Two plates, as made
Chicago
Photographic panorama beside bird's-eye illustration / lithograph. Do not treat them as the same kind of evidence.
1871·Chicago
Chicago after the fire
Attributed to George N. Barnard
Photographic panorama
What this plate shows
A wide photographic plate of the burnt district: chimneys, rubble, a horizon of ruin. This is a camera record after 8–10 October 1871. Set it beside Davis’s or Flint’s drawn ‘before’ views. One is an illustration of what was imagined as standing. This is what the lens found after.
- Image type
- Photographic panorama
- Source
- Google Art Project / Wikimedia; panoramic photograph of the burnt district.
- License
- Public domain.
1872·Chicago
The City of Chicago as it was before the great conflagration
W. Flint
Bird's-eye illustration / lithograph
What this plate shows
A lithographic bird’s-eye of Chicago drawn as it stood before 8–10 October 1871, issued the following year. River, rail, grain elevators, a dense grid to the lake. An imagined high viewpoint of a city already gone when the print was sold. Not a photograph.
- Image type
- Bird's-eye illustration / lithograph
- Source
- Library of Congress; Wikimedia scan of the 1872 lithograph.
- License
- Public domain.