di Milano),
19th century. Albumen
print. Gift of Joseph Folberg,
1994.85.3
20

PHOTOGRAPHING GOTHIC ENGLAND
While Italy’s photographers sought to highlight the shared history of their new
nation, in Britain they took to the countryside to depict their nation as it once
had been. As the Industrial Revolution swept through England, Scotland, and
Wales, the once heavily agrarian rural economy rapidly urbanized. Workers
moved in droves to cities, where they lived in dense and often dangerous
conditions, close to the factories and the mills that employed them. Many,
particularly artists and architects, opposed this rapid urban growth, decrying
poverty and the cramped, unsafe living conditions it forced upon laborers.
In 1836 the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin published a pamphlet
of prints unfavorably comparing England in the 1830s with England in the
1530s. Called Contrastes, it promoted the Middle Ages as a time of plenty, elegant
Gothic architecture, and independent workers skilled in a variety of crafts—
radically distinct from the Industrial Revolution, the era of the poorhouse, the
unsanitary city, and the bored worker toiling over an automated loom. New
architecture evoking the pointed arches and intricate stained glass of the Late
Middle Ages had been popular in elite circles for several decades, but Pugin’s
Contrastes proposed something different: that a Gothic revival could be at once
an architectural and a social movement, a return to what he perceived as an idyllic
medieval past. Commissioned in 1835, along with Charles Barry, to reconstruct
fig. 9
Artist unknown (English),
Westminster Palace (Parliament
Blgs), from Views in Europe
and the United States,
1875–80. Albumen print.
Gift of Mrs. George Liddle,
1977.207.1.a
22

fig. 10
Artist unknown (English),
The Old Rod Yard, Ely,
c. 1880. Carbon print
possibly. Gift of Joseph
Folberg, 1994.68.17
the Palace of Westminster in London (the meeting place of the Houses of
Parliament) after a fire destroyed it in 1834, Pugin designed the seat of the people’s
power in England as a many-spired Gothic castle (fig. 9). Reproducing the
aesthetics of the Middle Ages, he hoped, would revive its ethos as well.
As Pugin, alongside theorists like John Ruskin and designers like William
Morris, promoted the Gothic Revival as the antidote to the ills of the industrialized
city, photographers around England sought to dramatize the beauty
and majesty of England’s surviving medieval Gothic monuments. In Ely, a city
in the swampy eastern fenland, far from the industrial centers of Manchester,
London, and Leeds, an anonymous photographer captured a scene of bucolic
rural industry: basket weavers unloading sheaves of willow at a riverbank (fig. 10).
In the background, the almost spectral presence of Ely’s monumental fourteenthcentury
cathedral watches over the laborers. From the flat-bottomed boat of the
reed gatherers, to the picturesque pub at the shore, with its partially thatched
23

oof, to the haunting cathedral in the background, the scene could practically
be the 1530s. None of the modern drainage systems and levees that protected
the low-lying town or the smokestacks of Ely’s ceramics industry are visible,
nor is it clear from the image that the sheaves the workers hoist are bound for
John Fear Basket Manufacturer and Rod Merchant, an industrial basket factory.
Photography, with its promise of exquisite reality, casts as true a scene just as
imaginary as Pugin’s mythologized sixteenth century.
Not all of the photographers of the Gothic Revival headed for the fens
in search of the idyllic Middle Ages. Whereas Pugin had imagined the Gothic as
a lost and romantic past, others sought to render the Gothic as part of the fabric
of modern England—a cultural force that still shaped the nation. For both camps,
Gothic architecture was more than simply a stylistic choice. Pugin, like many of
his supporters, was Catholic and closely tied the loss of medieval nobility to the
establishment of the Church of England. It was no accident that Pugin located
his idealized Middle Ages in 1530, six years before Henry VIII’s conversion and
his subsequent destruction of many of the same rural monasteries that Pugin
imagined and illustrated.
For others, however, towering Gothic churches were proof of a vital cultural
history of engineering and skilled artisanship more than they represented
institutions of faith. Francis Frith, for example, framed Lincoln cathedral—
built over nearly two and a half centuries beginning in 1311—as the backdrop
of the modern city of Lincoln (fig. 11). The cathedral’s façade fills the end of
an empty, architecturally diverse street. The rusticated blocks and bricks of a
Georgian mansion abut the stucco façade of a medieval timber-framed house.
In the middle of the wide street an oil lamp stands, its bulbous shape a modern
counterpoint to the cathedral’s spires. A small section of scaffolding that
frames an element of the church’s façade completes the scene: the cathedral is
rendered as a continuous project, a living part of Lincoln. The scene reiterates
a visual hypothesis advanced by the photographer William Henry Fox Talbot
fifteen years earlier (fig. 12). Fox Talbot’s image, entitled A Scene in York, was
part of the initial portfolio of images he used to promote his refinements to
the craft of photography. In that photograph, York Minster rises ghostlike from
the modern city. If Fox Talbot quietly proposed the Gothic cathedral and its
medieval associations as still lingering behind the growth of urban England,
Frith’s image framed the Gothic as its very core.
24

