Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey

Abstract

In 1868, the little-known project manager and government surveyor Albrecht Meydenbauer (1834-1921) climbed to the top of the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin to shoot the first 360-degree photographic record of the city. In contrast to the idealistic, hyper-real clarity of a more famous painted panorama of Berlin made only 30 years before, Eduard Gaertner’s Panorama von Berlin, Meydenbauer’s photographic panorama is shaky, blurred, unstable. While Gaertner’s survey, painted with the aid of a camera obscura, is crisp, stiff and hyper-real, Meydenbauer’s, unsteady photographs betray the limits of his new technology. But it would not be long before Meydenbauer would find a way to overcome these deficiencies, continuing to experiment with film in the scientific recording of the city by using the photographic survey image – or photogram – to document important buildings for posterity. The still existent Meydenbauer archive in Waldstadt, Brandenburg, containing around 20,000 photographs of Berlin and its environs, is an example of one of the earliest uses of architectural photography to document and preserve urban monuments. However, these photographs were never intended as just visual records. Instead, they attest to the potential of the photograph to act not just a representational device, but also a generator of a newly projected order in the real spaces of the city. In short, Meydenbauer would begin to use photography to realise an ambition that Leon Battista Alberti could have only dreamed of when he first attempted to survey the city of Rome in the 1440s by “measuring with sight”: The ambition of measuring and ordering the world with nothing but a recording device and a point of view.