The recording through photography of all cities is increasingly valued, not only by historians and local historical groups, but also by all of us who recognize the dramatic ways in which cities are reshaped constantly, through architectural imagination and blunder; local planning decisions and disasters; and the ravages of time, fire and weather. The city of New Orleans has lived through more than most. Burned down several times, it was brutally occupied in 1866, the first year of the Civil War; has been hit by many a hurricane, tornado and flood; and not surprisingly has been the subject of many photographic, fictional and non-fiction publications. Since the hurricanes of its more recent years, the city has been the focus of many studies, and photographs of its historic districts, buildings and landmarks have mushroomed. There is now a major literature of photographic and written accounts of the transformations caused within the city by the hurricanes of 2005 (Katrina and Rita) and 2008 (Gustav).

Given the fragility and accidental or enforced loss of many parts of this place, most precious of all are the collections of photographs and illustrations of the elegant nineteenth- to early twentieth-century city – from Edwin L. Jewell's Jewell's Crescent City Illustrated (1873) and the photographs of George François Mugnier to the much-reproduced images of the prostitutes of Storyville by photographer E. J. Bellocq (whose photographs of other parts of the city have been somewhat overlooked). One of the most picturesque cities in the United States, New Orleans architecture bears traces of the city's various colonizations, by the French and Spanish mainly (though most of its “French” architecture was burned down and replaced by Spanish and American buildings), and it is still one of the most Europeanized and celebrated cities on the continent, containing some of the nation's oldest buildings. Its relationships with Europe, especially France, have remained culturally (though less so commercially) strong through the centuries, and following the disgraceful neglect by George W. Bush's government following Hurricane Katrina, were valued ever more positively. France offered generous financial and cultural support to the city in the days and months following the disaster, and – in a wonderful reference back to the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon – “Chirac, buy us back!” became a sardonic rallying cry of the 2006 Mardi Gras processions.

Apart from Charleston and Atlanta, New Orleans is said to have suffered more from the Civil War than any American city, both in terms of demolished buildings and also the loss of a thriving sugar and cotton commercial sector. The Confederacy's largest city, and the country's second port, was reduced to a subdued occupied backwater only one year into the conflict. John W. De Forest wrote, “Who would have believed that prosperous, gay, bragging New Orleans would come to such grief and poverty! … Business gone, money gone, population gone!” (Zante, 11). Occupied by a brutal conquering army throughout the war and after, led by the notorious General “Beast” Butler (whose dismissal of uncooperative women as prostitutes led to international as well as local outrage), the city was demoralized and humiliated in the immediate postbellum years. It was therefore crucial to rebuild its image as well as its infrastructure – and the World Exposition of 1867 in Paris was a great way to do so. The photographic campaign of commercial photographer Theodore Lilienthal was really an advertising promotion of the city – in Zante's words, “a virtually unparalleled visual document of citybuilding and civic boosterism in the Civil War and Reconstruction era” (7).

Sponsored by the city itself, Lilienthal produced 150 large albumen prints in luxurious portfolios, called La Nouvelle Orléans et ses environs. They were a bright spot in a rather disappointing American display – undoubtedly badly affected by the timing of the Expo, just as the country was emerging from a damaging war between states. His photographs arrived in Paris late, fourteen weeks after the opening, so that many visitors and jurors missed them. But they were instantly admired (not least by the visiting Louisianians), and Lilienthal was awarded a bronze medal in a category of photographs “that impart a knowledge of various countries around the earth” (14). These were presented by Mayor Heath of New Orleans to Emperor Napoleon III at the Exposition's close, in recognition of the colonial and commercial ties between the two – and in hopes of reviving trade and business links the city had enjoyed before the war. Napoleon III responded very graciously, acknowledging the ties – of law, custom, language and commercial intercourse – that existed between his country and New Orleans, and thanking Heath fulsomely for the gift. These photographs have only recently emerged, exhibited (for the first time since the Expo) in New Orleans during 2000, and are now recognized as a major collection of nineteenth-century urban photography, as well as the first recorded municipally sponsored photographic survey of an American city.

The collection features many workplace views (of brewery, foundry and port occupations) – largely in order to demonstrate to prospective immigrant workers how attractive the city might be now the war was over and work was resuming. It represents New Orleans as a city of major manufacturing industry rather than the collection of artisanal workshops and small craftshops that it really was. Nevertheless, the photographer also showed a city very different from others in the Union, largely through its topographical exceptionalism that fascinated viewers: the way this busy, sophisticated city had reclaimed wetlands at the confluence of the Mississippi River, Bayou St. John, Lake Pontchartrain, and the marshes and swamps leading to the Gulf of Mexico, but was also frequently inundated by water, refuse and sewage that could not be adequately drained away because of its low-lying position. However, despite the praise lavished on these photographs, the hoped-for recruitment of new European labour and trading ships was not realized, and the main effect seems to have been to boost Orleanians' own self-image during the Reconstruction period.

It is interesting that Lilienthal was German; while French contributions to the cultural history of New Orleans are well documented, the German response is only beginning to be recognized (Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein's remarkable erotic antebellum novel The Mysteries of New Orleans is a further example). To the city's regret, Lilienthal had little influence on a desired white German immigration to the city, and it was to be another twenty years before New Orleans was to rise again as a prosperous and buoyant cultural and commercial city.

Van Zante's book is a fine tribute both to Lilienthal and to New Orleans. A comprehensive study of the Expo photographs, it also includes substantial chapters on the city itself and the photographer's practices and career as commercial photographer spanning the development of the art from daguerreotype to dry plate. There are sections on Lilienthal's city panoramas, his work as a stereo photographer, a chronology of his studio locations and a bibliographic essay. The 126 photographs themselves, finely reproduced, are accompanied by illuminating and fully referenced commentaries that position and contextualize each picture, offer architectural and sociological information about the subject and discuss the technical qualities of the shot. For instance, discussing a rather unprepossessing picture of “Firemen's Cemetery” (124–26), Zante informs us succinctly about the position of the city's main necropolis, the location of all other cemeteries and the reasons for above-ground burial (marshy soil lower than river level), the Egyptian design of the Cimetière de Pompiers (and debates about the suitability of such for Christian burial), the nature of the Cypress Grove gateway, and the stereographic composition, locating the subject in depth and bringing into frame foreground elements such as railroad tracks, shell road and drainage canal: “Many of Lilienthal's views appear to have this distance and detachment from their subject, which can also be a result of the sometimes exaggerated perspective characteristic of early wide-angle lenses.”

These photographs, and Zante's excellent framework of exegesis, remind us of the rich architectural, commercial, social and pictorial legacy of one of the world's most fascinating cities, and offer a poignant commentary on its troubled history. As the editor reminds us in his Introduction, New Orleans has been “shaped by disaster more than perhaps any other major American city” (8), and he suggests that the Katrina disaster of 2005 “brought New Orleans into a realm of memory and loss that recalled the historical record of Reconstruction, of Lilienthal's city of 1867.” Once again, he argues, there is a struggle “to reconcile the city of the past and the reconstructed city, in the shadow of an event that appears to have been even more catastrophic than the Civil War.” In this way, a book that appears on first encounter to be a collection of nineteenth-century photographs of a city emerges as something of considerably greater significance.