Henry Adams did not have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 1900s. On the contrary, he showed himself open to many innovations that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought. Photography was one of them. The cathedrals, in their picturesqueness, have been camera-ready since long before the devices were invented, yet once available, the manners changed in which these churches were seen, studied, and understood. The study of the Middle Ages has never obligated professionals devoted to them to forswear the most modern gadgets or approaches. In fact, the opposite has held true from the beginning of medieval studies as a formal area of learned investigation. In the late nineteenth century, medievalists, like classicists, embraced cutting-edge research techniques. Editorial principles were only one of the newest widgets at their disposal. Beyond words, Adams’s book pivots decisively into the age of durable images on light-sensitive materials. In what is now the standard edition, the first page of the preface makes mention of a Kodak. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres methodically exploited the potential for the comparison of buildings in hard-to-reach locations that pictures made with photographic equipment accorded. By the same token, it gives signs that its author was transformed by the innovative ways of looking that arrived with the new technology.
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In swiveling intellectually in this direction, Adams had the advantage of acclaimed predecessors among the originators of art history as a formal discipline. John Ruskin gave a definitive mission statement for the incorporation of photography within scholarship. To do him justice, he issued repeated, often mutually contradictory pronouncements on the topic. In one passage that began by establishing a generic hierarchy of Gothic, he ended up elevating Notre-Dame of Paris above all other expressions of the style—and promptly called for image-based analysis to hone such observations. Consistent with this proclamation, he relied upon daguerreotypes in his research. Similarly, William Morris progressed in his own interests in photos by way of lantern slides and facsimiles. In due course, the great man wrote glowingly of the architecture in Amiens cathedral, in an article composed with the aid of snapshots.
Henry Adams had learned to take photographs already in the spring of 1872, in preparation for the journeys he and his wife would make on their extended honeymoon.
But it took a while, for reasons of both expense and convention, for the practice to percolate into his scholarship. For example, Lowell’s 1870 poem was accompanied by engravings and not photos. The two original private printings of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres are devoid of illustrations, apart from diagrams. In contrast, the 1913 reprint of the book that was overseen by Ralph Adams Cram exhibits mostly pictures cherry-picked for their utility in bringing home aspects of Gothic architecture. These images fulfill a documentary function. They are supposed to be direct records, without any intervention—no airbrushing.
Even in the private printings, many pages are studded with references that manifest the degree to which photos had displaced freehand drawings as a means of establishing a supposedly cold-eyed, firsthand, and experiential record of sights seen. Because of intimate circumstances in his life, Adams had good basis to be gruff about the art. Beyond the personal, he had intellectual objections. In fact, he developed what he called “photo-phobia” in reaction to what he regarded as inherent limitations and distortions in the medium, particularly as opposed to painting. Yet this stance of resistance did not keep him from exploiting the form for his own purposes, and even less to hamstringing others from doing so. For all his protestations, he was uniquely photocentric when compared with investigators from preceding generations.
In the nineteenth century, the discipline of historiography was fine-tuned as the numbers and stature of its practitioners burgeoned. In the refinement, archival research played an outsized role. As much as anyone, Adams perceived that personal archives of photographs had a one-of-a-kind value for facilitating recollection and evaluation as well as for helping in the hide-and-seek of historical investigation.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, the spreading use of plaster casts had begun to familiarize historians of art and architecture with the utility of working from copies, initially for the needs of instruction. Similarly, the proliferation of cameras and their products accustomed scholars to the advantages of such surrogates for the purposes
of comparison and the study of evolution. These inquirers developed and perfected their own kind of photosynthesis.
Adams casts Mont Saint Michel and Chartres guilefully as the travelogue of an imagined itinerary to Gothic sites. He makes his trip in the company of an unnamed
“niece.” This is his term for one of the companionable younger women who frequented him. Although many were in fact blood relations, others were not. To draw upon an old expression, they were kith and kin. In his pseudoavuncular stance, he assumes that such a purported relative will accompany him on his tour. Apart from a female escort, what is the womanly equivalent to a man who squires around a woman? Without fail, the niece is meant to carry a camera “and take interest in it, since she has nothing else, except her uncle, to interest her, and instances occur when she takes interest neither in the uncle nor in the journey.” In this gentle barb about the preference of his female companion for photographic hardware over all else, Adams may even intend a subtle contrast between women in the Middle Ages and in modernity. Photography supplies the acid test, by opposing the Virgin Mary and her resplendent stained glass to the supposed daughter of his sibling and the lens of her picture-taking rig.