fig. 11
Francis Frith (English,
1822–1898), Lincoln Cathedral,
c. 1860. Albumen print.
Gift of Joseph Folberg,
1994.68.68
fig. 12
William Henry Fox Talbot
(English, 1800–1877),
A Scene in York, 1845.
Calotype. Committee for Art
Acquisitions Fund, 1988.41
25

The Ruin
John Patrick (English, 1830–
1923), Chapel Royal, Holyrood,
19th century. Albumen
print. Gift of Joseph Folberg,
1994.68.100
In nineteenth-century Britain, many monuments of the Middle Ages were
not towering edifices or glorious cathedrals, but ruins. In the sixteenth century,
when Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church, his soldiers
ransacked many of the rural Catholic churches that refused to join his Church
of England. Called the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the period resulted in
the royal seizure of monastic holdings and the widespread destruction of their
medieval buildings.
As Romanticism, the artistic movement that emphasized the awe and
power of time and nature, swept across Europe in the early nineteenth century,
these ruins were regarded as perfect representations of the ravages of time, the
mistakes of the past, and the lost faith of the Middle Ages. Catholic groups
in England, like the popular Oxford Movement, treated images of ruins as
testimony to the violent suppression of Catholicism by an oppressive ruler.
But even Protestants and nonbelievers found beauty and mystery in their overgrown
walls and crumbling stones. Yet others viewed the ruins as Augustus
Welby Northmore Pugin had in his Contrastes: as evidence of a prosperous,
agrarian medieval society that had been undone by greed and force. Ruins
became so central to the nineteenth-century popular cultural imaginary that
architects were commissioned to design fake ruins, known as follies, for the
estates of wealthy families.
The ruined chapel on the Scottish royal estate of Holyrood was not
destroyed by Henry VIII’s armies but by a roof collapse in the eighteenth century.
Abandoned by the Scottish royal court, the structure was deemed too
costly to repair. Nevertheless, John Patrick’s photograph of the building exemplifies
the Romantic tradition of the ruin: the nave open to the sky, the stone
tracery of a window visible but the glass long gone. Although images like
Patrick’s are rooted in a particular historical and political context, their influence
has far outlasted the Gothic Revival or Romanticism. Contemporary
photography of ruins proliferates on platforms like Instagram. Its popularity
spurs photographers and would-be influencers to document everything from
abandoned suburban tract housing to ghost towns in the Western United States
to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, in search of the crumbling, overgrown,
Romantic picturesque.
27

