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

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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
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Page 19 and 20: fig. 8 Giacomo Brogi (Italian, 1822
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Exquisite Reality: Photography and the Invention of Nationhood, 1851–1900

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