Proving Preservation: Boston Subway Construction Photography, 1894–1897

While ostensibly depicting reality, documentary photography necessarily showcases a constructed version of it. In the nineteenth century, photographers and their sponsors already understood this quality and used photographs to convey prescribed truth. Official photographic documentation of the construction of America's first subway, in Boston, Massachusetts, provides a case study of the uses of images as both an integral tool of the preservation movement and proof of successful preservation. Vociferous defenders of beloved local landmarks, including Boston Common, Boston Public Garden, and neighboring buildings, convinced lawmakers to undertake a massive and hotly contested engineering project. Even this supposed preservation plan required some disruption of the existing environs, and the Boston Transit Commission turned to photography to achieve two simultaneous goals. Some 200,000 photographs were created over the course of sixty-five years to record the construction of Boston's transit system. While only a fraction of these survive today, principally at Historic New England, and most are unattributed to individual photographers, they allow the viewer to construct a cohesive narrative. The photographs do record construction, but more importantly they convey messages by the commission to convince detractors, prove preservation efforts, and demonstrate success. Viewed this way, the images of the commission represent the methodological intersection of photography and preservation when both were still in development. (Author abstract)