Universal Language and Cultural Translation in Nineteenth-century Photography and Geometry

摘要

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of photographers produced boldly geometrical images of urban spaces, engineering and buildings, drawing attention to the abstract shapes discerned in what was depicted. Among those were Juan (Jean) Laurent and his collaborators and successors. The images sold by Laurent y Cia (Laurent & Co.) provide a significant example of how such geometrical obsessions could be connected to cultural translation, as we would now term it. Lee Fontanella has argued that Laurent 'sensed it was his mission to record photographically and to register in an orderly fashion all minutiae, as well as monuments, in the peninsula'. By providing such renderings in a reproducible form, Laurent made a version of those things available to people abroad, in other parts of Spain, and, of course, to those in the locality that was depicted. The geometrical shapes in which the images are cast are a key means through which those things are communicated. The present study argues that geometry is presented as a kind of universal language through which photography can 'speak' and attempts a reconstruction of how such a geometrical photographic language might have been thought to operate. In these respects it contributes to the renewed critical interest in the historical notion of photography as a universal language.