Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject 9780271089287

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disillusioned

d is il lus i o n e d Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject

jordan bear

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-​Publication Data Bear, Jordan, author. Disillusioned : Victorian photography and the discerning subject / Jordan Bear.   pages  cm Summary: “Examines how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. Integrates images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework by locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception”—​Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-06501-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Trick photography—​Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Photography—​Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. tr148.B43 2015 771—​dc23 2014031329 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences. Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

For my parents, with love

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations   ix Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction: The History of Photography and the Problem of Knowledge   1

one

See for Yourself: Visual Discernment and Photography’s Appearance   11

two

Shadowy Organization: Combination Photography, Illusion, and Conspiracy   32

three Same Time Tomorrow: Serial Photographs and the Structure of Industrial Vision   53 four

Hand in Hand: Gender and Collaboration in Victorian Photography   80

five

Signature Style: Francis Frith and the Rise of Corporate Photographic Authorship   104

six

Indistinct Relics: Discerning the Origins of Photography   119

seven The Limits of Looking: The Tiny, Distant, and Rapid Subjects of Photography   131

Conclusion: “Normal” Photography: The Legacy of a History   150 Notes  163 Bibliography  179 Index  191

i l l u s t r a t i o n s

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“Caleidoscope-​Mania; or, the Natives Astonished.” © The Trustees of the British Museum.   13 Thaumatrope depicting Napoleon Bonaparte, recto and verso views, c. 1820s. Photo: Stéphane Dabrowski © La Cinémathèque Française (Paris).   17 The Habit Makes the Man. The Ranks and Dignities of British Society, c. 1820s. Twenty-​five faceless costume cards that fit over card with figure of beggar, transforming him into various British dignitaries. Cards hand-​drawn and colored in pen and ink, pencil, and watercolor. Yale Center for British Art.  19 Theodore Lane, Automaton Exhibition, Gothic Hall, Haymarket, 1826. Etching and aquatint. © The Trustees of the British Museum.  22 That Exquisite Little Automaton Artist. Called the Corinthian Maid, c. 1830. Handbill. National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield.  23 William Chester Walker, after Sir Humphry Davy, London Mechanics’ Institute, Southampton Buildings, Holborn: the Interior of the Laboratory, in a Cellar, 1828. Wood engraving. Wellcome Library, London.  25

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Great Hall of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, c. 1840s. Lithograph. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.  26 Poster listing the offerings of the Polytechnic Institution, c. 1840. Reproduced with the permission of the University of Westminster Archive.  28 Richard Beard’s trade card for his photographic studio at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London, c. 1840. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.  29 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life, 1857. Albumen print. Credit: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, New York.   34 Detail of Figure 10.  35 Detail of Figure 10.  35 William Spooner, The Cottage of Content; or, Right Roads and Wrong Ways, 1848. Lithograph, colored by hand, mounted on linen. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.  38 Cover, [James Taylor Staton], Bobby Shuttle and his Woife Sayroh’s Visit to Manchester un-th Greight Hert Treasures Palace, Owd-Traffort. Written for Bobby

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Hissel by th’ Hedditur oth’ “Bowton Luminary,” 1857. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.  40 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Study for The Two Ways of Life, 1857. Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.   43 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Study for The Two Ways of Life, 1857. Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.   44 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Did She? c. 1860. Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.  45 “Second Sight” trick of Jean-​ Eugène Robert-​Houdin, c. 1852. Engraving. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.   46 Henry Peach Robinson, Red Riding Hood, 1858. Albumen print. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   60 Henry Peach Robinson, Red Riding Hood, 1858. Albumen print. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   61 Henry Peach Robinson, Red Riding Hood, 1858. Albumen print. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   62 W. Forrest, Taxidermy specimen of a wolf. From Captain Thomas Brown, The Taxidermist’s Manual; or, the Art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History (London: A. Fullarton, 1853). Courtesy of

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Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.   64 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, A Young Naturalist, c. 1860. Albumen print. © NMPFT / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   65 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Flycatcher, c. 1860. Albumen print. © NMPFT / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   66 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Man Aiming Rifle, c. 1860. Albumen print. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.   67 Étienne-​Jules Marey’s photographic gun. Engraving. The World of Wonders (London: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1883). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.   68 Page from the index books of the Nadar Atelier, Hélène Petit dans “L’Assommoir,” c. 1879.  70 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Juggler, c. 1860. Albumen print. © NMPFT / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   72 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Two Urchins Playing a Game, c. 1860. Albumen print. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.   74 Henri Cartier-​Bresson, Valencia, 1933. Courtesy Magnum Photos.  75 Julia Margaret Cameron, possibly with Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Butcher’s Visit, c. 1863. “Mia Album.” Hochberg-Mattis Collection.  82 Julia Margaret Cameron, Receiving the Post, c. 1863. “Mia

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Album.” Hochberg-Mattis Collection.  82 Julia Margaret Cameron, Hurdy-​Gurdy Man, c. 1863. “Mia Album.” Hochberg-Mattis Collection.  83 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Kate Dore, c. 1862. Library of Congress.   84 Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, Kate Dore with Photogram Frame of “Ferns,” c. 1862. Albumen print; the ferns were added by the photogram technique. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.   84 Anna Atkins, title page of Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853. Cyanotype. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.  85 John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn with Her Microscope, c. 1854. Salted paper print from glass negative. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.   86 John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-​Gotha and Queen Victoria, 1860. Albumen carte-de-​visite. Author’s personal collection.  88 John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-​Gotha and Queen Victoria, 1860. Albumen carte-de-​visite. © National Portrait Gallery, London.   89 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The First Negative, 1857. Salted paper print. © RMN-​Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.   92 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Judith and Holofernes, 1857. Edinburgh Photographic Society.   93 Clementina, Lady Hawarden, Isabella Grace, c. 1861–62. Albumen

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print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.   97 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Child Study after Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, c. 1854–56. Albumen print. Photo: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, New York.   98 Julia Margaret Cameron, Adeline Grace Clougston, 1872. J. Paul Getty Museum.   100 Julia Margaret Cameron, The Lovely Remains of My Little Adeline, 1872. Tennyson Research Centre, Lincolnshire County Council.  100 Julia Margaret Cameron, Deathbed Study of Adeline Grace Clougston, 1872. Albumen print from collodion negative. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.   100 Detail of Figure 46.  101 Detail of Figure 45.  103 Francis Frith, Sculptures from the Outer Wall, Dendera, 1858–59. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.  106 Detail of Figure 49.  107 Frank Mason Good, for Frith and Co., Fountain of the Seraglio, n.d. Whole-​plate albumen print from wet collodion glass negative. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.  109 Detail of Figure 51.  110 From a photograph by Messrs. F. Frith and Co., Fountain of the Seraglio, n.d. Engraving. From Edwin Hodder, Cities of the World (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Company, 1882). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.   110

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Fig. 54 Robert P. Napper, Gardens at the Alcázar, Seville, c. 1860. Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Museo Universidad de Navarra.   111 Fig. 55 Francis Frith and Co., Alcázar Gardens, Seville, c. 1860s. Whole-​plate albumen print from wet collodion glass negative. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.   112 Fig. 56 Robert P. Napper, Group of Smugglers, Gibraltar, c. 1860. Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Museo Universidad de Navarra.   113 Fig. 57 Robert P. Napper, Square of San Francisco, Seville, c. 1860. Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Museo Universidad de Navarra.   114 Fig. 58 Francis Frith and Co., Square of San Francisco, Seville, c. 1860s. Albumen print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.   115 Fig. 59 Francis Eginton, after Benjamin West, Venus and Adonis, 1778–81. Mechanical painting process of aquatint on albumen surface. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.  122 Fig. 60 Unknown photographer, Interior View of the Patent Museum, South Kensington Museum