28

fig. 13
Isidore Justin Taylor with
Charles Nodier and
Alphonse de Cailleux
(Isidore Justin Taylor:
French, born in Belgium,
1789–1879; Charles Nodier:
French, 1780–1844; Alphonse
de Cailleux: French,
1788–1876), Vue générale de
la grand Cathédrale d’Evreux,
from Voyages pittoresques et
romantiques dans l’ancienne
France, Volume I, 1820.
Illustrated book with
lithographs. National
Library of France
THE MISSION HÉLIOGRAPHIQUE
In early nineteenth-century France, however—seesawing between revolutionary
governments and strong-armed rulers—the monuments of the Middle
Ages were more politically fraught. In Paris, many antiquarians sought to celebrate
medieval France just as Frith did medieval England, casting the era and
its monuments as a source of national identity. In 1820 three men—the baron
Isidore Justin Taylor, the viscount Alphonse de Cailleux, and the académicien
Charles Nodier—began a series of densely illustrated books, which they
termed Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Picturesque and
Romantic Journeys in Ancient France, fig. 13). Their narrative, like Pugin’s,
was a history of kindly rulers and noblesse oblige, illustrated with lithographic
prints of architectural monuments as testaments to the power and grandeur of
noble families and the institutional Church.
Their picturesque voyages were popular with the Parisian elites, but many
who lived in the shadow of the monuments that Taylor, Nodier, and de Cailleux
celebrated saw the buildings instead as legacies of a feudal past—remnants of
a period of power-hungry kings, abusive feudal lords, and a domineering
Church. Churches, monasteries, and medieval civic buildings were being
demolished by French governors and mayors who wanted to give their towns
a clean break from the past. In 1830, when the July Revolution overthrew the
Bourbon monarchy, cities and towns across France began a wholesale campaign
of renovation and reconstruction, re-creating these “feudal” monuments
as modern structures for modern purposes: converting parish churches into
city halls, feudal prisons into Palais du Justice. A year later, the poet and novelist
Victor Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris (often titled The Hunchback
of Notre-Dame in English translations), the story of the enchanting gypsy
Esmerelda, the hunchbacked bell ringer Quasimodo who loves her, and the
corrupt archdeacon Claude Frollo. The novel plays out against the backdrop
of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, whose crumbling beauty and proud
history Hugo analogizes to his disfigured but brave protagonist Quasimodo.
Hugo’s novel describes architecture as the pure expression of society, a kind
of poetry in stone. Hugo followed his immensely popular novel with an 1832
essay entitled “Guerre aux démolisseurs” (War on the Demolishers), in which
he called for new laws to protect French historical monuments. These edifices,
he argued, are the story of France, echoing the claims of the English Gothic
29

evivalists that sites of architectural patrimony are not legacies of oppression
but repositories of collective history. 6 Until the invention of the printing press
made literature accessible, Hugo argued, architecture was the primary means
by which culture was preserved and kept alive.
Hugo’s call for legal protection for monuments and historical buildings
resulted in the establishment of the Commission des monuments historiques;
his friend, the novelist and playwright Prosper Mérimée, was
appointed its director. In 1851 the commission sent five artists, all members
of the Société Héliographique, in five directions across France to document
the nation’s architectural patrimony—an assignment known as the Mission
Héliographique. 7 Romantic literature—including the novels of Hugo and the
plays of Mérimée—was not far from the minds of the five, and its influence is
strongly felt in the photographs from their survey.
Charles Soulier, for example, framed Notre-Dame from across the
Seine in winter, the church’s narrow flying buttresses rising like tendrils from a
smoky grove of trees (fig. 14). Édouard Denis Baldus photographed the Maison
Carrée, the first-century CE Roman temple in Nîmes that was the inspiration
for Paris’s Église de la Madeleine and Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia State Capitol,
from an oblique angle, ignoring the hyper-rational geometry of its square
façade and rendering the famously white marble as dark, and its portico cast
in shadow (fig. 15). By framing the scene from askance, the temple’s repeating
columns echo the rhythm of the fence posts that separate the monument from
the street before it, and its outline is interrupted by a single standing oil lamp.
In Baldus’s image, the light—either the intellectual light of history, or the
reflected gleam of marble—comes not from the building. Instead, illumination
comes from the simple oil lamp, the product of civic services tended by an
unseen laborer. Just as in Hugo’s novel, architecture becomes the backdrop for
a story of modern French life.
Light is also the primary language of a photograph of the interior of
Rouen Cathedral taken by the Bisson brothers studio (fig. 16). Shot from an
elevated position anchored to the right-side wall of the church’s fourteenthcentury
nave, the image gazes toward the apse and high altar. Hazy light
casts long horizontal shadows from the unseen windows of the nave, and the
apse’s windows glow. The height and delicacy of the stone pillars, culminating
in steeply pointed archways, gives the architecture the evanescent quality
30

