In the Grand Tour, cathedrals provided the vantage points, as the names of Goethe, Wagner and Voltaire carved into the sandstone parapets at Strasbourg testify. A century earlier, Wenceslaus Hollar sketched a six-sheet prospect of Stuart London from the tower of what is now Southwark Cathedral. The altitude of the viewpoint was paramount, and the Church held a monopoly. When St Paul’s Cathedral was undergoing renovations in 1823, Thomas Hornor, a panorama entrepreneur, built himself a cabin on the scaffolding at the top and spent the summer sketching obsessively, ending up with over three hundred detailed drawings. When the Church’s superiority was undermined by capitalism, Southwark Cathedral’s primacy as the prime spot to look north over the Thames was superseded by the steam-powered Albion Mills of William Blake’s “dark and satanic” notoriety.

Like maps, cityscapes are both emblems and instruments of power; projections of the metropolis’ might. In a display case in the Museo Correr is Canaletto’s camera obscura. So accurate are his Venetian cityscapes that Italy’s Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate uses them to measure the tides. To what extent these cityscapes are the product of the camera obscura supplemented or not by other compositional and surveying methods is unclear. To verify the precision of their sketches, nineteenth century archaeologists would state the focal length of the lens used with their camera for each particular drawing of a topographical or architectural vista, an assertion of objectivity that accompanied their Orientalism.

Eadweard Muybridge’s peerless panoramas of San Francisco were photographed from a Central Pacific Railroad magnate’s mansion. The plutocrat’s view from the penthouse is a fundamental part of its status. Every year in London, the charity Open House arranges access to places that are normally closed to the public. Typically, a group will take the lift to the top of a new skyscraper, feign a cursory appreciation of the architecture, and then rush to the windows to admire the view. When the London cityscapes by Michael Collins were exhibited in City Hall in 2009, by the end of each day their glass was spotted with the fingerprints left by viewers pointing out places of personal significance.

Cities are mutating bodies, an energy evident in the profusion of tower cranes, or in the blocks of masonry in Canaletto’s stonemason’s yard (1725). Muybridge’s last panorama of the most famous new city of earth, besides showing the grand homes and boulevards descending towards the bay and the harbour, included the teeming settlement, as dense as a shanty town, grouped around the waterfront, and the building site on Nob Hill. Taken on a series of thirteen photographic plates over the course of four to five hours, the incongruous shadows reveal the temporal sleight of hand in the still picture of that sunny day. Photography’s indexicality is a tight-lipped truth. A partial record is shown fully detailed. With their plethora of intricate detail, cityscapes are the ideal subject to exhibit photography’s unwavering stare at the large scale of the tableau. Palimpsests of the constructs in our histories, the strata of the eras evident within the successive urban reconstructions, traces of the overwhelming weight of Fernand Braudel’s longue durée.