Almost from the moment photography was invented, the world's ancient monuments became a favourite subject; just two months after the Institut de France made public the details of Daguerre's invention, Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière was on the Acropolis making photographs. There were practical reasons for the popularity of monuments as subject matter: unlike humans the Sphinx easily held still for the twenty minutes it took to make a picture. Their popularity among both photographers and collectors, however, had other reasons as well, including the development of tourism, which made early travel photography logistically possible, and the era's fascination with ancient history; a widespread colonial attitude towards other cultures also influenced what was photographed and how. For those who purchased the photographs, in addition to proving that such wonders actually existed, images of ancient monuments offered a link with the past in the midst of rapid and sometimes destructive social and technological change, symbolizing stability and endurance, and in some cases confirming religious belief. At the same time the photographs helped to shape understanding of the cultures that produced the monuments, and even permitted a piece of that culture to be possessed; locations like Egypt came to be defined by their ruins and archaeological sites as the monuments were repeatedly photographed, forever trapping the country and its people in the past for the delectation of Europeans. Many photographers recorded monuments for commercial reasons, but others were scientifically motivated. In the 1840s the antiquarian and traveller Eugène Piot (1812-91) devised an elaborate scheme to document the world's ancient sites and works of art. Though he hoped to make money by publishing engravings made from the photographs, his project was also intended to be a comprehensive survey of historic monuments, the first such project attempted. In June 1851 Piot published L'Italie monumentale, and there the project ended in financial disaster, perhaps because Piot's reproductions looked too much like lithographs, a distinctly old-fashioned medium by that time. Subsequent projects were better organized and more successful, including Maxime Du Camp's 1851 excursion to the Middle East, and the French government's Mission Héliographique, which sought to record the appearance of historic structures as the prelude to preserving them.
Well before the end of the 19th century, vast numbers of ancient monuments had been photographed (often in stereographic form), from Jerusalem to the ruins of Angkor. Other, more remote sites had to await further exploration in the 20th century, and technological innovations such as aerial and underwater photography.
— Molly Rogers
See also archaeology and photography; poidebard, antoine.
