Photographic views of railroads: recording public works in nineteenth-century Brazil

Abstract This article analyzes how railway engineering was connected to the production of photographs in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil. The hypothesis is that growing demands related to the execution of projects and new cartographic knowledge required more visual records, which was supplied and leveraged with the emergence of photographic techniques. Data was collected on photographic records of railroads taken in Brazil after the 1850s to analyze the characteristics of these images. This analysis was further extended in a series of photographs by Marc Ferrez, since this collection contains the most views of railways currently accessible, permitting the recognition of patterns in these images to identify them as “photographic project records.”