Andy Cavacco ’13 on Marguery

This podcast is part of Watson Conversations, a growing collection of podcasts produced by Wheaton students as part of Art History 298: Photography as Knowledge.

Emile Marguery
Lock and Dam Building Along the Seine
1892
Albumen Print

Purchased with the Kenneth C. and Louise McKeon Deemer ’33 Fund

Emile Marguery’s photograph documents the construction of a lock on the Seine River, but unlike other 19th-century photographs of similar subjects, it does not celebrate it as a modern feat of engineering.

Andy Cavacco ’13 discusses Marguery’s emphasis on the dangerous nature of the work being done. He reads the photograph’s composition as capturing both the social and physical strata of the modern city.

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