Shorter Notice The Perpetual Unfolding of Photographic History: A Previously Unknown Panorama of Salvador, Bahia, by Rodolpho Lindemann

Introduction

There has been a particularly close and fruitful relationship between photography and the Brazilian landscape and context dating back even prior to the official announcement of photography’s invention in France in 1839. Although the daguerreotype reached Brazilian shores only six months after its debut, one of the pioneers of the attempt to immortalize light outside of Europe, Hercules Florence, was already living and developing photographic experiments in that region of South America.¹ When Emperor Dom Pedro II learned of the invention by the arrival of the first daguerreotypist in Brazil in 1840—the abbot Louis Compte—he was so fascinated that he became an amateur photographer and collector.² But it would be, more than anything, Brazil’s perceived exoticism, its infinite landscapes, and its cultural diversity that would attract a large number of foreign, mostly European, photographers; they would produce, during the course of the nineteenth century alone, a body of photographic work as extensive and important as it is unexplored or even unknown or unidentified.

In this context, the present article examines a photographic panorama—an elevated view of a landscape or city formed by the seamless piecing together of multiple overlapping photographic images—of the city of Salvador, captured in six parts around 1880 by German-born photographer Rodolpho Lindemann; the panorama was recently added to the collection of the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles and is now part of the GRI’s collection of photographs of Brazil and Latin America more generally.³ Despite its unique characteristics, this panorama has not been mentioned in previous studies or in the foremost books on the history of photography in Brazil, suggesting that its existence has not been widely known.

The mass availability of photography in the mid-nineteenth century not only facilitated a broader proliferation of urban views—which already had a significant pictorial presence—but also reinforced the need to document cities. Its proliferation garnered new opportunities to experiment with increasingly sophisticated formats and multiplied the technical possibilities of the medium. Indeed, it was only a few short years after the announcement of the daguerreotype’s invention that panoramic photography made its first appearance.⁴ The photographic camera was initially seen as a scientific device with the ability to document reality, and panoramic photography only intensified this attribute, depicting the totality through elevation, distance, and broad visual coverage. The technology of panoramic photography, which produced large-scale images, was intended to convey not only a total view but also a specific idea of power inherited from pictorial panoramas;⁵ the total representation of landscapes and cities—at first seemingly innocuous—is directly related to the colonial and imperialist policies imposed on the spaces depicted. This is one of the many reasons why Brazilian photography is a fascinating case study.

The circulation of these panoramic photographs and their connections with other paintings and photographs allow us to reexamine concepts linked to the mobility of images and their relationships with objects and institutions proposed by American art theorist Jonathan Crary and Spanish art historian Ana María Guash, as well as to reflect on the photographic archive as a theoretical and discursive concept, following the ideas of Allan Sekula, American artist and theorist.⁶ These ideas are also related to American anthropologist Deborah Poole’s notion of “visual economy,” according to which images can be considered “as part of a comprehensive organization of people, ideas, and objects.”⁷

Photographic Panoramas and Their Derivations

A substantial number of photographers from across Europe relocated to Brazil during the nineteenth century, where they worked professionally in a wide range of fields and produced remarkable bodies of work. These photographers captured on film nearly everything, including portraits, landscapes, urban panoramas, and social documentation, and their images appeared in important scientific publications and international exhibitions.

In the case of Rodolpho Frederico Francisco Lindemann, who was born in Germany in the mid-1850s, Brazil would become his home in the 1870s. Upon his arrival, the photographer settled in the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia. In 1882, Lindemann was hired as a studio assistant to the prominent Swiss photographer Guilherme Gaensly, and later became his business partner.