fig. 14
Charles Soulier (French,
1840–1875), Notre-Dame
de Paris, c. 1860. Albumen
print. Committee for Art
Acquisitions Fund, 1986.122
fig. 15
Édouard Denis Baldus
(French, c. 1813–c. 1882),
The Maison Carrée, Nîmes,
1853. Albumen print. Gift of
William Rubel, 1994.170
31

of fine lace hovering in a breeze. 8 The interior is
completely empty save for two chairs, which sit
like props on a stage, waiting for the actors. The
photograph doesn’t aim to represent the church in
the light of scientific Enlightenment—as the revolutionaries
in Paris who rechristened Notre-Dame
as a secular temple to the Cult of Reason in 1793
would have—nor as divinely lit and rooted purely
in faith. Instead, it presents the Gothic structure as
an architectural marvel deserving of preservation, to
be lived with as a monument to the French history
that created it.
BUILDING THE NATION ABROAD
While photography flourished across Europe as
the visual language of nation building, Europe’s
nations sought to expand their power beyond their
historical borders. In 1830 French troops invaded
Algeria, establishing a military-run government in the capital, Algiers, and
supply chains to ship Algerian goods to mainland France. Across Africa and
the Middle East in the years that followed, the British, French, Italian, Belgian,
German, Spanish, and Portuguese governments seized territory for themselves,
stripping the land of its resources, fueling and exacerbating local rivalries and
conflicts for their own gain, and ruling their new territories with brutal martial
force. European states often considered the countries they seized, like Algeria,
as simply new land for the invading nation. Local cultures and histories were
annihilated. In their place, European languages were taught, and European laws
and cultural norms enforced.
Paradoxically, just as foreign governors tried to efface the local history of
the lands they seized, European artists were brought in droves to Africa and the
Middle East to depict the monuments and history of these distant lands. Unlike
the Gothic Revivalists or the photographers of the Mission Héliographique,
these European artists and photographers sought to dramatize the mysterious
exoticism of their subjects. Their mythologizing images of the same histories
that European governments suppressed were specifically intended to attract
fig. 16
Bisson Frères (Louis-Auguste
Bisson: French,1814–1876;
Auguste-Rosalie Bisson:
French, 1826–1900), Rouen
Cathedral, Interior, c. 1860. Salt
print. Gift from the Alinder
Collection, 1988.156
32

fig. 17
Photoglob Zurich (Swiss,
active 1880s–1900s), 15,024.
P.Z.–Jérusalem. Mur des
Lamentations, from Album
of Photographs of the Holy
Land Assembled by Boulos
Meo, Jerusalem, before 1901.
Photochrom. Gift of Charles
B. Leib, 1977.37.20
would-be colonists to these newly seized territories. 9 Africa became the land
of the pharaohs and lions, and the Middle East the Holy Land of medieval lore.
While European photographers depicted their home nations emerging from a
common past, albeit an entirely constructed one, they depicted their colonial
quarries as trapped in a distant past that was equally imaginary. 10
A photochrom—a colorized print—by the Swiss studio Photoglob
Zurich epitomizes this trend (fig. 17). In the image, part of an album of photographs
of the Holy Land owned by Jane Stanford, pilgrims, their bodies
draped in prayer shawls, press themselves against the Western Wall in Jerusalem,
said to be the last surviving element of the sixth-century BCE temple built
under the reign of Herod. Entitled Mur des lamentations (Wall of Lamentations)
after the scraps of prayer that Jewish pilgrims leave in the cracks of the ancient
33

