Technology and Culture

abstract:

Visual images shape knowledge, as scholars of visual representation have long argued. Historians of technology stand to benefit from understanding how seemingly objective photographs of colossal engineering works are much more than technical illustrations. With their unmatched legibility and reproducibility, photographs can crucially shape the public’s view. Civil engineers were well aware of how photographs could advance their cause. Photographs of infrastructures were part of a political project: the builders of Paris’s modern water system harnessed photographs as political tools in the contentious construction of aqueducts bringing drinking water to Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. This article examines how photographs engineered the public’s understanding of large water projects and landscape transformation.