ABSTRACT
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. In 1871 the large newspapers illustrated their coverage of the Paris Commune with wood-engravings executed by craftsmen after the drawings of artists present in Paris, who sent out their work from the besieged city either by balloon or through the lines of the troops surrounding the city. Photographs had been taken of ruined buildings during the Franco-Prussian War, but their function was rather different from the Commune ruins.