Most of the work by Lindemann known to us today is focused on landscapes, as evidenced by the views and photographs of Salvador that the Baron of Rio Branco included in Album de vues du Brésil (Album of views of Brazil), an appendix to the book Le Brésil (Brazil), published in Paris in 1889 by Émile Levasseur.⁸ Lindemann was one of the artists with the greatest number of photographs reproduced in this publication, with a total of twenty-five views, twenty of which are of Salvador. This publication was produced under the auspices of the Comitê Franco-Brasileiro para a Exposição Universal de Paris (Franco-Brazilian Committee for the Paris Universal Exposition) of 1889, and its photographs were part of the Brazilian pavilion at the Paris Universal Exposition, where Lindemann and Gaensly exhibited photos of Bahia and Pernambuco.⁹ During his years in Brazil, Lindemann also took photographic views in other provinces such as Alagoas, as well as a number of portraits, a common practice during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In the early 1890s, Gaensly moved to the city of São Paulo to open a branch of the Gaensly & Lindemann studio, while Lindemann assumed responsibility for the photographic studio in Bahia. Fotografía Lindemann (Lindemann Photography) was eventually sold to a merchant in 1906, and the photographer and his wife appear to have left Brazil. Although there is no information regarding the date of Lindemann’s death or the fate of his photographic archive, some of his photographs are now located at the Instituto Moreira Salles (Moreira Salles Institute) in São Paulo, Brazil.

Despite Lindemann’s presumably extensive body of work and his prominent role in Salvador at the time, it is often difficult to access the photographs taken by photographers of those years. Not only was there little awareness about the importance of preserving photographic archives and photos as historically significant objects in the day but, in many cases, the prints sold by the photographers themselves were not signed, making it even more difficult to identify and access them today.¹⁰ This is the case for the panoramic photograph by Lindemann recently acquired by the GRI. The large, six-part folding object depicts the coastline of Salvador as seen from the Forte São Marcelo (São Marcelo Fort), a historic structure facing the city center (fig. 1).

This panorama came from a private collection and does not bear a signature, which initially left its authorship obscure. With research it was possible to determine that it had indeed been made by Lindemann, because the aforementioned Album de vues du Brésil includes a drawing of the coast of Salvador that is captioned as having been based on one of his photos. When the two images are compared, it is possible to see that their content is essentially the same, with the exception of several sailboats and the dramatic rays of sunlight added by the artist (fig. 2). As can be seen, the angle of coverage, the distance to the shore, and the location of the vessels are the same in both views, along with certain elements in the lower-left sector of the two images, corresponding to the dock of the fort and a fragment of its side wall. Brazilian historian of photography Boris Kossoy states that cities included as panoramic views in the Album de vues du Brésil received special treatment to ensure that they reflected the “civilized landscape worthy of export” that the album was intended to convey.¹¹

The photographic panorama of Salvador was likely created by Lindemann in the late 1870s or early 1880s. The final image demonstrates his high level of technical skill both in taking the types of sequential shots that are seamlessly pieced together and, in particular, producing the extreme sharpness and level of detail. In it, we can see the Elevador Lacerda (Lacerda Elevator, the first urban elevator in the world, inaugurated in 1873); the old Arsenal da Marinha (Arsenal of the Navy); the Teatro São João (São João Theater); and many other structures in what was at the time the second most populous city in Brazil and an important cultural center of the Americas.

It is not the first panoramic view of Salvador taken by Lindemann from the Forte São Marcelo; a similar image, taken around 1875, is located at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen in Mannheim, Germany.¹² However, the panorama at the GRI is different from this earlier one and others because of its large size: it is 159.5 centimeters long and 24 centimeters high. These dimensions and its sharpness allow us to observe the city in great detail, in particular the buildings overlooking the bay and the vessels sailing along the coast. Because of the large size of this image, when we look more closely at it, small scenes of everyday life in Salvador emerge, such as three men standing on the dock of the fort and people on the coast or aboard different types of boats (figs. 3a–c).

