Missing photographs of the existing drawings. Where are they?

Very often we have to deal with 19th century drawings similar to the below-linked examples:


Until 03/04/1880, magazines and newspapers were publishing drawings instead of photographs. Apparently, they had no choice, because there was no technology allowing to publish actual photographs. And if we were to believe the U.S. Library of Congress - prior to 1880 - newspapers had an army of sketch artists running around and producing various illustrations.
  • The first photograph published in an American newspaper - actually a photomechanical reproduction of a photograph - appeared in the Daily Graphic on March 4, 1880.
  • Before that time it was common practice for American editors to enlist artists to sketch and report on news events, from steamboat explosions to the battles of the Civil War.
  • It was not until 1919, with the launching of New York's Illustrated Daily News, that American newspapers began to feature photographs routinely.
  • The lighter cameras and "faster" lenses introduced in the 1920s brought about a revolution in news photography, ushering in the age of photojournalism.
Well... it sure looks like they were real busy sketching things, that's for sure. It also looks like many of their sketches (if not all) had a real photograph for a twin.

1864
Grue du Viaduc
A crane in the port of Brest, France, engraving from L'Illustration, Journal Universel, No 121...jpg

Source - Source

1863
The Russian Atlantic Squadron Command
russian_sailors_ny-xz.jpg


I see only two possible explanations of this:
  • 1. Artists had to manually reproduce photographs, because there was no technology to print actual photographs
    • If that was the case, where are the thousands of missing photographs represented by the thousands of existing sketches?
  • 2. There was a specific sinister reason to show us sketches instead of the actual photographs.


KD: Looks like there could be tons of amazing/revealing photographs we have not seen yet. Some definitely did not make it through the wheels of time and censorship, while others are being kept in private collections. From time to time, such previously unknown photographs pop up on our radar through Sotheby's, eBay and other channels. Here is one example.
As far as this small article goes... if you run into a 19th century photograph, represented by a 19th century drawing, please share what you've got. I will put them side by side like I did with the images above. This could serve as a tool to demonstrate that many drawings did represent real things.
  • Wouldn't it be cool to find a photograph used to sketch something similar to the below 1882 aircraft?
 
Take out the Norman Rockwellian characters and I think this is a contender. The characters appear to be composites, they don't match the contrast of the rest of the image (i.e. the missing photograph). This is Crystal Palace, New York, in 1854.

Elisha_OTIS_1854.jpg

Crystal Palace in New York looked quite amazing. Quite a shame that it caught fire.

crystal_palace_ny.jpeg

Burning_of_the_New_York_Crystal_Palace,_on_Tuesday_Oct._5th,_1858._During_its_occupation_for_t...jpg
 
Crystal Palace in New York
They built a replica in Amsterdam with photo's but these photo's plus story are even more disturbing
off course this one burnt down too.
There was a specific sinister reason
I even find vague black and white photo's of events or buildings in the 80's.

In 1987 something my dad had a really Nice canon EOS camera and I had this pocket camera all in color.
I have color pictures of myself in 1973 too.
 
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This could serve as a tool to demonstrate that many drawings did represent real things.
I think they did. Line-based representations (drawings or woodcuts, see below) were made to render complex shadows and greys from a photograph into affordable mass-printable black and white. Please excuse me quoting Wikipedia on this:
“While there were earlier mechanical printing processes that could imitate the tone and subtle details of a photograph, most notably the Woodburytype, expense and practicality prohibited their being used in mass commercial printing that used relief printing.

“Previously most newspaper pictures were woodcuts or wood-engravings made from hand-carved blocks of wood that, while they were often copied from photographs, they more resemble hand drawn sketches. Commercial printers wanted a practical way to realistically reproduce photographs onto the printed page, but most common mechanical printing processes can only print areas of ink or leave blank areas on the paper and not a photographic range of tones; only black (or coloured) ink, or nothing. The half-tone process overcame these limitations and became the staple of the book, newspaper and other periodical industry.”

Whatever high-end tech was actually available at the time, making a newspaper the masses could afford, or a print that could be easily reproduced in a book, probably made more sense done in black ink only.

I have personal experience with needing to turn photos into something which can be printed using just one ink: one of my earliest jobs used a black & white photocopier for leaflets, quite a while after desktop publishing & photo-quality home printing was available, because it was simpler, and the outcome was disposable, not worth wasting time or money on. We had a program on the office’s desktop PC which rendered any photo into halftone dots, and we used it nearly every day. The end result wasn’t unpleasant to look at (just like the line renderings of old photos), so upgrading wasn’t a priority.

dotty.jpeg

To my mind, this makes it more likely than not that original photographs existed.
 
I think it's easier to pass a light skinned colored person for white once you sketch it and remove color. If someone is colored in any shade, sketch the picture and make them white. I have nothing against white people but it's obvious history has been rewritten/hidden. I believe it's in the bible if you can decode it.
 
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