In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the author takes portable machines with roll-film so much for granted that he twice employs “kodak” uncapitalized as a generic term.
The germ of this device was patented in 1881. Already by the 1890s, its convenience had changed the world every bit as much as cellphone cameras have in this century. Adams also brings home how photos have supplanted engravings as a medium of scholarly record. Personal accumulations and formal archives of photographs, including printed books with reproductions that individuals and libraries could acquire, in turn became essential tools for pursuing certain avenues of investigation, such as art and architectural history. Assembling holdings of pictures was immeasurably more practical for individuals, since collections of original objects were costly even for wealthy institutions. Researchers could readily secure all the facts, not just verbal but visual too.
In his work, Adams pushed ahead with his own amassing of images. He was driven by the belief that “photographs such as those of the Monuments Historiques answer all the just purposes of underground travel.” Furthermore, comparison of such pictures had won recognition as a discovery process. Potential readers of Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, in their guise as tourists who would visit the actual cathedrals he discusses, were expected to make the juxtaposition of images and realities a heuristic technique. By the end, he recommends having in hand photos and books of architectural history when touring Gothic cathedrals. Ultimately, systematic archives gained, in Adams’s eyes as well as in others’, a special cachet for the cognition and remembrance that they enabled.
In writing to his intimate friend Elizabeth Cameron, Adams commented on the quantity of photographs and on the eye-watering price tag for acquiring them that
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his personal collecting entailed. These efforts came above and beyond those called for to consult pictures compiled in conjunction with specific projects of other scholars and institutions. Over the past half century, hitherto-untapped resources made widely available through computing have shaken up the process of research and the provision of access to its results. So too in the corresponding decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a similar revolution caused radical transformations in the workings of scholarship as photography and other novel media for recording sights and sounds came into being.
On one level, Adams’s book masks its earnestness and bluffs at being a kind of light guidebook for his “nieces.” He assumes the posture of a convivially, albeit sometimes condescendingly, uncle-like cicerone, leading his young fellow Protestant Americans on a grand tour of the Catholic Middle Ages. One of his true nieces depicts, in a few quick verbal brushstrokes, a day at Chartres when he shares his prophet-like wisdom, knowledge, and enthusiasm. On another plane, and outside the privileged eddies of those nearest and dearest to him, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres could fulfill the principle of noblesse oblige—it could serve as an edification, enhancement, and enticement to the ever-larger bands of less wealthy readers whose peregrinations would take place mainly through print. They might not have the means to board transatlantic steamships and sail in staterooms or even the most modest berths to Europe, but they had access to visual glories such as Chartres through expanding media of communication. These other channels ranged from the humble postcard (see Fig. 1.34) through more sophisticated products such as the stereoscopic slide.
Photographs of sights were major constituents of armchair travel. Yet books were no less present than they had been in the first half of the century, when Henry Adams’s boyhood perusal of Sir Walter Scott’s novels molded his earliest images and impressions of the Middle Ages. In fact, economic and industrial advances assured that printed resources were available to a larger readership than ever before. For want of functional time machines, diachronic journeys have tended to necessitate immersion in texts. When primary works exist from the earlier culture under investigation, they make an unmatched starting point. Secondarily, writings from other cultures confer the benefits of comparison. The literature of scholarship constitutes a third textual corpus that can expand understanding of the past. Supplementing all three sorts of reading, Adams possessed knowledge and experience that he had earned outside the library, from travels abroad and from engagement with hosts of interlocutors and correspondents. The book of experience can be the most useful one on the shelf of life.
To some of Adams’s contemporaries, the hell-for-leather pace of development in their world was disheartening, even baleful. To others, it meant the opening of opportunities. To the wisest, it signified both. Yet does apparent change correspond to the real thing? The French have a saying that has become a bromide since its first documented use in 1849: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” which in English has become, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The thought corresponds, but something still gets lost in translation.
Fig. 1.34 Postcard depicting Chartres Cathedral (Versailles: A. Bourdier, ca. 1896–1912).