Picturing the White City: Architectural Photography from the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, with its grand vision of Beaux-Arts urban design, set the architectural tone for America's ambitious cultural goals at the turn of the century.

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in America, Exposition planners directed the creation of a neo-classical "White City," constructed entirely of plaster on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago's Jackson Park. Millions visited what remains the largest world's fair to date. But the view most Americans saw in newspapers and magazines was captured by Charles Dudley Arnold, the official Exposition photographer whose work was reproduced worldwide.

Now a part of the McKim, Mead and White archive at Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Arnold's photographs are the focus of a centennial exhibition, Picturing the White city: Architectural Photography from the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893., featuring 47 large-scale platinum prints of the fair and more than two dozen smaller-scale prints of the buildings under construction. The exhibition also includes correspondence, drawings and promotional material from the Exposition; many of the items are being exhibited publicly for the first time.

The architecture of this Beaux-Arts urban vision seemed to validate America's claims to be a significant cultural power, according to Leila Whittemore, curator of the exhibition. But the architectural merits of the fair have long been debated. Even Louis Sullivan, one of the architects, believed it retarded the growth of a progressive American architecture. In spite of the critics, the grand vistas and Beaux-Arts harmony of the Exposition buildings, designed by architects such as Mckim, Mead and White; Richard Morris Hunt and C.B. Atwood, would spark subsequent urban planning across America over the next half century, including Daniel H. Burnham's 1906 master plan of Chicago.

Arnold, born in Canada, was a successful architectural photographer in New York City and Buffalo, N.Y., with a client list that included McKim, Mead and White. He was asked by Burnham, the Exposition's Director of Construction, to document its construction from 1891 to 1893. Arnold received the exclusive franchise to market his photographs as official views of the World's Fair, images that helped to shape popular perceptions of the fair and to fix it in cultural memory.

"His photography demonstrates the careful building of a unified image for the 'White city,'" said Ms. Whittemore. "Today, of course, historians look more critically at this image, noting aspects of American culture which it repressed or excluded in its search for harmony. One hundred years after the event, Arnold's images continue to fuel this controversy and on their own merits to capture the imagination," she said.