City boosters of nineteenth-century Berlin had their work cut out for them. When it became the capital of the new German Empire in 1871, Berlin was by reputation provincial and peripheral, known for its wide dusty streets, monotonous multistorey rental barracks and buttoned-up Prussian culture. It seemed to suffer by comparison to the larger European capitals its boosters wished to see as natural rivals – Paris, Vienna, London. Perhaps for that very reason, imperial Berlin's art and culture have often been overshadowed both by fin-de-siècle Europe's more glamorous urban centres and also by the more freewheeling Weimar-era metropolis it would become after World War I. In Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis, Miriam Paeslack makes a convincing case for attending more closely to this era of Berlin's history. Even before the tumults of the twentieth century, Berlin became known as a city whose rapid growth had unmoored it from any stable connection to its past in a way that could be alternately exhilarating and disorienting. Paeslack argues that photography helped construct the image of Berlin as a site of change, ‘both a witness of and collaborator with’ the modernizing city (p. xvi). Photographers also worked to reconstruct the city's relationship to its history in the midst of these changes, photographing both the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ Berlin.

Each of Paeslack's four chapters treats a specific mode of viewing the city through the photographer's lens: panoramas, architectural photography, photogrammetry that enabled the precise documentation of urban building, and painterly views of those fragments of old Berlin that remained. In each of these modes, photographers provided highly structured and selective ways of picturing the city. In the panorama, they used their medium to craft sweeping views, disengaging from the urban bustle and imposing coherence on the growing city's fragments. In the collaboration of photographer Ernst von Brauchitsch and city architect Ludwig Hoffmann, architectural photography framed new buildings as both monuments of progress and images of stability and urban professionalism. Through the innovations of Albrecht Meydenbauer and his Royal Prussian Photogrammetric Institute, photographers became integrated into the process of city building in a very immediate and pragmatic way – regulating building sites – while also generating images of the city in flux that Paeslack links to a longer history of ‘rubble photography’. Finally, art photographers collaborated in the invention of a picturesque urban past that seemed all the more valuable as it became harder to find.

Throughout each of these chapters, Paeslack maintains a balance between theory, larger narratives and specifics that is both informative and enjoyable. The book boasts a large number of well-explained images. Especially welcome is the occasional inclusion of comparative images from other cities and visual media. Though narrowly focused on the work of a small group of professional photographers working in Berlin, themes of competition and comparison inform and enrich Paeslack's analysis. Rivalries over size, infrastructure and importance structured global urban identities around 1900, and throughout her chapters Paeslack attends especially to comparisons with Paris and the United States. In so doing, she makes a case that historically Germans have often made themselves: that their capital city is best understood in comparison to the urban centres of the United States, with which it shares certain attributes of frontier culture and an atmosphere of permanent unsettled newness.

Constructing Imperial Berlin is a valuable contribution to the growing body of research on the intertwined histories of photography and the city, such as Catherine Clark's Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860–1970 (Oxford, 2018), which examines the evolution of the photograph as documentation and evocation of the historical city. Others, including Anna Ross, have argued that photographs of urban transformation provided concrete images of progress that provided a sense of celebration and dynamism in a changing environment. One of the virtues of Paeslack's account within this body of literature is that, instead of presenting one understanding of photography's place in the city, it includes these different aspects of the practice of urban photography in Berlin side-by-side, as photographers traced the skyline, celebrated the new and composed careful views of urban poverty and history. The result is to place the focus on the diverse uses of photography as a technology, rather than the construction of a particular understanding of the city. In a way that might feel dissatisfying to readers looking for grander narratives, Paeslack resists any simple conclusion about what either photography or Berlin was in this era. What all these different ways of using photographic technology to construct the city image add up to is a landscape of fragments – productive of fruitful comparisons and true to the history of both the medium and the subject but, in the end, as elusive and changeable as Berlin itself.