Two plates, as made

Chicago

Photographic panorama beside street photograph. Do not treat them as the same kind of evidence.

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.

Open this plate alone

State Street, Chicago, 1893. Period photograph of the rebuilt commercial street. Underwood & Underwood / J. T. Jarvis issued a stereo of State Street in 1893 (LOC LCCN 96503107). This scan is a matching street view of that year.. Street photograph. — 1893·Chicago
State Street, Chicago
Period photograph of the rebuilt commercial street. Underwood & Underwood / J. T. Jarvis issued a stereo of State Street in 1893 (LOC LCCN 96503107). This scan is a matching street view of that year.
Street photograph

What this plate shows

State Street photographed looking along the commercial canyon: cable cars, wagons, packed sidewalks, masonry blocks with iron fronts. Twenty-two years after the fire. A camera on the rebuilt street. Not Flint’s lithograph of the city as drawn before, and not Barnard’s plate of the burnt district. This is what occupied the street afterward, that year.

Image type: Street photograph
Region: North America
Source: Wikimedia Commons scan of an 1893 photograph of State Street, Chicago. Related: Library of Congress stereo 1s12691.
License: Public domain (U.S. publication, 1893).

Open this plate alone