limestone, the photograph renders the wall climbing up past the frame’s
bounds and vines tumbling down its uneven surface. Supplicants bow and
kneel before the semi-ruin. To a French audience the scene would have been
a stark contrast to the glowing light of Rouen cathedral or the delicate spires
of Notre-Dame. Soulier’s ghostly Notre-Dame rising from the haze of winter
trees painted France’s national history as practically a natural element of the
landscape, something always present that would always remain—an elegant
backdrop to modern Paris. The Wall of Lamentations, by contrast, is cast as
a history that still traps the Jerusalemites, despite the fact that in reality it is
barely two hundred feet long and sixty feet high. The careful cropping makes
it appear endless, a history that can never be overcome.
Artists and writers like the painter Eugène Fromentin, who traveled
to Algeria in 1852 as part of an archaeological expedition, depicted the vast
desert landscapes of newly colonized French North Africa as an enticement
to adventurous French citizens who might travel to and settle in this new land
tinged with dangers (fig. 18). But it was photographs, giving an impression of
unalloyed truth, that most vigorously captured the European colonial imagination
(figs. 19, 20). Reviewing an album of photographs of Egypt taken in 1851
by the French photographer Maxime du Camp, Francis Wey wrote:
fig. 18
Eugène Fromentin (French,
1820–1876), The Desert at
En-Furchi, Algeria, c. 1848.
Charcoal and chalk. Alice
Meyer Buck Fund, 1981.68
34

fig. 19
Photoglob Zurich (Swiss,
active 1880s–1900s), Palace of
Justice, Casbah, Tangiers, 19th
century. Photochrom. Gift of
Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.29
fig. 20
Wilhelm Hammerschmidt
(German, c. 1830–1869),
Bazaar, Cairo, c. 1860.
Albumenized salt print from
a paper negative. Gift of
Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.86
35

It is powerfully unsettling to contemplate . . . all of the sites and the aspects
of such a singular land without suffering from the strangeness of its style and
character rendered in such intimate impressions of its reality. To enter into this
album is to travel. The truth invades you, it strikes you, disrupts you in so many
ways that soon you forget the print and its subjects are assimilated into your
imagination and you begin to dream that you are following a caravan. For what
is, after all, this land? A vision, a mute tableau, an inert image of the past. 11
Just as Félix Bonfils depicted Cairo’s al-Qarafa as a direct link to the
distant past of the Abbasid Caliphate, Europeans across the colonies likewise
depicted scenes of a distant past in the present: bazaars replete with camels,
tents, and Bedouin traders, or buildings articulated with horseshoe arches
and painted tiles. Whereas photographs of soaring Gothic spires or ancient
Roman ruins represented the politicized histories of their European nations,
Europeans’ photographs of the Middle East rendered garbled, mythologized
histories of the nations that Europe sought to assimilate. If France’s past was the
geometric logic of the Maison Carrée and its present was the civic promise of
the oil lamp that beamed beside it, its future, these images proposed to French
audiences, was the untapped potential of the lands south of the Mediterranean
whose histories were yet to be “illuminated” by the light of modernization.
Picturing their own colonialist and orientalizing vision of North Africa and
the Middle East, photographers really illustrated their own nations—gazing at
once lustily and fearfully across the Mediterranean.
. . . MAIS IL FAUT LE CHOISIR
It is tempting to look at many of these images now simply as historical relics,
points along a history of photography that eventually arrived at the digital
camera, the smartphone, the social media platform. But just as much as these
images represent a history of technology, they depict a history of ideology
whose legacy remains deeply rooted in how we make and consider images
today. Today visual propaganda far more subtle and insidious than a carefully
framed albumen print shapes how we conceive of our nations, our politics, and
our world. We know to scrutinize an image for the politician edited out of a
compromising scene, the celebrity face superimposed onto a naked body. But
36