The Forte São Marcelo was a prime vantage point for taking panoramic photographs of Salvador during the nineteenth century, due to its location facing the city center from a close but sufficiently distant position, enabling shots with a substantial angle of coverage. Many renowned photographers of the period accomplished the feat from that spot. For example, in 1860, British photographer Benjamin Mulock took at least two panoramic photos from the site reflecting very different qualities of execution and reproduction.¹³ Around 1870, a similar six-part panoramic photograph was captured by a still-unknown photographer, and later in the decade, both Marc Ferrez (figs. 4a, 4b) and Gaensly produced their own versions.¹⁴ Of all these panoramas with identical viewpoints and visual coverage, the print now at the GRI has the largest dimensions. It is possible that photographers were motivated to return to the same location in order to outdo one another in the creation of similar panoramic shots in an increasingly larger size, a photographic feat of the time.

The use of the panoramic format to depict cities or landscapes is a common technique not only in the history of photography but also in the history of art and visual practices around the world. Consider, for example, the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. In 1822, French painter Félix-Émile Taunay painted Panorama do Rio de Janeiro, a one-meter-long colored aquatint portraying a very urban view of the city from Morro do Castelo (Castle Hill). This panorama, made in Brazil, was exhibited in 1824 at the Passage des Panoramas (Passageway of Panoramas) in Paris, allowing French spectators to experience, perhaps for the first time, a comprehensive view of the city. A second panoramic depiction was painted around 1830 by Robert Burford, the proprietor of Leicester Square, a space for exhibiting panoramas in London, where it was on display for a year.¹⁵

Some years later, around 1863, Italian-born photographer Augusto Stahl took a five-part photographic panorama of Rio de Janeiro. The vantage point used for this panorama was the Ilha das Cobras (Isle of Snakes), which would also be used by other photographers, such as Georges Leuzinger in his three-part photographic panorama around 1866 (fig. 5), an image upon which the Spanish artist Enrique Casanova y Astorza would base his painting Vista do Rio de Janeiro (View of Rio de Janeiro) around 1883 (fig. 6).¹⁶

Photographs by Stahl, Leuzinger, and others would arrive several decades after the early pictorial representations to update and expand the idea of the Latin American metropolis that was developing in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁷ These photographs depart from the typical natural setting of the city while heightening the presence of urban density through a focus on its architecture and the movement of waterways. The vision of the new and exotic—for these creators coming from other latitudes—emerges as a historical construction, revealing mechanisms of visual representation explicitly devised first by the painter and later by the photographer. The latter uses the photographic apparatus and its reality effect to reconfigure and reorganize the relationships between the observing subject and modes of representation.¹⁸

Panoramic photos have a particular technical appeal, and there was a remarkable number of them produced in Brazil, where, as seen from the numerous examples mentioned, they were a common practice among landscape photographers. Creating these images was a difficult undertaking: the photographer had to travel to the shooting location with bulky equipment—including heavy cameras, tripods, glass plates—and chemicals, due to the specific characteristics of the wet collodion process, which was in use from the late 1850s until the 1880s, when it was replaced by dry gelatin plates.¹⁹ The resulting prints are different from other photographs: because of their large size, panoramic photos are usually folded, further emphasizing their status as manipulable objects, compared to other smaller or pocket-size photographs (fig. 7). The panoramic photos were private objects, acquired by a select clientele as visual treasures depicting cities in faraway regions of the world in all their detail and splendor.²⁰

Consequently, this type of photographic feat was motivated not only by the adventure of creating images outside of the studio but also by the possibility of selling them as collectible objects. The primary buyers were foreigners visiting or living in Brazil on a temporary basis. These images thus traveled to different countries and ended up becoming part of public libraries and private archives, largely in Europe. Historian Gilberto Ferrez states that the quality of the Brazilian photographs is fully comparable to those produced in other parts of the world; the difference lies in the actual accessibility of such photographs taken in Brazil.²¹ We still have not been able to determine the authorship of many such extant photos or even the present location of those that may be lost, stored without names in private collections, or forgotten in libraries in distant countries, given their itinerant nature and their lack of markings, signatures, or stamps.

