Nejstarší fotografie Prahy 1850-1870 / The Earliest Photographs of Prague 1850-1870 – Bečková Kateřina (2019)

Historical photographs of Prague are used as illustrative and documentary material in many publications, and their selections or editions are among the most popular on the book market. However, the book "The Oldest Photographs of Prague" has set a higher goal. It does not aim to evoke sentiment in readers or nostalgia for bygone times; instead, it examines photography itself and the circumstances of its creation. The authors of the book decided to systematically capture the widest possible spectrum of photographic production from the earliest period, including its peculiarities and a large number of interesting images that have never made it into popular selections. Only through a comprehensive perspective can one understand how the technical medium of photography developed in its early days and what Prague was like at the time when its first images were created. To fulfill this publishing intention, the curators of three Prague public collections of historical photographs—the Museum of the Capital City of Prague, the Archive of the Capital City of Prague, and the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences—joined forces with other institutions from Prague and Vienna. The result of several years of work is a monumental scholarly visual publication that showcases more than 700 images of Prague taken in the first twenty years of photography's existence. The textual passages...