Record Pictures, published by SteidlMACK, gathers historical photographs from the archive of the Institution of Civil Engineers and places them within a longer history of technical image-making. The book’s subject is not simply engineering construction, but the visual system developed to document it: before photography, civil engineers commissioned topographic artists to record projects in progress, combining the clarity and detail of technical drawing with the conventions of seventeenth-century Dutch topographical landscape. When photography emerged, its capacity for precise, objective, relatively inexpensive recording made it an immediate instrument of industry.

Spanning seventy-five years from the mid-nineteenth century, the selection extends across Europe, Africa, Australasia, the Far East and Latin America. It includes previously unpublished examples drawn from what the publisher describes as arguably Britain’s finest collection of this material. Read together, these images occupy a productive space between document, survey and landscape photograph. Their purpose was scientific rather than artistic, yet their attention to terrain, structures and changing worksites gives them a visual intelligence that exceeds their administrative function.

Michael Collins contributes the introductory essay and is credited in the editorial record as author and editor; the historical photographs come from the ICE archive, and the original photographers are not enumerated in the available credit. Collins argues that the principles of the record picture remain active in contemporary practice, now taken up by artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher and Thomas Struth. For collectors, the book’s significance lies in this carefully framed recovery: it connects industrial history, photographic practice and the genealogy of contemporary landscape, while bringing together images that have not previously been widely available in book form.