Documentary Photography, Temporality, and the Industrialization of the Parisian Worksite

Abstract

Architectural media operate at different speeds. This fact was evident to the French engineers who routinely documented the construction of industrial buildings and infrastructure with photography in Paris during the late nineteenth century. In this period, French engineers principally worked as managers, as the industrialization of the Parisian worksite emerged in concert with preoccupations about oversight and supervision. Such concerns had surfaced with changing conceptions of time under industrial capitalism as exemplified by the standardization of timekeeping after 1884 that was necessitated by new technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad. Working under new regimes of time, engineers consistently commissioned serial photographs of the construction process taken at timed intervals. Such images visualized and verified the expediency and efficiency of labor, building materials, and methods of construction within the expanding bureaucracy of the state’s administrations for building. This paper contends that construction photographs, as they clocked the phases of construction, played a supportive role in the production of engineering knowledge at a moment when engineers operated according to a managerial paradigm. Accordingly, construction photographs participated in a broader cultural field, contributing to the industrialization of the worksite and of time itself in the wake of the expansion of urban capitalism during the second half of the nineteenth century.