Gezicht op het meer van Misurina in de Dolomieten, Italië before 1878

This photograph of Lake Misurina in the Dolomites, Italy, was taken by Eugène Goblet d'Alviella sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It's part of a broader cultural phenomenon: the rise of tourism and the popularization of landscape photography. The image itself is a fascinating blend of the natural and the constructed. The lake and mountains are presented in a way that emphasizes their sublime beauty, yet the photograph is also a commodity, designed to be consumed by tourists and disseminated through publications. Consider how the rise of tourism in the late 19th century shaped the way people perceived and interacted with the natural world. Was this landscape photography simply a reflection of that trend, or did it actively contribute to the commodification of nature? To understand this image better, we might research the history of tourism in the Dolomites, the development of photography as a commercial enterprise, and the artistic conventions that shaped landscape photography at the time. Art history is, after all, a social history.