it’s easy to forget that such extreme examples of doctored, fake images are only
part of what makes a photograph misleading or untrue.
“But it must be chosen,” Francis Wey’s addition to his journal’s motto,
“Nothing is beautiful but the truth,” was intended to highlight the craft of the
photographer—their role in producing such an incredible likeness after life.
But it actually presaged the biases and cultural prejudices that photographers
brought to, and still bring to, their work. While in the nineteenth century
photography remained the purview of the few—the rare artist wielding a
camera—today we are all photographers. Photography gives us all the ability
to choose what we depict as beautiful and what we depict as true. But what
truth we see through a camera’s lens is precisely that: only what we see as the
truth. Although what we depict may not be the ideology of the Italian state or
the Ottoman sultan, it is just as much shaped by our own politics, ideas, hopes,
and fears as any image of French patrimony or orientalized myth ever was.
The technique that Wey breathlessly announced as the child of art and science,
the apolitical medium that could render the honest beauty of the world, is and
always has been a political tool.
1. See Robert A. Sobieszek and E. S. Gavin Carney,
Remembrances of the Near East: The Photographs of
Bonfils, 1867–1907: From the Collections of the International
Museum of Photography at George Eastman House and the
Harvard Semitic Museum (Rochester, NY: International
Museum of Photography at the George Eastman
House, 1980).
2. Julia Grimes, “Armenians and Armenian
Photographers in the Ottoman Empire,” Public Domain
Review, November 4, 2014, https://publicdomainreview
.org/essay/armenians-and-armenian-photographers-in
-the-ottoman-empire/.
3. Francis Wey, “But du journal La Lumière,”
La Lumière, no. 1 (February 21, 1851), reprinted in
B. R. de Monfort, Collection du journal La Lumière:
Beaux-Arts. Héliographie. Sciences. Première Année – 1851
(Paris: Société Héliographique, 1851), 1. All translations
my own unless otherwise indicated.
4. Francis Wey, “Exposé Sommaire, Du but et des
principaux éléments du journal,” La Lumière, no. 5
(March 9, 1851), reprinted in de Monfort, Collection
du journal La Lumière, 18.
5. On Sommer’s long and prolific career in Italy
see Giovanni Fanelli, L’Italia virata all’oro attraverso
le fotografie di Giorgio Sommer (Florence, Italy:
Polistampa, 2007).
6. Victor Hugo, “War on the Demolishers!,” trans.
Danny Smith, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative
Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 25, no. 2
(September 1, 2018): 224–48.
7. Joel A. Herschman and William W. Clark, Un Voyage
Héliographique à Faire: The Mission of 1851: The First
Photographic Survey of Historical Monuments in France
(Flushing, NY: Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens
College, 1981).
8. On the art historical role of similarly dramatic
photographs of Gothic spaces see Ralph Lieberman,
“The Art-Historical Photograph as Fiction: The
Pretense of Objectivity,” in Fictions of Art History,
ed. Mark Ledbury (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2013), 118–38.
9. Keri A. Berg, “The Imperialist Lens: Du Camp,
Salzmann and Early French Photography,” Early
Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 1 (2008): 1–17.
10. On the relationship between photography
and orientalism see Ali Behdad, “Mediated Visions:
Early Photography of the Middle East and Orientalist
Network,” History of Photography 41, no. 4 (2017):
362–75.
11. Francis Wey, “Voyages héliographiques. Album
d’Egypt de M. Maxime du Camp,” La Lumière, no. 32
(September 14, 1851), reprinted in de Monfort,
Collection du journal La Lumière, 127.
37