Concluding Remarks

Photographic theory has made it clear that nothing in a photograph is neutral.²² As Colombian art historian Juanita Solano-Roa states, formats and spaces for circulation and conservation imbue each photograph with meanings that transcend realistic depiction.²³ In the case of panoramic photographs, the view from above or at a distance is a vision with the power to dominate. These images play an important historical role, for they allow us to observe elements that are difficult to see in other representations, such as the layout of cities, their specific streets, their buildings, their advertisements, and other urban features in a certain period. Nevertheless, as Kossoy argues, photographic images are not only born ideologized but also accumulate ideological components as the photographs are omitted from historical records or reused for different purposes throughout their trajectories.²⁴

In this sense, the panoramic photograph by Lindemann shows the urban landscape toward the end of the colonial period in one of Brazil’s most important cities, much of whose identity was constructed around its geographical and architectural characteristics. The relocation and identification of this photograph leads, at least, to two contributions. As mentioned above, the photograph itself offers a wealth of details about its moment in Salvador, making it an exceptional historical visual source. Further, although there are other images from around the same time that depict the city from similar vantage points, restoring the authorship of Lindemann’s photograph contributes to our understanding of the history of the medium as well as its uses, derivations, and functions.

This photograph cannot be understood in isolation. As demonstrated, it is part of a genealogy of panoramic images that—whether in painting, drawing, or photography—are in dialogue with one another. Following Poole, viewers can locate a “combination of relationships of referral and exchange among images themselves, and the social and discursive relations connecting image-makers and consumers”—what Poole determines to be an “image world” that is mutually reinforcing.²⁵ As was already the case in the nineteenth century, individuals see and produce images on the basis of prior knowledge.

Equally, there is a material aspect of the panoramic photographs analyzed here. These large photos travel as folded objects, which are treasured, sold, forgotten, and rediscovered. Because of their physical characteristics, they must be unfolded in order to assume full form and allow the observation of their subject. The drawing included in Album de vues du Brésil (see fig. 2) is an image that can be easily and readily accessed, but the panoramic photograph on which it was based remained stored—folded—in a private collection in Europe and was later sold in California.²⁶ It is not possible to trace all its locations since its creation, but its latest movement to the GRI’s collection made it possible to study it and demonstrate that the best place for a nineteenth-century photograph is in a library or archive open to the public, allowing researchers and curators as well as any other interested person to learn of its existence and have access to it. Never losing sight of the fact that, as American art historians Rosalind Krauss, Alan Trachtenberg, and Sekula argue, every archive complies with certain standards as a technology of power in which ownership remains paramount,²⁷ this type of change in location enables us to reengage with Lindemann’s object and continue to unfold the multiple pages of photographic history. The very characteristics of the medium of photography—elusive and at times forgotten—will ensure that its history will always be diverse—one that is never finished, being perpetually constructed and reconfigured.

Julieta Pestarino is an anthropologist and holds a PhD in History and Theory of the Arts from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Notes

I would like to thank the Getty Foundation and Idurre Alonso, curator of Latin American Art at the Getty Research Institute, for giving me the opportunity to be a Getty Graduate Intern in 2021–22 in the Curatorial Department and to work on significant Latin American artworks and collections and the acquisition of the photographic panorama by Rodolpho Lindemann. This essay was translated from the Spanish by Audrey Young.

