Even those who know noth­ing else about Istan­bul know that it used to be called Con­stan­tino­ple. The offi­cial renam­ing hap­pened in 1930, mean­ing that the pho­tographs you see here, all of which date from around 1890, were tak­en, strict­ly speak­ing, not in Istan­bul but Con­stan­tino­ple. But under any name, and despite all the oth­er changes that have occurred over the past 130 years, the Turk­ish metrop­o­lis on the Bospho­rus remains rec­og­niz­able as the gate­way between East and West it has been through­out record­ed his­to­ry. This is thanks in part to its old­est land­marks, above all the cathe­dral-turned-mosque-turned-muse­um known as Hagia Sophia, pic­tured above.

In the 1890s Hagia Sophia was still a mosque, and as we recent­ly post­ed here, it has just this year become one again. But as a his­tor­i­cal­ly rich struc­ture even by the stan­dards of such a his­tor­i­cal­ly rich city, it will no doubt remain Istan­bul’s prime tourist attrac­tion in the 2020s, much as it must have been in the 19th cen­tu­ry.

For those who could­n’t make the trip in those days — or who could make the trip and want­ed to bring home sou­venirs that could con­vey as rich­ly as pos­si­ble what they’d seen on their trav­els — there were Pho­tocrom prints. Though not tech­ni­cal­ly a col­or pho­tog­ra­phy process, Pho­tocrom could pro­duce fair­ly con­vinc­ing images by apply­ing col­or to black-and-white pic­tures.

Hence Pho­tocrom’s use in cap­tur­ing vis­tas from the great Euro­pean cities, includ­ing Rome, Venice, and Paris, all pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Pho­tocrom prints, explains the Library of Con­gress’ web site, “are ink-based images pro­duced through ‘the direct pho­to­graph­ic trans­fer of an orig­i­nal neg­a­tive onto litho and chro­mo­graph­ic print­ing plates,’ ” a tech­nol­o­gy that allowed for the mass pro­duc­tion of images that could then be wide­ly dis­trib­uted. Thanks to the ven­tures of licensees like the Detroit Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny, those on the oth­er side of the world could behold a city like Istan­bul — or rather Con­stan­tino­ple — through what looked “decep­tive­ly like col­or pho­tographs.”

The sub­jects of these prints, all of which you can view and down­load at the Library of Con­gress’ online archive, include not just Hagia Sophia but the foun­tain of Sul­tan Ahmed, Top­ka­ki Palace’s impe­r­i­al gate, and the Gala­ta Bridge (for which Leonar­do da Vin­ci him­self once sub­mit­ted a design). Oth­er pic­tures depict the city’s street life with views of the Eminönü bazaar as well as bar­bers and cooks ply­ing their trade in the open air. The col­ors and con­trasts of the Pho­tocrom process gives all of them a sense of real­i­ty more vivid, in a way, than real­i­ty itself — but as those who’ve been there know, the real­i­ty of Istan­bul is vivid enough for any­body.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Down­load Thou­sands of Ottoman-Era Pho­tographs That Have Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

An Intro­duc­tion to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Muse­um, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

Rome Comes to Life in Pho­tochrom Col­or Pho­tos Tak­en in 1890: The Colos­se­um, Tre­vi Foun­tain & More

Venice in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images 125 Years Ago: The Rial­to Bridge, St. Mark’s Basil­i­ca, Doge’s Palace & More

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

In her 1938 essay “Three Guineas,” Vir­ginia Woolf won­dered “whether when we look at the same pho­tographs we feel the same things.” Woolf half-hoped that gris­ly images of the dead from the Span­ish Civ­il War might help put an end to the spread­ing glob­al con­flict. She rec­og­nized, writes Susan Son­tag in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, photography’s abil­i­ty “to viv­i­fy the con­dem­na­tion of war” and to “bring home, for a spell, a por­tion of its real­i­ty to those who have no expe­ri­ence of war at all.”

Math­ew Brady, the man cred­it­ed as the “father of pho­to­jour­nal­ism,” had no such lofty ambi­tions at the begin­ning of the Civ­il War. At first, he offered to pho­to­graph sol­diers before they left for the bat­tle­field, to pre­serve their pre-war image for pos­ter­i­ty should they not return. (He cyn­i­cal­ly adver­tised his ser­vices with the line, “You can­not tell how soon it may be too late.”) Brady was already a suc­cess­ful pho­tog­ra­ph­er and had tak­en por­traits of Abra­ham Lin­coln, Andrew Jack­son, Daniel Web­ster, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Hav­ing stud­ied under Samuel Morse, who brought the daguerreo­type tech­nique to the U.S., Brady opened his first stu­dio in New York in 1844 and became high­ly sought after. He might have safe­ly wait­ed out the war in the city, oper­at­ing a thriv­ing busi­ness, but, as he remem­bered lat­er, “I had to go. A spir­it in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.” Brady took his peti­tion all the way to Lin­coln, who approved it on the con­di­tion that Brady finance the doc­u­men­ta­tion him­self. “At his own expense,” notes the Amer­i­can Bat­tle­field Trust, “he orga­nized a group of pho­tog­ra­phers and staff to fol­low the troops as the first field-pho­tog­ra­phers.”

Soon after, “in 1862, Brady shocked the nation when he dis­played the first pho­tographs of the car­nage of the war in his New York Stu­dio in an exhib­it enti­tled ‘The Dead of Anti­etam.’ These images, pho­tographed by Alexan­der Gard­ner and James F. Gib­son, were the first to pic­ture a bat­tle­field before the dead had been removed and the first to be dis­trib­uted to a mass pub­lic.” The New York Times respond­ed as Woolf would sev­en­ty-six years lat­er, writ­ing of the pho­tos:

Mr. Brady has done some­thing to bring home to us the ter­ri­ble real­i­ty and earnest­ness of war. If he has not brought bod­ies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done some­thing very like it.

Shocked the nation may have been, but the war dragged on three more years. Brady and his team not only pho­tographed the dead—they cap­tured every­thing from hot-air bal­loons to pon­toon bridges to breast­works to win­ter huts and wag­on trains. Brady went bank­rupt fund­ing the mak­ing of over 10,000 plates, many of them har­row­ing depic­tions of the war’s bru­tal­i­ty, before the U.S. gov­ern­ment final­ly bought them for $25,000.

The Pub­lic Domain Review has anoth­er har­row­ing col­lec­tion of Brady’s daguerreo­types—por­traits he took before the war that have decayed and dis­tort­ed, as have a great many of Brady’s pho­tos of the war dead. These images “were extreme­ly sen­si­tive to scratch­es, dust, hair, etc, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the rub­bing of the glass cov­er if they glue hold­ing it in place dete­ri­o­rat­ed.” Despite pho­tog­ra­phers’ promis­es to the con­trary, “this fix­ing” of the image for pos­ter­i­ty “was far from per­ma­nent.” See more of Brady’s Civ­il War pho­tographs at the Nation­al Archives.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of the U.S. Civ­il War Visu­al­ized Month by Month and State by State, in an Info­graph­ic from 1897

Eerie 19th Cen­tu­ry Pho­tographs of Ghosts: See Images from the Long, Strange Tra­di­tion of “Spir­it Pho­tog­ra­phy”

The Civ­il War & Recon­struc­tion: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness