Coda: Pictures at an Exhibition

Abstract

Fleeting cities required fixation, if not in situ then in pictures. With the precipitous rise of the exposition medium after 1851 came a corresponding surge in pictorial representations of unimaginable scope and variety. These included not only sketches, engravings, oil paintings, billboard advertisements, diagrams and maps, but also photographs, stereoscopic cards, newsreels and films. Only a few years after the invention of photography, the Great Exhibition’s official report already contained more than 150 daguerreotype and calotype pictures taken both inside and outside the Crystal Palace. Brief films and newsreels, so-called actualités, were first featured 50 years later, at the Paris exposition of 1900. By the interwar period, moving images had become part and parcel of each such mega-event and were an integral element of the global exhibitionary system. Organizers, artists and journalists alike sought to fix and document, communicate and convey their experiences and impressions to a wider public. In order to remember and share these autobiographically momentous occasions, visitors invested in lavishly illustrated souvenir volumes and sent rapturous letters and picture postcards to friends and families at home, even if the visual accuracy of these tangible representations was always open to question.

An Weltausstellungen ist es ein eigenthümlicher Reiz, daß sie ein momentanes Centrum der Weltcultur bilden, daß die Arbeit der ganzen Welt sich, wie in einem Bilde, in diese enge Begrenzung zusammengezogen hat.

(Georg Simmel)¹