| Description |
Perhaps no other photographer of the Paris Commune has received as much art historical attention as Bruno Braquehais. Within this scholarship, he is heralded as unique, either framed as the dedicated photojournalist of the Commune or as the sole photographer sympathetic to the cause of the Commune. However, previous analysis of his photographs of the Commune has been inadequate, because it has failed to consider them in the context of the photographic album in which they appear. This thesis attempts to contest and expand this body of scholarship by analyzing Braquehais's photographs of the Commune not as isolated images, but instead as texts integrated into the album Siège de Paris. With reference to the touristic architectural photographs of Paris and Victorian travel photography of the periphery, I argue that Braquehais's photographs of the Commune exist in the visual lexicon of the travel photograph and situate their Communard subjects (and the Commune itself) as the Other. Importantly, the structure of the album and the visual strategies of the photographs themselves permit the bourgeois viewer to consume the album as a solely aesthetic object and as a way to assuage fear by asserting control over the dangerous Other. This thesis considers the politics behind the representation, production, and consumption of the Commune and the implications of its commodification. |
