The Earliest Photographs of Prague 1850-1870 - Kateřina Bečková

Product detailed description

Historical photographs of Prague are used as illustrative and documentary material in many publications and their selections or editions are among the most popular on the book market. However, the book The Oldest Photographs of Prague has set a higher goal. It does not aim at the sentiment of readers or the nostalgia of bygone times, the subject of research has become photography itself and the circumstances of its origin. The authors of the book decided to systematically capture the widest possible range of photographic production of the oldest period, including its peculiarities and a large number of interesting images, which have never been included in popularization selections. Only in the breadth of the overall view is it possible to understand how the technical medium of photography developed in its beginnings and what Prague was like at the time when its first images were created. The curators of three Prague public collections of historical photographs, the Museum of the Capital City of Prague, the Archives of the Capital City of Prague and the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic joined forces to fulfill this publishing intention in cooperation with other institutions from Prague and Vienna. The result of several years of work has become a monumental professional pictorial publication, which shows more than 700 images of Prague taken in the first twenty years of the existence of photography. The text passages introduce the reader to the context of the beginnings of photography, describe the pioneering efforts of the first photographers and Prague, which they decided to photograph. The pictorial part, which contains reproductions of images in topographical order, is accompanied by a catalog of collected photographs with basic authorial and technical data. At the end of the book, the reader will find clear medallions of photographers supplemented by knowledge from the latest archival research, a glossary of technical terms, an extensive list of bibliographies and indexes. The bilingual, Czech-English book has the ambition to become the basic title of its field and an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the history of photography both in Prague and in the Central European region.