1. See the investigations on Hercules Florence’s photographic research in Brazil carried out by Boris Kossoy. Boris Kossoy, Hercule Florence: A descoberta isolada da fotografia no Brasil (São Paulo: Faculdade de Educação Social Anhembi, 1977); and Boris Kossoy, The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence (New York: Routledge, 2018). ↩︎

2. The first daguerreotype made in South America took place in Brazil on 16 January 1840 by Compte, chaplain of a French school ship that landed in the port of Rio de Janeiro. Pedro II was fourteen years old when he first learned of the daguerreotype. He was so enthusiastic that he soon acquired the necessary equipment to take photographs himself, which, according to Gilberto Ferrez, made him the first Brazilian to produce daguerreotypes. Throughout his life, he collected photographs of views of Brazil as well as portraits of relatives and friends, which he kept in albums. See Gilberto Ferrez, A fotografia no Brasil: 1840–1900 (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985), 20. ↩︎

3. The GRI’s photographic collection has important holdings from Brazil, such as the collection of aforementioned historian Gilberto Ferrez, grandson of renowned Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez. The view by Lindemann joined other photographic panoramas taken in the country that were already part of the GRI’s collection, although those were mainly associated with the city of Rio de Janeiro, such as the panorama taken from the Ilha das Cobras (Isle of Snakes) by George Leuzinger (1813–92) around 1866; Vue prise de Sta. Thereza (View from Santa Theresa) taken by Marc Ferrez around 1890; and the urban view of Praça Floriano (Floriano Square) taken by Augusto César de Malta Campos in 1928. The last two photographs are reproduced in Idurre Alonso and Maristella Casciato, The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes, Photographs, Debates (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021), 24–27, pls. 12 and 13. ↩︎

4. Panoramic photography was pioneered in 1845 in Paris by Friedrich von Martens, who developed a camera for panoramic daguerreotypes that produced views using a rotating lens with an angle of view potentially exceeding 150 degrees. A detailed account of the technical evolution of the photographic panorama can be found in Gerardo Martinez-Delgado, “La ilusión de la ciudad total: Fotografía panorámica en México antes de 1910 e investigación en historia urbana,” Cuicuilco: Revista de ciencias antropológicas 24, no. 68 (2017): 101–33. ↩︎

5. The panorama as a pictorial medium was a British invention, patented in 1787 by Robert Barker, an Irish-born painter based in Edinburgh. It quickly became one of the most popular visual spectacles of its time. According to Colombian art historian Juanita Solano-Roa, its innovative way of presenting the world led to a paradigmatic change both in ways of seeing and in the logics of representation. The pictorial panorama broke with the historically prevailing linear perspective proposed by Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti, which has one vanishing point, representing instead a continuous linear horizon. For a historical overview of the invention and circulation of pictorial panoramas, see Carla Hermann, “Landscape and Power: Taunay’s and Burford’s Panoramas of Rio de Janeiro in Paris and London in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Artelogie, no. 10 (2017): 1–10; and Juanita Solano-Roa, “Fotoramas: Jorge Obando y la fotografía panorámica de los años treinta en Colombia,” Revista Historia y Sociedad, no. 43 (2022): 69–91. ↩︎

6. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Ana María Guash, Arte y archivo (Madrid: Akal, 2011); Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); and Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 443–52. ↩︎

7. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 8. ↩︎

8. This album has been digitized and is available to view online at the Biblioteca Digital Luso-Brasileira, https://bdlb.bn.gov.br/acervo/handle/20.500.12156.3/46289. It contains ninety-four images of Brazil, with photographs by Marc Ferrez, Lindemann, and Joaquim Insley Pacheco, among others, as well as lithographic drawings based on photos. According to Kossoy, it can be considered the final piece of publicity for Brazil produced by the imperial government as it entered into decline, given that the album was published less than a year before the Proclamation of the Republic of Brazil. For more details on the photographs included in Álbum de vues du Brésil, see Boris Kossoy, “A Construção do Nacional na Fotografia Brasileira: O Espelho Europeu,” in Realidades e Ficções na Trama Fotográfica (São Paulo: Ateliê, 2000), 73–126. ↩︎

9. For more information on Brazil’s participation in this event and the extensive use of photographs, see Maria Inez Turazzi, Poses e trejeitos: A fotografia e as exposições na era do espetáculo: 1839/1889 (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1995). ↩︎