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(“the Brompton Boilers”), 1859. Albumen print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.   127 After Richard Beard, The London Scavenger, 1851. Engraving for Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Wellcome Library, London.   138 Alex Ritchie, Vertical Section (Looking West) or King’s Chamber, 1874. Plate xi, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: W. Isbister, 1874). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.   144 Alex Ritchie, Vertical Transverse Section with Arabs Ascending the Grand Gallery, 1874. Plate xii, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: W. Isbister, 1874). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.   145 Charles Piazzi Smyth, Tomb in the Central Chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, 1865. Albumen print. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.   146 Pierre-​Louis Pierson, The Countess di Castiglione Weeping into Her Handkerchief, c. mid-1860s. Albumen print. © RMN-​Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.   148

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Like any form of knowledge, this book is a communal enterprise. As such, the many members of this community deserve recognition, and my gratitude. I thank Jonathan Crary for his exacting dedication to innovative scholarship and for the example it has provided to all who have studied with him. His work has revitalized a moribund field and given shape to my own enterprise in absolutely foundational ways. Anne Higonnet was the ideal advocate and mentor throughout my studies. I am deeply grateful for her acumen and astonishing mastery of nineteenth-​century art and culture, and for her generosity in sharing it with me. My first teacher at Columbia, David Freedberg, was the most remarkable adviser ex officio that I could ever have hoped for. His erudition, wit, and vigorous commitment to scholarship have provided solace on many occasions. Stefan Andriopoulos was an attentive reader and an eager supporter of this project nearly from its inception. From my fellow students at Columbia, I learned more than I can say, and I thank Albert Narath, Evan Neely, Rachel Churner, Patrick Crowley, Emerson Bowyer, and especially my dear friend Samuel Spinner. The community of historians of photography is an especially generous one. I am indebted to John Tagg for his stimulating and insightful comradeship, and for writing the book that first convinced me that there might be “histories” of photography, and that they demanded serious inquiry. Geoff Batchen has been unstintingly generous with his time and his wisdom for many years. So many other members of this community have shown me great kindnesses that I dare not attempt to name them all here. My wonderfully supportive colleagues at Toronto deserve my gratitude for helping to cultivate this book to maturity, and I am genuinely grateful to all of them. Special thanks are due Elizabeth Legge for nurturing, advising, feeding, and entertaining me over the last years. Alison Syme is treasured as both a punishingly rigorous reader and as a kind and gracious teammate. I am particularly grateful to Elspeth Brown, Mark Cheetham, Louis Kaplan, Matt Kavaler, and Nikki Cesare-​Schotzko for the many conversations from which I have benefited enormously. This book would be merely a manuscript languishing in a dusty crypt were it not for the support of Ellie Goodman, executive editor at Penn State Press. Her enthusiasm and acuity have helped to sharpen the text in myriad ways. The success of any work of art history depends upon the ability to illustrate the objects about which one writes. Thanks to the vision and munificence of

the Art History Publication Initiative, this book presents its full program of images, a rare luxury for which I am most appreciative. I have been fortunate enough to have received considerable financial support throughout my study, which has made this work feasible. I thank the Metropolitan Museum of Art for granting me a Chester Dale Fellowship and for providing the chance to work closely with the museum’s extraordinarily learned and supportive curators, Malcolm Daniel, Jeff L. Rosenheim, and Mia Fineman. A fellowship from the Pierre and Maria-​Gaetana Matisse Foundation came at a crucial moment in my research, as did the sustenance provided by numerous fellowships and grants from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia. The year of quiet, contemplative writing furnished by the American Council of Learned Societies Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship was a great boon. My time as a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art was remarkably productive and enjoyable, and I thank its Head of Research, Lisa Ford, for her hospitality. To Joseph, I owe my sanity and my happiness, as well as most of my better ideas. My parents have been unconditional in their love and support in this and all my other endeavors. I owe them the greatest debt of all.

xiv acknowledgments

Introduction The History of Photography and the Problem of Knowledge

writing a history of the idea that “seeing is believing” would doubtless be an impossibly circuitous undertaking, but there would be certain junctures to which the meandering historian’s attention would be quickly drawn. The traditional milestones of mimetic progress would seem the logical guideposts on this journey, as they confront their viewers with the inadequacies of settled representational practices and the structures of knowledge and conviction upon which those practices were predicated. It is tempting to think that excavating the historical specificity of photography’s illusionism would constitute but one more chapter in such an enterprise. This book, however, posits a far tighter linkage between the emergence of this medium and the foundations of the study of the production of knowledge. That a shared historical milieu nurtured both the objects of this study and the conceptual approaches that underpin it poses challenges, but offers considerable opportunities, too. It is, as one of the foundational texts of social constructivism reminds us, “from Marx that the sociology of knowledge derived its root proposition—​that man’s consciousness is derived from his social being.”1 The tenet that “knowledge” and “reality” are variables fashioned out of specific sociohistorical institutions is now almost entirely uncontroversial. It has evolved, much like the objects of its study, into a “given,” a natural state of affairs that is presupposed by the structure of intellectual inquiry. But it is also a historical artifact, whose salient features emerged, perhaps most vividly, in responses to the abortive revolutions of 1848 and the liberalization of private enterprise that followed in Europe, and especially Britain, in the 1850s. The value of this contemporaneity of method and object is not simply a matter of having the proper tools at hand

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for the materials we will have to shape. Rather, it presents an opportunity to study the history of a particular mode of representation whose contested, variable correspondence to reality reveals among the Victorians a precocious skepticism of the supposed “givenness” of reality itself. It also furnishes the much-​needed chance to interrogate the odd persistence of taking for granted the taken-for-​granted in the very historical period that has furnished us with the awareness to know better. At the heart of the project shared by Marx and a sundry cast of acolytes and rivals is the apportionment of agency and its exercise among the liberal state and the individuals who comprised it. What seems like a fairly general—​ if not immutable—​conflict embedded in the structure of societies on closer inspection appears to derive from some quite specific historical features of midcentury political economy. While the nonrevolutions of the 1848 “Springtime of the Peoples” proved to be as fleeting as a summer shower, they had exposed the allegiances of bourgeois moderates and the limits of their democratic intentions. At the center of the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a self-aware—​and politically decisive—​stratum was its failure to support the foot soldiers of the revolutions. The laboring poor appeared, in the radicality of their demands and the swiftness of their successes across the continent, to constitute a threat greater than the continued sovereignty of all but the most absolutist of old regimes.2 The glacial democratization of particular zones of political life was one thing, but the genuine destruction of the social order was quite another, and the ascendant bourgeois was increasingly willing to see in the first approach a sufficiently rapid path to his success. In Britain, the lines were drawn most starkly in April, when a mass Chartist demonstration sought to capitalize on the havoc wreaked by weeks of industrial rioting in the north by personally delivering its demands to Parliament. Built up as the decisive confrontation in English political history, the Chartists ultimately managed to recruit only a fraction of the revolutionaries they had hoped to harness.3 By contrast, the authorities were able to deputize more than ten thousand members of the middle class as special constables, a show of force that compelled the dispersal of the crowd.4 The humiliation was acute, and the dissolution of the viable revolutionary force on Kennington Common sapped the strength of the movement long enough for the economic boom of the 1850s to set in. While the structural inequities underlying the unrest remained largely in place, the new prosperity initiated a public culture of “progress” that nurtured the belief in the power of market liberalization to transform the lot of the lower classes, and to grant new freedoms of its own creation. As Eric Hobsbawm has wryly noted, “If Europe had still lived in the era of the baroque princes, it would have been filled with spectacular masques, processions, and operas distributing allegorical representations of economic triumph and industrial progress at the feet of its rulers.”5 Of course, such “rituals of self-​congratulation” as the Great Exhibition of 1851 served effectively as technologically updated pageants, produced on a scale and in an environment that was itself demonstrative of the industrial apotheosis being lauded. The momentum for political liberalization was readily channeled into the opening up of new consumer markets. Indeed, one of the few pieces of genuinely progressive reform legislation in the 1850s came not in the expansion of bread-and-​butter political rights, but

