The Camera Against the Paris Commune
Year: 2021

In this chapter the author focuses on history’s first forensic deployment of the camera to illuminate the limits of photography’s democratisation in the period of the Second Empire in France. Photographers had experience of recording contemporary history under conditions similar to those which were to be encountered in the Paris Commune. Roger Fenton had been dispatched on an official mission to the Crimea in 1855 to provide visual proof that the British Government was not mismanaging the war. I