This paper is an attempt to juxtapose a variety of ways in which a city's history can be portrayed by working through various forms through which the history of Bristol has been envisioned. First, I hope to use the concept of the palimpsest from historical geography as a stage on which other ways of portraying the city can be interrogated. These other envisionings I subsequently stage are the visions bound up in touristic sights, that is in the pictures used in and created by heritage displays; and the ‘dispersed memory’ of archive pictures, principally the Reece Winstone archive of Bristol By studying the connections and disjunctures in this triptych I hope to suggest the importance and complexity of technologies used to envisage the city. I try to suggest that pictures of the city cannot be used as naive documents to illustrate the passage of time—despite how often they are used to do this. Different senses of historicity are manufactured through the space—times created by different processes of envisioning the city. I suggest the interlinkage of these technologies echoes through a specifically urban ‘picturesque’ photography that coalesces a sensitivity to the passage of time with a detailed cognisance of the city in visual depictions of Bristol.
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