in the removal of so-​called taxes on knowledge, the stamp duties imposed on newspapers, and constituted merely an addition to the menu of available goods.6 Censorship controls fell in favor of transferring the responsibility of judgment to the consumer: the radical pamphleteer was newly occupied by his morning paper. The era of revolution had in short order become the epoch of leisure. It is telling that this new zone of recreation was described by one Victorian authority as “a sort of neutral ground,”7 a characterization in close accord with the rather extreme form of laissez-​faire economic policies feeding the boom. As Peter Bailey has argued, leisure comprised “a cultural void and placed alarming new responsibilities upon the individual’s capacity for self-​direction.”8 The range of possibilities available to the consumer of recreation, and the relatively unfettered freedom of choice accorded to him, posed a predicament to the dominant bourgeois culture. Matthew Browne, a commentator suspicious of this newly granted liberty lamented, typically, that “free trade, free religion, free art and free self-​culture are all bound up in the same bundle and stand or fall together.”9 This bundle seemed to be tautly tied together in that decisive “handbook of mid-​Victorian liberalism”: John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848).10 In what would become the guiding axiom for the political thought of the two decades following the treatise’s publication in that year of continental revolutions, Mill averred that “laisser-​faire, in short, should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.”11 The figure who was the beneficiary of this practice was the individual, the preeminent social unit at the core of Mill’s liberalism. That individual’s ability to make a go of it in the worlds of commerce and of ideas, unimpeded by the dictates of higher authorities, was the only route to the improvement of society as a whole.12 But the meddlesome state would never be far away, and it is for this reason that, Mill declares, “there never was more necessity for surrounding individual independence of thought, speech and conduct, with the most powerful defences.”13 The individual had to assert his preeminence not only in the realm of recreation—​that is, of pleasure—​but also in the darker environs of pain. In his important early essay “Civilization,” Mill discusses the political and moral perils of abrogating one’s visual capacities to witness the display of pain and suffering to the bureaucratic structures of the state. In modern Britain, “all those necessary portions of the business of society which oblige any person to be the immediate agent or ocular witness of the infliction of pain, are delegated by common consent to peculiar and narrow classes; to the judge, the soldier, the surgeon, the butcher, and the executioner.” As a result, Mill avers, “a moral effeminacy, an inaptitude for every kind of struggle” has left men unable to “do what is painful or disagreeable,” because the “spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain, is kept more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fulness the benefits of civilization.” The attenuation of this sensory prowess rendered individuals morally and politically inert, incapable of asserting their necessary position at the heart of liberal society. For Mill, this diminution of visual agency constituted a direct threat to the advancement of that society, for it is “originality of mind and individuality of character, which are the only source of any real progress.”14

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Visual capacities came to stand, in Mill’s thought, for the empowerment of the individual and the restraint of the state as necessary conditions for “real progress.” The liberal vision was forcefully countered by Marx, who viewed the bifurcated allegiances between self and society in an antithetical way. Yet this appraisal, too, invested the figure of the discerning viewer with the most momentous status.15 Marx asserted that “where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, but in reality, in life, a double existence . . . he lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means.” In an inversion of Mill’s schema, this state promises to alleviate the alienation of the individual by integrating him into its community, but demands of him the cutthroat individualism at the heart of the capitalist expansion. Yet, along with Mill, the liberation of the senses is critical in Marx’s account, their release linked not to economic liberalization but to the destruction of capitalism, for “the transcendence of private property” would require “the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities. . . . Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form—​in short senses capable of human gratifications, senses conforming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being.”16 Here Marx implies that it is society’s obsession with private wealth at the expense of communal welfare that has retarded the sensory apparatus by its atmospheric brutality: “Every organ of sense is injured in an equal degree by artificial elevation of temperature, by the dust-​laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise.”17 These capacities are to be won back only by drastic measures, and their refinement will be crucial to the larger political enterprise of dispelling the ideological bases of capital’s dominance. The apotheosis of this procedure would be the keen awareness of ideology’s deceptions, which Marx articulated in a well-​known visual metaphor: “[I]f in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-​down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-​process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-​process.”18 Visual discernment was, then, the preferred metaphor in the two most consequential—​and antagonistic—​politics of the 1850s. Indeed, it became the key for mediating the individual’s agency and his place in the community. This study asserts that a primary feature of the development of modern society was the dramatic expansion of an audience empowered to judge the reliability of its own visual experience. The book tells a number of stories about photography’s role in the formation of liberal subjectivity, and these stories posit accounts of the medium and its authority that are not entirely commensurable with one another. Indeed, it recognizes the full complexities of Victorian society and culture that permitted such wildly divergent interpretive accounts of vision and of photography to coexist despite their utter incompatibility, both with each other and with the discourses in whose service they were simultaneously enlisted. The negotiation of these variegated possibilities for the medium was itself an untidy process, but as I shall show, they are well illuminated by the heuristic of visual discernment and the variable modes of agency that such discernment implied.

The chronological sweep of this book is bounded on either side by conceptual shifts in understanding how human visual capacities relate to the discernment of representations, and what the agential ramifications of those relationships are imagined to be. It commences with an exploration of the dramatic developments in the phase leading up to photography’s industrialization in Britain, principally in the interconnected realms of vision research, visual education, and the marketplace for visual illusion. In particular, I investigate the evolution of visual deception in the years flanking photography’s announcement in 1839, proposing that the milieu into which this supposedly revolutionary medium was inserted was primed not to receive photography as unquestionably objective. Rather, I demonstrate that photography was much more readily located within a vast mosaic of visual discernment in which political, commercial, and pedagogic institutions had disparate, vested interests in photography’s status. The capacity for the visual discrimination of photographic representations emerges as both a criterion for political agency and a skill to be commodified, developments that depended precisely upon an ambivalence of photography’s representational role. To understand the impact of the photograph in any historical period, we must study the adjacent forms of visual belief with which it variously competes and collaborates. In the nineteenth century, scientific demonstrations, magic shows, and philosophical games repeatedly put the visual credulity of the modern public to the test in ways that shaped, and were shaped by, the reality claims of photography. By initiating the narrative here, among the competing—​and conjoined—​ endeavors of visual education and deception, I demonstrate how the new medium of photography was enmeshed within a vast visual environment that daily challenged the credulity and judgment of its citizens. By locating photography within this web of visual belief, the project proposes a reinterpretation of the emergence of the medium, in which the very quality that is imagined to have made it unique—​its objectivity—​is instead understood as a deeply contested feature, whose malleability reflects the ambivalences of conviction and skepticism in the middle of the nineteenth century. The book then turns to an investigation of the implications of this conceptual ambivalence as refracted through the distinctive photographic practices of a group of the most significant and successful photographers of the 1850s and 1860s. The surrender of photography’s presumptive objectivity was manifested in some very concrete artistic modes, each of which has been incompatible with the orthodox history of photography and, accordingly, has been marginalized as a curiosity. Yet these practices and debates are not simply marginalia in this history, for they elicited fierce disputes among the Victorians themselves about photography as a medium and, more obliquely, about the nature of representing the real. In their negotiation of their audiences, the key commercial photographers, Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, created images that readily sacrificed the conventional guarantees of photographic realism in order to activate their viewers’ primed capacities for visual discernment. The first of these two case studies explores the process of composite or “combination” photography, in which an innovative practitioner would bring together a group of details from distinct negatives and unite them into a single representation. In agglomerating these images, the photographer could overcome the temporal and spatial limitations of photographic technologies, but

