| Summary: | Between the perfection of the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype processes in 1840 and
the International Exhibition of 1862, engineers commissioned portraits in these new and more
traditional mediums. These portraits and depictions of engineering represent the uncertain
, social position engineers occupied and the conflictual attitudes towards their work. To date,
there remain relatively few portraits, despite the fact that a number of engineers became
millionaires. That probably derives from the difficulty of depicting this new professional group
within existing artisitic conventions. Consequently some of the most striking visages of
individual engineers are in the early versions of the photographic medium suggesting the
engineer's implementation of technology and industrial method to impose a new reality, or
radically changed industrial environment, on contemporary society.
Similarly, the few academic pictures of engineering works betray difficulties with the
choice of appropriate pictorial typology and iconography. The majority of such representations
derive from picturesque topographical traditions reflecting the prepondrance of touristic
promotional books aimed at the rising middle class, (the members of which supported such
manifestations of technical and social progress). Popular admiration and anxiety about the
physical changes effected through engineering were more directly represented in the new
illustrated journals where iconographic innovation was feasible.
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