Getty Museum

Study of Rocks

Date

about 1845

Medium

Daguerreotype

Culture

French

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Jagged rocks jut out toward the viewer, filling the frame with a sense of the powerful forces that formed them. Were they the result of ancient biblical catastrophes such as earthquakes and floods, or of slow evolutionary forces, such as glacial retreating? In the 1800s, two main schools of thought emerged around the question of how these landforms were created. This fractured rock formation may have been photographed for scientific study to provide evidence for the discussion.

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