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only by sacrificing the ostensible objectivity inherent to the medium. Here I reconstruct the political and economic contexts of the most topical and controversial of all such images, Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life (1857), a photograph fundamentally depicting and enacting one pervasive model of Victorian visual epistemology. Made up of more than thirty separate negatives, Rejlander’s photograph presented a timely moral lesson on the priority of industrial efficiency and initiative, and in its form and its motifs encouraged an attendant mode of visuality. This investigation will show how the discernment and revelation of the constructed photograph’s “seams” were implicated in an urgent debate about how the bond between the individual worker and a collective industrial society was to be organized. The volume of scholarly commentary on the role of photography’s mass production in the 1850s is eclipsed only by the quantity of images that the increasingly industrial-​scale studios pumped out during the course of the decade. Alas, very few of these interventions have traced the relationship between the serial mode of production that this new scale necessitated and the emergence of an attendant mode of visual discernment.19 In the second of the case studies, I examine the ways in which photographic series were in the vanguard in challenging the medium’s objectivity, with special attention to the staged images of the leading commercial photographer, Henry Peach Robinson. The success of Robinson’s enterprise was attributed in large measure to the opportunity he provided his viewers to identify the mode of the serial images’ fabrication, an invitation that seemed both to reify and critique the belief structures in which industrial society consisted. In negating the possibility of finding “reality” in the single image, Robinson’s photographs profoundly correlate the nature of visual acuity with the organization of industrial society. They accomplish this not by demanding adherence to the neutrality of the photograph but precisely by elucidating its manufacture. The favor with which positivistic methods of engaging with works of art were increasingly met following 1848 was marked by the rise of connoisseurship, which, as its most notorious modern practitioner asserted, “exercises eyes, mind, and judgment” like no other pursuit.20 To early connoisseurs, photographs were far more likely to be viewed as (at best) helpful subsidiary tools in the identification of Italian paintings than as autonomous representations worthy of analysis.21 Yet the attribution of photographs to particular authors in the nineteenth century was in fact central to both the makers and users of such images. Defying any crude presumption of their mechanical origins, photographs became vital venues through which the metaphysics of individuality and its expression in visual form were negotiated. Several of the first photographs produced by an acknowledged master of the medium, Julia Margaret Cameron, made in collaboration with—​and under the tutelage of—​the celebrated Rejlander, are uniquely positioned to help examine the ambivalent role of individual and joint authorial presence in a supposedly authorless medium. In this chapter, I trace the complexities of photographic collaboration between two artists, an arrangement that demanded a fracturing of the photograph’s neutrality. This template became especially fraught when Rejlander, a professional man, collaborated with Cameron, an amateur woman for whom the poles of slavish copying and indiscreet originality were to be negotiated only by a fluidity of photographic objectivity. The paradoxical assertion of Cameron’s

hand, at once absent and present, original and derivative, is a crucial locus not only of the troubled, gendered nature of photographic collaboration, but of the very unstable demands of authorial agency in the medium at large. The pressures on objectivity produced by gendered collaboration were matched in intensity by a new form of authorial cooperation in the 1860s and 1870s that was particular to the genre of travel photography. In the first decades, the veracity of images of far-​flung regions was guaranteed by the implicit presence at the scene of a known, named photographer. The contiguity of the photographer with the scene, of his indexical footprint in the image and with his signature on the photographic plate, affixed a special referential security to such pictures. Yet, as was the case with the most commercially successful of these photographers, Francis Frith, a new form of authorship soon emerged, in which the “name” of the maker was a corporate rather than an individual one. The rapid growth of the Frith firm, incorporated just after its namesake’s return to England from Egypt, underlined the incommensurability of a new economic entity—​the joint stock company—​with the individualism associated with early travel photographs. Indeed, in transforming itself into such a company, Frith’s concern participated in an astonishing inversion of the special linkage between the presence of the individual eyewitness at a foreign prospect and the photograph’s reliability. As the corporate form of photographic authorship became dominant in the final decades of the century, the neutrality evidently secured by the blended, depersonalized stamp of the Frith brand obliterated any traces of the individual photographers producing the company’s images, thus severing the special linkage of presence, individuality, and trustworthiness that had once given the genre its special representational position. Frith’s process of assimilating multiple individual authors to a single corporate identity enacts the larger social processes of mediating between individuals and collectives. The means through which that negotiation becomes legible is in the problematic realm of detecting visual “style.” The development of a Frith “house style” is a pointed strategy for frustrating the possibility of visual discernment as a tool for apportioning the relative agency of particular photographers against that of the corporate identity. As the case of “Frith” indicates, the attribution of any particular photograph to a specific author had exposed some very considerable epistemological fissures. These disputes reflected how closely photography had become integrated into broader conversations about the nature of knowledge and its commodification in modern society. These debates were magnified when the question revolved not around who made a single photograph, but who was responsible for the invention of the medium itself. And that lofty question was put to a striking test of visual discernment in the 1860s, when a group of photographic relics, some supposedly dating to the eighteenth century, were unveiled before the members of the Photographic Society of London. The striking inability of these “experts” to agree upon the nature of the specimens on which they trained their gazes reflected serious philosophical divisions about the status of photography’s origins. In particular, it catalyzed a new kind of debate about the origins of photography anchored in the distribution of agency that was so integral to photographic identity in this period. These authorities clashed not primarily over who had invented the medium, but rather whether any individual should be given precedence over the collective desires and contributions of a modern industrial nation.

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The period I investigate here can be said to close to a great extent with the estrangement from vision of the representational facility of photography in the 1870s, to which the concluding chapter of the book turns. Once-​innovative processes like telescopic and microscopic photography relinquished their crown in this decade to motion studies and images of electricity and magnetism. While this shift is most readily seen in a number of technological developments, the conceptual bases of the change are the focus of the final chapter. The photography of the preceding two decades could record the infinitesimally small and unfathomably distant phenomena of the natural world with increasing ease, extending human observational faculties beyond their natural limits. The implicit identity between photography and vision that had profoundly but quietly undergirded the medium during its growth was threatened by photographs that were irreconcilable with any kind of visual experience. As photography became increasingly untethered from vision, so too was there considerable stress applied to the models of visual discernment that so marked the epoch discussed in the preceding chapters. The proliferation of photographs that seemed to obviate the viewer of mass-​produced images so central in the 1850s and 1860s also empowered an elite college of experts to serve as the arbiters of photographic representations. When this specialized, credentialed mode of interpretation became the primary ethos of photographic reception, the potency of the medium as a vehicle for organizing social knowledge broadly was sapped. A consequent denigration of “mere” vision—​of a kind of looking that was unrefined by scientific and technical training—​markedly and irretrievably changed the unique role of the photograph that characterized its second and third decades. These particular modes of denigrating human vision already assume the need to overcome the central position of visual discernment in order to affect their desired ends. The two contemporaneous developments underlying this chapter represent the recalibration of visual discernment in a particular way. Specifically, the abandonment of a visual model of knowledge production open to the wide swath of citizens nurtured by the laissez-​faire ethos of the 1850s and 1860s, and the rise of the institutionalization of visual “expertise” to interpret photographs with no referential analogue in human experience, nevertheless attests to the power of discernment. They certainly represent epochal reconsiderations of how that visual discernment is to function in relationship to photography and its particular referential guarantees, but they begin from the premise of that discernment’s power to achieve very consequential political goals. The local aim of this study is to recover the intense ambiguity of the photograph’s verisimilitude, and to understand what it meant, in the midst of a transformational moment in modern culture, for “the real” to be, tenuously and paradoxically, in the eye of the beholder. This narrative, however, unfolds in relation to the weighty stakes of the liberation of visual judgment, through which commentators of divergent politics in the 1850s imagined the relationship between the human subject and society. The implications of tracing this relationship are, however, both more tentative and more ambitious. By historicizing the very specific modalities of what we now take to be a purely natural way of establishing knowledge, I hope to recapture a moment in which thinkers were just beginning to reckon with the insight that knowledge is not the

creation of individual minds, but rather of collective social processes. That the visual capacity for discernment was constantly imagined as the ideal metaphor for this deliberation marks the centrality of these debates to the current practice of historical inquiry. Visual judgment and its apportionment among individuals has been central in organizing some quite fundamental “givens” in our society. Among those thinkers who helped to codify this perspective most cogently was Émile Durkheim, who, as one contemporary sociologist explains, posited “a common public system of perception of reality that regulates, structures, and organizes relations in a community.”22 Durkheim performs the metonymic substitution of visual comprehension for knowledge that has since become utterly commonplace: “This is all because social thought, owing to the imperative authority that is in it, has an efficacy that individual thought could never have; by the power which it has over our minds, it can make us see things in whatever light it pleases; it adds to reality or deducts from it according to the circumstances.”23 Intersubjectivity is a social and a perceptual phenomenon, one from which the additive and subtractive honing of “reality” proceeds. It is also one in which the potency of the individual for judgment is inevitably sublimated to communal structures. Pierre Bourdieu has noted, in parallel terms, how photography is an exemplar of this process, in which social knowledge forms the basis of what initially seems the prerogative of the particular photographer. “Photography,” he asserts, “cannot be delivered over to the randomness of the individual imagination and, via the mediation of the ethos, the internalization of objective and common regularities, the group places this practice under its collective rule, so that the most trivial photograph expresses apart from the explicit intentions of the photographer, the system of schemes of perception, thought, and appreciation common to a whole group.”24 In our current commitment to a mode of historical analysis that is the child of the sociology of knowledge, we are perhaps less attentive than we might be to the far more contingent understanding of the creation of knowledge that characterized the two decades following 1848. Indeed, even as we have readily universalized the insights drawn from this approach, we have failed to historicize the peculiarities of the Victorian industrial society from which they emerged. As Marx cautioned in his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach, we must “see how the sensuous world around [us] is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, even the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society.”25 The inevitability of the conventional nature of social thought, and its ultimate subsumption of individual perceptual autonomy to immobile class hierarchies, was precisely what was being negotiated in those contested years. The characterization of photography’s social métier in mid-​Victorian Britain is an especially important one: while it shares with contemporary scholarly inquiry a fundamental engagement with the nature and formation of truth claims, it was far less unequivocal about the relatively degraded agency of the individual perceiver. The shared foci in the writings of Mill and Marx, of the liberalization of individual visual agency and its profound consequences for the formation of society, constitute the overarching backdrop for the nature of photography at midcentury. It is imperative, then, to consider how these discourses of political economy intersected with a field of contemporaneous developments, the sum

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of which is the rich milieu of visual conviction in this era of photography’s rapid commercial expansion. In his landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), once the most-​ cited text in Anglophone scholarship, Thomas Kuhn revived the social determination of perceptual experience for a new generation of scholars. “Among the few things that we know . . . with assurance,” he maintained, “are: that very different stimuli can produce the same sensations; that the same stimulus can produce very different sensations; and finally, that the route from stimulus to sensation is in part conditioned by education.”26 Transformations in visual comprehension are, in this canonical account, the building blocks of initiation into a particular discipline: “[L]ooking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-​chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist’s world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does.”27 Excoriated by some at the time of its publication as denying the possibility of scientific truth, and licensing a concomitant moral relativism, Kuhn’s illumination of the social basis of truth claims is a tenet almost universally held by the practitioners of historical inquiry today. But it would be a mistake to think of the Victorian age as one oblivious to the power of visual representations to mediate fundamental relationships between and among individuals and communities. Quite to the contrary, it was the era in which the social structure of visual knowledge, now ossified into convention, was negotiated through the prism of photography. Exploring its multiple facets holds the promise of finding not only the historical specificity of this medium’s putative objectivity, but of its conceptual legacy in the procedures of all histories.

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c h a p t e r

o n e

See for Yourself Visual Discernment and Photography’s Appearance

t h e pa s t t w o d e c a d e s h av e b e e n b u s y o n e s f o r t h e h i s t o riography of photography, the brisk pace of publication equaled only by the range of disciplines implicated in nurturing this growth field.1 One of the most revealing constituents of this boom is the work undertaken by literary scholars to interrogate the conventional realism of photography to elucidate parallel structures in the novel. As Jennifer Green-​Lewis put it, photography “provided a locus of debate for issues having to do with realism, especially literary realism. . . . [W]hat realism ought to do and what it was actually capable of were topics for which photography was able to provide confirmation.”2 Nancy Armstrong went further, describing a synergistic relationship between photography and the realist novel that restructured the ability of literature to gesture effectively toward the world.3 And a most ambitious revisionary account by Daniel A. Novak has recently confirmed how the Victorian novel and its readers were alert to and invested in the destabilizing impact of photography on the guarantees of realism at large.4 Each of these analyses made clear that the focus of the study of Victorian photography was to turn much more directly to the question of how this conventional realism provided a model for other modes of experience that sought to refer to “the real.”5 Interventions like these have urged us to think of photography’s apparently unique referential relationship to the world in historical, rather than ontological, terms, rejecting the temptation to view this position as the result of some immanent features shared by all photographs, transcending their historical contingencies and varieties. They make plain how little sense it makes to speak of referentiality in absolute terms, since a photograph can only be linked to that which it represents in ways that are more or less proximate than other modes of representation.

These are fundamentally studies of literature, and their objects are, ultimately, those texts that have made particular conceptual use of photography’s traditional realism. Nevertheless, they alert us to the great breadth of contexts that might usefully be brought to bear on the relative position of photographs as representations that compel belief. This comparative realm was once limited almost exclusively to the fine arts, its hoary axiom Paul Delaroche’s resignation that “from today, painting is dead.” And where painting was concerned, canvases for which the measure of success was the reproduction of minute detail no doubt found themselves in a new competitive environment. Yet if we are to judge the status of photography’s revolutionary referentiality only relative to the fine arts (with which, it must be said, its interaction was hardly of an unambiguous variety), or even to its shadowy doubles among Victorian novels, we will be reducing our field of inquiry to but the most obvious of its many facets. What is required now is an understanding of how the photograph is positioned as a neutral medium in relation to contemporary visual practices, adjacent discourses and debates, and metaphorical repertoires. This understanding demands a wide-​ranging examination of the milieux in which the photograph was, at any given juncture, embedded. In this chapter, I explore the dramatic changes in three such realms: that of scientific research, of education, and of commercial recreation, each of which was centrally concerned with the distribution of agency and the resulting creation of knowledge.

v i si o n r e s e a r c h an d i n di v i dual e x pe ri e n ce

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In the history of the political uses of visual deception, a saga reaching back to the ancients, Sir David Brewster found an especially germane group of precedents for the state of knowledge and belief in his own time. His landmark Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (1832) consisted in part of describing the parallels between the credulity of the subjects of past despots and the opportunities afforded by modern scientific researches that might help to make his own age a less benighted one. One commentator summarized the tome’s aspirations: “Through the faculties or powers of human perception and verification . . . we will be better aware of the extent of their liability to be deceived, and of the means of verification and correction at their command, as well as of the mode in which their liability to deception ought to be guarded against or protected from the influence of imposture, and verification applied in defeating or exposing delusion.”6 Indeed, these were hopes shared by many, for whom the extraordinary international program of vision research in the first decades of the century seemed as though it might finally place the fleeting and amorphous faculties of perception within the purview of empirical science. The primary objective of these studies, whose histories have been thoroughly traced in recent scholarship,7 was, as one historian has put it, “to establish the nature and reliability of knowledge acquisition.”8 To uncover the mechanisms of deception was, for Brewster, not an arcane scientific accomplishment, but rather an urgent and potentially revolutionary political act. Brewster wrote in the fourth of his epistolary communiqués explicitly of the historical nexus between visual deception and the state: “A national

FIGURE 1

“Caleidoscope-​ Mania; or, the Natives Astonished.” © The Trustees of the British Museum.

system of deception, intended as an instrument of government, must have brought into requisition not merely the scientific skill of the age, but a variety of subsidiary contrivances, calculated to astonish the beholder, to confound his judgment, to dazzle his senses, and to give a predominant influence to the peculiar imposture which it was thought desirable to establish.”9 And, to be certain, Brewster insisted, “there can be little doubt that the most common, as well as the most successful, impositions of the ancients were of an optical nature.”10 The purpose of revealing the means by which these optical deceptions were perpetrated by tyrants throughout history was not merely to make more astute viewers, but to fashion a citizenry immune to the manipulations of an unjust government; it would create a new epoch in which “sovereigns seek to reign only through the affections of their people.”11 It is appealing to conclude from the emancipatory possibilities offered by visual acuity in Brewster’s influential account that the vision research of the first decades of the century produced an affirmative image of the political benefits offered by systematizing the nature of visual deception. Indeed, some of the most recent interpretations of the ramifications of these inquiries proceed along these very lines, claiming that “precisely because mechanisms of deception and illusion could be uncovered . . . the general epistemological conclusions drawn from research on vision and deception were optimistic.”12 Yet the stability of knowledge evidently offered by these researches grows ever more complicated in the ensuing decades: first, because the possibility of “general epistemological conclusions” is one that emerging knowledge about the variability and irregularity of visual experience seems to obviate and, concomitantly, because any conclusions that were drawn were far more opportunistic—​ politically and commercially—​than they were optimistic (fig. 1). The scientific investigators of the midcentury culture into which the photograph was born had a strikingly disparate conception of subjective phenomena from their predecessors of just a generation earlier. The productive and

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bizarre career of the German chemist and physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, best known today for his controversial practices of—​and possible death from— self-​experimentation, gives a good deal of insight into the pervasive belief in the calculable and universal nature of subjective visual experience. “It was,” as one recent critic has aptly noted, “Ritter’s self-​experimentation and his unremitting pursuit of the correlation between self-​knowledge and knowledge of nature that most distinguished his career.”13 He brutally subjected himself to the rigors of experimenting with galvanism on his eyes and ears, as well as on what he delicately referred to as “other choice parts of the body.” The Romanticism of the investigator in Ritter’s conception is pronounced, implying as it does that the very particular laboratory constituted by his body could accordingly be extrapolated to the body, as such. In later decades, the more sophisticated work in the 1820s and 1830s, including that of the organic chemist and director of the Gobelins tapestry works, Michel Eugène Chevreul, proposed, following Ritter, that these perceptual experiences could be rationalized and analyzed like any other phenomena. Perhaps it was the outlandishness of Ritter’s approach that exemplified for the succeeding generation the perils of presuming that anything of general applicability might be ascertained from the acquisition of self-​knowledge. By midcentury, the image of Ritter electrifying his own genitals and squeezing his eyeballs in the name of scientific inquiry would have struck experimenters as the consummate conflict of interest, and as a privileging of the self that would, in time, become antithetical to the very ethos of science itself. These descendants recognized that the variability and idiosyncrasy of individual vision was not congenial to a mathematics of the eye. Any universal principles for defining perceptual experience at large, and the identification of deception in particular, were inevitably to be corrupted by the interestedness of the viewing subject. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s landmark study has convincingly demonstrated, efforts to curb these impurities, to temper the self in a moralized quest for objectivity, were among the foundational features of scientific inquiry in the second half of the nineteenth century.14 It was, crucially, in this intergenerational moment of transformation that photography emerged, in the flux of transitioning from Chevreul’s belief in the lawlike regularity of perceptual phenomena to Helmholtz’s deep ambivalence about the variability that would inevitably destabilize such laws and their application. Positioned at such a crossroads in the relationship between visual experience, deception, and objectivity, it can hardly be surprising that a medium as putatively proximate to the referential world as photography would become the venue for some of the most substantial debates about the nature of the modern self. With the prominence accorded the anxieties about the epistemological, and indeed the moral, ramifications of perceptual variability, it seems necessary to reconsider one of the major premises of some of the most influential histories of early photography: the medium’s persuasiveness among its varied viewerships. If the individuality of visual experience was increasingly acknowledged and feared, how is it that the photograph has been thought to have been comprehensively and equally persuasive among Victorian beholders? Given the commitment of midcentury scientific inquiry to the impossibility of a calculable, one-size-fits-​all account of subjective phenomena, would not this potentiality for photography have seemed inimical to the very features

for which the new medium was supposedly prized, namely, its objectivity? It would seem that the elusive search for a bedrock, objective basis for the visual was already being acknowledged as an aspiration to be sought, rather than a state of affairs intrinsic to a particular technology or mode of representation. To be as persuasive—​as decisively convincing in its definition of itself as a neutral vehicle—​as many critics have implied, would have meant, for the Victorians, that the medium was not objective, but, antithetically, that it managed to accommodate itself to the very procedures and idiosyncrasies of individuality that had made objectivity itself so elusive, so far outside the realm of the human sensorium. If the photograph had achieved the representational summit of genuine objectivity, why did that ideal seem farther away than ever in the years following its genesis? A crucial feature proposed by Daston and Galison, which has helped to bring historical specificity to the objective status of certain visual representations, is the hypothesis that “nonintervention, not verisimilitude, lay at the heart of mechanical objectivity, and this is why mechanically produced images captured its message best.”15 It was not photography’s resemblance to the referential world but, rather, the fact that it seemed to be generated without the agency of a human being that secured for the medium its privileged epistemic position. I would propose that we must conceive of nonintervention as one of a number of possible bases for evoking objectivity in the mechanical age, and, more critically, as one that operates with varying degrees of efficacy and in the service of myriad and often incompatible representational programs. In the next chapter, I will trace one such instance, in which photographic nonintervention actually worked against the prerogatives typically associated with the claim to objectivity. In the case of the immensely controversial photograph I will discuss, it is evident that nonintervention—​the absence of the human hand—​was designated as deeply immoral to conventional sensibilities, and as the antithesis of the ideals of objectivity. This case study indicates a broader critique of the historiography of photography that undergirds this project. It is my contention that the indeterminacy of a photograph’s referential status—​whether or not it ought to be classified as “objective”—​was itself the prerequisite to the most fraught feature of midcentury visuality: the exercise of visual discrimination. Far from serving as an ideal of, or aspirant to, objectivity, the makers and users of photography, both institutional and informal, systematically subverted this ethos to respond to the problem of the increasingly differentiated viewer engendered by a new generation of vision researches. This invitation to visual discernment unfolded in a vast network of spaces and practices that putatively made that individuality the basis of their appeals. By making the photograph the preeminent vehicle through which to exercise the ability to tell truth from falsehood, these venues offered a kind of emancipation tethered closely to the increasingly visual nature of subjectivity. In sites commercial and political throughout the second and third decades of photography’s history, this freedom to judge was cultivated as a skill that nevertheless served to supplant more concrete liberties, and transformed visual judgment into a commodity and a prerequisite ability for modern citizenship. This complex operation could be activated only by nurturing that for which the faculty of visual discrimination was indispensible, by making tenuous the most essential feature of the photograph’s efficacy and its history: its objective nature.

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v i su a l e d u c at i o n

The capacity to discern visually infused a range of educational enterprises in the first half of the century, not least in a popular genre of writing that proliferated with the aim of dramatizing the didactic program that might serve as a bulwark against superstition and ignorance. Extraordinary compendia of midcentury illusions, and the bases for their discernment, were incarnated in the narratives of several memorable texts. The prospectus of Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest recognized the mixture of instruction and entertainment required to impart these skills to youths: “[T]he object of the present work is to inculcate that early love of science which can never be derived from the sterner productions. Youth is naturally addicted to amusement, and in this item his expenditure too often exceeds his allotted income.”16 The handbook’s author, the physician John Ayrton Paris, knew well of what he spoke, for he had likely invented and certainly popularized the thaumatrope, among the most successful of the optical toys relying upon retinal retention.17 Another, Parlour Magic, attested that “the boy whose wonder and curiosity have been excited by the experiments of the scientific lecturer, the illusions of the ventriloquist, or the deceptions of the exhibitor of feats of manual dexterity, will here find many of these mysteries unveiled.”18 These somewhat formulaic stories usually consisted of an inquisitive child mesmerized by some optical illusion, followed by an explanation of its purely scientific bases by a figure of authority and, finally, a resolution by the youth to be wary of deception and attentive to its operations in the future. There were, embedded in these texts, characterizations of the political ramifications of the educational project that clearly link the skepticism of deception with liberty. In the first of these tales, a precocious boy named Tom Seymour and his slightly daft sister Louisa arrive home from school on holiday and begin to receive their real education from their amateur scientist and tinkerer father, a set of skills whose absence in the school curriculum is subtly indicted. Papa wows his brood and the benighted local vicar with the demonstration of the thaumatrope.19 By spinning around a two-​sided card with great speed, the discrete images apparently blend into one, classically a bird and a cage. But in this case the card consisted of an especially loaded commentary on the relation between visual deception and the legitimacy of power (fig. 2). The full exchange must be recounted:

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“What have you there?” exclaimed the vicar; “arms and legs, without a body?” “Yes,” replied Mr. Seymour; “and which, on turning round, will present the figure of a king, invested with all the insignia of royalty.” “It is indeed a king. Look at his crown and sceptre!” cried Louisa. “Now for the epigram,” said the major, who then read the following lines:— “Head, legs, and arms, alone appear; Observe that nobody is here: Napoleon-​like I undertake Of nobody a king to make.”20

FIGURE 2

Thaumatrope depicting Napoleon Bonaparte, recto and verso views, c. 1820s. Photo: Stéphane Dabrowski © La Cinémathèque Française (Paris).

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The visual illusion that unites the tyrant Bonaparte with the attributes of royalty on the thaumatrope here stands for the role that deception plays in illegitimate power vesting itself. The false monarchy founded by the Corsican despot can be “undone,” as it were, by revealing that the assumption of the mantle by Napoleon is a deception, showing that in reality the two are discrete and that it is only through manipulation of the human perceptual apparatus that they can appear to be integrated. At this revelation young Tom gushed: “Papa, I never experienced so much interest in a performance of this kind until I was capable of explaining the principles upon which it was conducted!” Papa, hardly needing the cue, leaps into a rather interminable explanation of the relationship of the individual images to the whole, emphasizing that it is the failure of the human perception to see that they are in fact distinct views, rather than a single representation. The thaumatrope again offered the youngster two sides of the epistemic coin: the convincing illusion, and the capacity to comprehend the basis of that illusion’s persuasiveness. Having begun to ameliorate the antisocial possibilities of apparently superficial toys and games, manufacturers could begin to use this medium for more direct overtures toward cultivating a particularly political kind of visual play. A game consisting of cards entitled The Habit Makes the Man, illustrating what the explanatory text called “The Ranks and Dignities of British Society,” is representative (fig. 3).21 Atop the hierarchy sat, not surprisingly, the King, from whose perch the cards descended down through the ranks of Duke and Marquess, settling at its base with the Scottish Highlander. The cards consist of hand-​drawn typological bodies of each of the ranks, with a small hole cut into the face, leaving that space open to the back. Behind these facades one would align another card: that depicting a beggar in his tattered rags, walking stick, and upturned hat poised to receive the charity of passersby. Thus, the visage of the tramp would be seamlessly imposed upon the grand accoutrements of the aristocracy in a Dick Whittington–like rise from poverty to prestige. One could surely interpret the political thrust of the game in this affirmative way, understanding that social rank is merely a matter of its trappings, and that meteoric social mobility is a possibility in play, if not in life. Yet I think that another tradition from which this kind of game derives suggests a different politics, one in which visual discernment is again centrally implicated. One of the few sanctioned spaces for ribald recreations in early modern Europe was that of Carnival, the pre-​Lenten festival in which all of the standard hierarchies and ordering systems were temporarily transgressed or inverted. An almost invariable feature of these events, which took on local variations throughout Christendom, was the coronation of a pauper as King for a Day, presumably upsetting the well-​ordered political universe. Yet, as Bakhtin asserts, this carnivalesque inversion can occur only within a society in which class structures are secure, where the king is so surely the king that this mockery poses no actual threat to the established order.22 On the contrary, the temporary transgression served elites well as a kind of safety release, in which the hostility of the ruled masses would be expressed symbolically and lightheartedly in the sanctioned space of play, rather than by revolutionary action in the streets. And while this legacy was somewhat less pronounced in Protestant England than in its Catholic counterparts on the Continent, many of the structures of Carnival were nevertheless present in vestigial form in the

FIGURE 3

The Habit Makes the Man. The Ranks and Dignities of British Society, c. 1820s. Twenty-​five faceless costume cards that fit over card with figure of beggar, transforming him into various British dignitaries. Cards hand-​drawn and colored in pen and ink, pencil, and watercolor. Yale Center for British Art.

popular culture of the nation, not least in the kind of games exemplified by the one to which I allude.23 The heritage of Carnival indicates that we should pay particular attention to the transience of the beggar’s identities. His mobility will not lead to a secure position among the aristocracy; rather, the fact that mobility is itself the basis of a game, something rendered laughably impossible, indicates that hierarchical rigidity, not flexibility, is the ethos of this diversion. This beggar doesn’t even achieve the title of King for a Day; King for a Few Seconds would have to suffice. In an era when the unprecedented fortunes won by those engaged in commerce—​of money earned rather than inherited—​began to dwarf the residual ancient emoluments of the aristocracy, social mobility was a more immediate concern than in England’s earlier, feudal society. The idea that

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a lowborn magnate might, through the accumulation of worldly goods and appurtenances, gain the appearance of an aristocrat was particularly galling to the old guard. As Dickens tartly noted of the “bran-​new house” of the nouveau riche Veneering clan in Our Mutual Friend, “[A]ll things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings.”24 Indeed, a complex system of deciphering the class of such newly polished industrialists was developed in the public discourse, and telling a born gentleman from a self-​made one was often cast in perceptual terms, of being able to tell what was beneath the surface of opulence. These skills are remarkably incarnated in our game, for underneath the duke or marquess is the “true” identity of the beggar. That is the one guise that cannot be peeled away, no matter how many cards are in the deck. At bottom, this is not so much a tale of social mobility as one of the importance of spotting the social climber, of recognizing the visual incongruities between his deep-​down self and the luxurious garb he has so impertinently assumed. Industry and industriousness had their place in modern Britain, but they had their limitations too, and this loaded game embodies the paradoxical message offered to the young in this age of economic expansion: that the visual skills cultivated to calibrate a productive rising generation were the same ones that enabled its members to see the political and social limitations of their advancement. The titles of a few contemporary games indicate this tendency, from “Every Man to His Station” to “Who Wears the Crown?”—​a rhetorical question for which the response was as obvious as it was inevitable.