10. On the lack of concern for the preservation of photography in Brazil among photographers, as well as the indifference of disciplines such as history and other social sciences to the study and preservation of historical photographs, see Boris Kossoy, Fotografia & História (São Paulo: Ateliê, 1989). This applies to many countries in Latin America. ↩︎

11. Kossoy, “A Construção do Nacional na Fotografia Brasileira,” 98. ↩︎

12. This panorama measures 14.6 by 121.5 centimeters. It is reproduced in Pedro Karp Vasquez, Fotógrafos Alemães no Brasil do Século XIX (San Pablo: Metalivros, 2000), 158–59. ↩︎

13. One of the photographs has large dimensions. It was taken by Mulock in four parts, and measures 17.6 by 139.4 centimeters, but its sharpness and level of detail are not particularly high, and it is in a poor state of preservation. This panoramic photo is currently held by the National Library of Brazil (ARC.35.7[3]) and is viewable online at https://brasilianafotografica.bn.gov.br/brasiliana/handle/20.500.12156.1/875. The other photograph, apparently taken in the same year, is much smaller in size, but for Gilberto Ferrez is “the sharpest and most perfect, never equaled” panoramic photograph taken from the coast of Salvador’s city center during the nineteenth century. The quality of the photograph is very good, offering total sharpness in all the buildings, allowing viewers to observe—up close and in great detail—the skyline of the city and its architecture in the mid-1800s. It was produced in three parts and measures 11.7 by 62.5 centimeters. It is reproduced in Gilberto Ferrez, Bahía: Velhas fotografias 1858–1900 (Salvador: Livraria Kosmos, 1988), 32–33. The differences in quality between the two images suggest that the equipment used by Mulock for each of them was probably very different. ↩︎

14. The photograph by an unknown maker measures 138.5 by 15.5 centimeters and is published in Ferrez, A fotografia no Brasil, 138–39. In 1875, Marc Ferrez was invited to join the Comissão Geológica do Império (Geological Commission of the Empire) as a photographer. In this context, he took important photographs of Bahia, including a photographic panorama in two parts. A copy is currently located in the collection of the Instituto Moreira Salles (museum locator numbers 007A5P4F04-014 and 007A5P4F04-015) and is published in Ferrez, Bahía, 132–33. The panorama by Gaensly was produced between 1873 and 1878. ↩︎

15. For more details on both images, see Hermann, “Landscape and Power.” ↩︎

16. The three-part panorama by Leuzinger is located at the Getty Research Institute, and a copy is also found in the National Library of Brazil, available online at https://objdigital.bn.br/objdigital2/acervo_digital/div_iconografia/icon72486/icon72486.htm. The painted panorama by Casanovas is located in the collection of the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, Brazil, and is also available online at https://acervos.ims.com.br/portals/#/detailpage/4294983067. ↩︎

17. For the specific case of the panoramas by Leuzinger, see Caroline Ivanski Langer, “Os primeiros olhares à modernidade do Rio de Janeiro: A fotografia do suíço Georges Leuzinger na segunda metade do século XIX,” Amerika 24 (July 2022), https://doi.org/10.4000/amerika.15697. ↩︎

18. Crary, Techniques of the Observer. ↩︎

19. Karp Vasquez, Fotógrafos Alemães no Brasil, 22. ↩︎

20. Boris Kossoy, Origens e expansão da fotografia no Brasil: Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1980), 57. ↩︎

21. Ferrez, A fotografia no Brasil, 15. ↩︎

22. Rosalind Krauss, Le photographique: Pour une théorie des écarts (Paris: Macula, 1990); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan Education, 1988); and Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), among many others. ↩︎

23. Solano-Roa, “Fotoramas,” 72. ↩︎

24. Kossoy, “A Construção do Nacional na Fotografia Brasileira,” 76. ↩︎

25. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 7. ↩︎

26. The item was acquired by the GRI in 2022 in California from a dealer based in the U.K. ↩︎

27. Krauss, Le photographique; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989); and Sekula, “Reading an Archive.” ↩︎