‘Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally in Photography’: William J. Stillman and the Acropolis in Word and Image

In 1870, the American William J. Stillman ' diplomat, journalist, painter and photographer ' published an album of autotypes entitled The Acropolis of Athens: Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally in Photography. (A second version of the publication would follow in'. ) For a newcomer to the medium, Stillman's images were remarkable for their poise and clarity. But where the photographs were 'clear and lively', to borrow John Szarkowski's phrase, the brief text which accompanied each was, by comparison, laborious and lifeless. Facing each other across each double-spread, text and image seemed to speak in completely different registers, in a manner which presaged many subsequent uses of similar material, most famously Vers Une Architecture. This paper will explore the relationship between those two registers in terms of Stillman's intentions, in terms of contemporary ideas on the depiction of architecture and in terms of the modes of publication will followed. Stillman was deeply involved in contemporary discussions of artistic depiction and its relationship to the truth of experience. In his critique of Ruskin's essay on Turner's Slave Ship, Stillman contends that Ruskin, in pressing his claims for the painting's objective validity, 'left out of all consideration the subjective transformation of natural truth which is the basis of art.' For Stillman, the vivid rendering of the experience of the world depended, ultimately, on artistic subjectivity. Conceding the power of Ruskin's 'word picture' (as he terms it), he is nonetheless uneasy with its conflation of the stable, reliable viewpoint offered by words and the visceral, mutable view by images. Thus, although primarily known for his vivid writing, in The Acropolis of Athens, Stillman used the images to communicate experience, while the words stuck close to the facts.