The amalgamation of reason and emotion distinguishes Evans from other architectural photographers. Alfred Stieglitz, the leader of the Photo-Secession in New York, wrote of Evans, “He stands alone in architectural photography, and he is able to instill into pictures of this kind so much feeling, beauty, and poetry entitles him to be ranked with the leading pictorial photographers of the world.” Compared to previous architectural photos for restoration programs, Edouard Baldus’s Cloister of Saint-Trophime (Fig. 4), Arles, for instance, though both boasting indexical qualities with great realistic details, the former one is creating art rather than merely recording the scene, because it does not combine several negatives in order to present …show more content…
In his Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Ruskin states that the medieval craftsmanship quality of the medieval cathedrals suggests the morally superior way of life in the medieval era. In the age of fast-paced urbanization and technological change, he appealed for a return to a bucolic life. By creating the medieval architectural photos, Evans preserved the bucolic landscape that people had gradually lost connection to. He also advocated the establishment of a national archive of cathedral photos and maintained, “If we valued out great architecture as we ought, we should not only have photographic records to scale, of all the important details, etc., but we should also have every aspect of our great buildings, in general and in particular, from the point of view of beauty; so that the present appearance, in the best conditions of lighting, might be on record for both our current delight and the inestimable joy of our descendants, when these architectural treasures are gone