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication and the exhibition it accompanies are a result of many years
of conversations with friends and mentors about the political role and ideological
function of architectural patrimony. I’ll always appreciate their time,
wisdom, and company, and I hope that I do justice to the many things I’ve
learned from them. I’m particularly grateful for many conversations with
Kristina Eldrenkamp, Baird Jarman, Eleanor Jensen, Valerie Krall, Michael
Lewis, Ralph Lieberman, Alex Smith, Ann Tartsinis, Sarah Van Anden, Lora
Webb, Yechen Zhao, and the students of Carleton College’s off-campus studies
program Architecture, Urbanism, and Empire in Europe.
Exquisite Reality has been supported by the Department of Art and Art
History at Stanford, and I’m grateful to Alexander Nemerov, Richard Meyer,
Elis Imboden, and Perla Miranda Garcia for their help and support. This exhibition
would not have been possible, either in concept or in form, without the
care and advice of Bissera Pentcheva.
At the Cantor Arts Center, I’m indebted to Kate Holohan and Maggie
Dethloff, both of whom have helped shepherd this exhibition from its earliest
stages with generosity and tremendous insight. Exquisite Reality is the Cantor’s
first exhibition conceived as an entirely digital project. Although we were
forced online by the COVID pandemic, instead of lamenting what we couldn’t
do, the Cantor’s team embraced what new possibilities an online exhibition
could bring. The result is a tribute to their creativity and thoughtfulness in the
face of a constantly evolving challenge. The exhibition has been supported,
fostered, and immeasurably improved by Peg Brady, Heidi Sigua Campbell,
Robert DeArmond, Shanna Dickson, James Gaddy, Elizabeth Giudicessi, Jody
Hanson, María José Alvarado Luna, Tiffany Sakato, Lindsey Westbrook, and
Margaret Whitehorn. I am deeply grateful to them all. None of this would
be possible without the leadership of Cantor Interim Co-Directors Elizabeth
Kathleen Mitchell and Maude Brezinski, as well as former Cantor John and Jill
Freidenrich Director Susan Dackerman. I would also like to acknowledge the
generous support of Sue and John Diekman.
Finally, two people deserve particular thanks: Red Hook Hester
Harrison-Smith and Sara Harrison. They are, in that order, the two wisest
people I know. This exhibition is dedicated to both of them.
39

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
This list reflects the information available at the time of publication.
Édouard Denis Baldus (French, c. 1813–c. 1882),
The Maison Carrée, Nîmes, 1853. Albumen print.
Gift of William Rubel, 1994.170
David Cox (Jr.?) (English, 1809–1885), Kneeling Pilgrims
in front of a Church (Notre Dame?), 19th century.
Watercolor. Gift of Joseph F. McCrindle, 1987.56
Bisson Frères (Louis-Auguste Bisson: French, 1814–
1876; Auguste-Rosalie Bisson: French, 1826–1900),
Caserne d’Infanterie, Blois, 1890–91. Albumen print.
Museum Purchase Fund, 1974.5
Bisson Frères (Louis-Auguste Bisson: French, 1814–
1876; Auguste-Rosalie Bisson: French, 1826–1900),
Rouen Cathedral, Interior, c. 1860. Salt print. Gift from
the Alinder Collection, 1988.156
Félix Bonfils (French, 1831–1885), Ascent of the Great
Pyramid of Cheops, c. 1870–80. Albumen print. Gift of
Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.56
Félix Bonfils (French, 1831–1885), Caliph’s Tomb,
19th century. Albumen print. Gift of Joseph Folberg,
1994.86.10
Giacomo Brogi (Italian, 1822–1881), 3023. Florence.
Arcade of the Uffizi Gallery (Firenze. Portici degli Uffizi...),
1864–81. Albumen print. Gift of Robert Enteen,
2017.115
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800–1877),
A Scene in York, 1845. Calotype. Committee for Art
Acquisitions Fund, 1988.41
Fratelli Alinari (Italian, active 1854–1920), The Cathedral
of Milan (Duomo di Milano), 19th century. Albumen
print. Gift of Joseph Folberg, 1994.85.3
Francis Frith (English, 1822–1898), Ruins of a Christian
Church, Island of Saye, Ethiopia, c. 1856–60. Albumen
print. Gift of William Rubel, 1982.337.9
Francis Frith (English, 1822–1898), Tintern Abbey,
19th century. Albumen print. Museum Purchase Fund,
1975.158.1
Lekegian, G. & Co. (Egyptian, active 1887–1920s),
Medinet-Abou, c. 1880–90. Albumen print. Anonymous
gift, 1978.232.10
Jakob August Lorent (German, 1813–1884), Tempel des
Olympischen Jupiter, 1860–61. Collotype. Gift of Mr. and
Mrs. John J. Mathrusse, 1982.211.11
40

Charles Marville (born Charles-Francois Bossu)
(French, 1813–1879), Rue Visconti, 1867–68.
Albumen print. Gift of William Rubel, 1994.184
Sébah & Joaillier (Turkish, active 1888–c. 1950),
Panoramic View of Brousse, 19th century. Albumen print.
Gift of Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.120
Luis Leon Masson (Spanish, active 19th century),
Panoramic Views of Gibraltar, c. 1859. Albumen print.
Gift of Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.98.a–j
Giorgio Sommer (Italian, born in Germany, 1834–1914),
Gotthardbahn, Wassen, 19th century. Albumen print.
Gift of Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.126
Gaetano Pedo Studio (Italian, active 1880–90), The
Roman Forum, Rome (Roma, Foro Romano), 19th century.
Albumen print. Museum Purchase Fund, 1973.63.2
Giorgio Sommer (Italian, born in Germany, 1834–1914),
Via del Pò (Torino), c. 1875. Albumen print. Gift of
Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis, 1987.63.71
Pascal Sébah (Turkish, 1823–1886), Tombs of the Caliphs,
Cairo, 19th century. Albumen print. Gift of Joseph
Folberg, 1994.68.115
Charles Soulier (French, 1840–1875), Notre-Dame
de Paris, c. 1860. Albumen print. Committee for Art
Acquisitions Fund, 1986.122
41

An earlier iteration of this initiative was supported by
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and included the
following projects:
Erik Yingling, Aura: Art and Authenticity, Spring 2020
Alexandria Hejazi-Tsagaris, Crossing the Caspian:
Persia and Europe, 1500–1700, Winter 2020
Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Blackboard, Fall 2018
Sydney Skelton Simon, Working Metal in 20th-Century
Sculpture, Winter 2018
Michael Metzger, Environmental Exposure: Photography
and Ecology after 1970, Fall 2017
Yu-chuan Phoenix Chen, A Mushroom Perspective on
Sacred Geography, Winter 2017
Rachel Newman, Blood in the Sugar Bowl, Spring 2016
George Philip LeBourdais, Arboreal Architecture: A Visual
History of Trees, Spring 2015
Annie Ronan, Astley D. M. Cooper and Mrs. Stanford’s Jewels,
Fall 2015
John R. Blakinger, The New Landscape: Experiments in
Light by György Kepes, Fall 2014
Front and back cover: Photoglob Zurich (Swiss, active
1880s–1900s), Palace of Justice, Casbah, Tangiers, 19th century.
Photochrom. Gift of Joseph Folberg, 1994.68.29
This publication accompanies the virtual exhibition
Exquisite Reality: Photography and the Invention of Nationhood
1851–1900, curated by Danny Smith and presented by
the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University beginning
March 2021, and accessible at http://cantor.2.vu/exquisite.
This exhibition and publication are part of a collaborative
initiative between the Cantor Arts Center and Stanford’s
Department of Art & Art History. This initiative, the
Cantor Curatorial Fellowship, aims to make the multifaceted
museum a compelling and vivid component of
the department’s graduate student academic experience.
The resulting exhibition projects are designed to provide
doctoral students with the unique opportunity to work
directly with objects as they curate focused, scholarly
exhibitions that relate both to their own research interests
and to the museum’s holdings.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Sue and
John Diekman.
All works reproduced in this publication are from the
Cantor Arts Center collection unless otherwise noted. Not
all works pictured herein appear in the virtual exhibition.
Additional copyright credits appear below the images.
First published in 2021 by the Cantor Arts Center,
Stanford University, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford, California
94305-5060.
© 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Junior University. All rights reserved.
No parts of this publication may be reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage retrieval system, without prior permission in
writing from the Cantor Arts Center.
Graphic designer: Jody Hanson
Editor: Lindsey Westbrook

IRIS & B. GERALD CANTOR CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS
AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY
The Cantor Arts Center is the hub for deep explorations of visual arts on the
Stanford University campus. By showcasing both contemporary works and
historic ones, exhibitions at the Cantor spark interdisciplinary conversations
about critically important issues. With a collection that spans thousands of
years, it is one of the most visited university art museums in the country,
attracting visitors from the area and around the world.
/cantorarts
@cantorarts
museum.stanford.edu

Cantor Curatorial Fellow Exhibitions