“ h i s e ye s ar e h i s m a r k e t ”

In his revealing essay “Civilisation,” of which we have already taken note, John Stuart Mill implied a linkage between the atrophy of the individual’s sensory capacity and the rise of a peculiarly economic form of deception. His confidant Alexander Bain remarked in his summary of the essay that Mill “regards as consequences of our civilization, the decay of individual energy, the weakening of the influence of superior minds, the growth of charlatanerie, and the diminished efficacy of public opinion.”25 It was a common enough refrain. In 1830, that pointed purveyor of scientific reason, The Lancet, printed an unsigned note that seemed to express the exasperation of its presumed readership:

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London is never without its grand curiosity or its sight. The living skeleton, the mermaid, the great live elephant, and the great dead elephant, have all had their day; every kind of humbug seems to flourish in succession. The gullibility of John Bull is insatiable. . . . [T]he King of Humbugs, [is] not satisfied with extracting gold from the pockets of poor Mr. Bull, but extracts silver from his brain.26 Whether it was truly the case, as one astonished Frenchman would assert, that “England is the classic ground of ‘Puffs,’ ”27 commercial deceptions assumed an absolutely central position in quotidian experience in midcentury London.28 And the extraction of lucre from the pockets and skulls of the everyman was an expression of a fully liberalized economy, one in which an economic actor

had only his own abilities to rely upon to avoid being duped. The authoritative commentator on matters of English law, Sir William Blackstone, pointed in his definition of the doctrine of caveat emptor to its decidedly visual dimensions: “The rule is expressed by the phrase caveat emptor,—​let the buyer beware. His eyes are his market.”29 As the legal adjunct to the ideology of laissez-​faire economy, caveat emptor became the ideal means to express the disapprobation of buyers of goods who had failed to exercise visual judgment, only to rely on the courts to recoup their investments. As one contemporary treatise put it, “Where the vendor affirms that the thing sold has not a defect, which is a visible one, and obvious to the senses, the rule caveat emptor, is applicable.”30 Further, since “in a purchase without warranty, a man’s eyes, taste, and senses must be his protection” from deception,31 he must not look to the courts for redress “if its intrinsic worth do[es] not correspond with its outward appearance.”32 Because “the discernment of such defects is frequently a matter of skill,” the law must not penalize those who discern or reward those who fail to do so, for such interference would artificially banish a necessary mode of judgment from the marketplace. One account summed up the fundamental value of this legal doctrine: “It cautions the buyer, therefore, according to the Italian proverb, ‘that he has need of a hundred eyes, but the seller of only one.’ ”33 Richard Altick, in his truly magisterial Shows of London, incisively characterized the tacit agreement that governed the culture of deception as “caveat spectator.”34 Since Altick’s groundbreaking (and in many ways unequaled) research into the exhibitionary culture of modern London, an unusually rich body of literature has emerged on the role of commercial deception. Although much of this work has focused on the somewhat unrepresentative figure of P. T. Barnum, it has nevertheless been especially useful in proposing what Neil Harris called the “operational aesthetic” of such deceptions. Under this system, “The objects inside the museum, and Barnum’s activities outside, focused attention on their own structures and operations . . . and enabled—​or at least invited—​audiences and participants to learn how they worked.”35 Barnum’s perfection of this maneuver has had the effect of submerging a bewildering array of less successful but equally revealing iterations.36 A particular subset of “humbugs”37 that would become especially germane to the position of the photographic in this culture of visual discernment were those that entailed telling the difference between the natural and artificial (fig. 4).38 Benjamin Silliman, the American chemist and visitor to London, wrote of a figure of Sleeping Beauty on display at Mme. Tussaud’s that “her bust, with her dress, rises and falls so naturally with the respiration, that you instinctively move softly, lest she should be disturbed in her slumber.”39 And in the same venue, spectators would have their tickets collected by the famed hôtesse, only to be confronted a few paces later by her waxworks doppelganger.40 In one year alone, two simulacral Napoleons appeared in different exhibitions in London: one resting in full regalia on a couch, breathing visibly, the other at a re-​creation of the tomb of Frederick the Great.41 Of the former, newspaper accounts typically sought to blend their wonder at the mechanical accomplishment of illusion with a dose of concern for the ramifications of such a complete deception. Recalling Brewster, one commentator ominously wondered, “Had the Romish monks of old possessed this secret of animating

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FIGURE 4

Theodore Lane, Automaton Exhibition, Gothic Hall, Haymarket, 1826. Etching and aquatint. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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lay figures, to what extend might they not have carried their pious frauds upon the ignorant and credulous of their followers!”42 The credulity demanded by the properly discriminating viewer of the respiring emperor became only more urgent when the fashion for “artist” automata reached London. Like his many wax-and-​wire kin on the London scene, the “Automaton Artist, Prosopographus” was himself an object of sensitive attention. But, unusually, his appearance is made even more pointed since his own visual productions, too, invited a heightened degree of visual discernment.43 In the words of one review, “The automaton represents a man splendidly attired, seated on a couch beneath a canopy; in its hand is a pencil,” which he employs “to draw an outline resemblance of any person that is placed before it.”44 But most strikingly among all such mechanisms were the performances of a pseudoautomaton called the Corinthian Maid, “that exquisite little automaton artist” (fig. 5).45 As Geoffrey Batchen and Victor Burgin have both argued, few figures would have as intense a resonance for the practice of early photography as the Corinthian Maid, who, in anticipation of the departure of her lover, traced his shadow on a wall.46 The morphological similarities of the Corinthian Maid’s activities to photogenic drawing are obvious, but the events taking place on the Strand were remarkable for even more salient reasons. First, this Corinthian Maid was a decidedly commercial one who would create a profile of any visitor for a shilling. But more fascinating, although her exhibitors touted a “Mechanism within the Automaton being so arranged as to produce a mathematical transcript of a shadow,” there seems little doubt that that mechanism was in fact a human artist, concealed within the machinic form that was itself an imitation of a living—​if legendary—​human being.

FIGURE 5

That Exquisite Little Automaton Artist. Called the Corinthian Maid, c. 1830. Handbill. National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield.

This Corinthian Maid—​more than Wright of Derby’s famous painted iteration—​occupies the intersection of two deeply intertwined problems that this study traces, for it is here that the task of visual discernment and the properties of agency attributed to an image-​maker come into contact. For the members of her audience, the two activities became inseparable, since discerning whether the Maid is truly mechanical or instead conceals a living artist is a prerequisite for adjudicating her exhibitor’s boast that she produces “a mathematical transcript of a shadow.” What guarantees are furnished by this supposed automaticity, and to what desires do they respond? Is it not the greater feat that a human being, sequestered uncomfortably within the shell of the automaton, was in fact the source of this mathematical precision? Whether or not one could detect the imposture—​could locate the human hand amid the

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supposedly mechanical output of the Maid—​would determine the authority attributed to the representations produced.

the commerce in discernment

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The first decades of photography were contemporary with a period of extraordinary ambivalence about the nature of illusion and its role in a modern urban culture whose identity consisted in large part of the revelation of those forces—​ physical, chemical, and biological—​which undergirded the lived experience of its populace. What constituted “the real” was undergoing a thorough reevaluation.47 Experimental science moved from the drawing rooms of gentlemen amateurs into a set of public venues that determined the nature of visible truths not through the illusionary obfuscation long favored by crown and altar, but by way of the apparently antithetical public revelation of evidentiary realities. The egalitarian ethos of observational scientific experiments appealed to the newly visually enfranchised working classes as a means of attaining advancement through less drastic means than political revolution, and, simultaneously, to institutional authorities by promoting concomitant stability. For Alfred Russel Wallace, among the most brilliant and erratic scientific figures in modern history (who today is unjustly remembered as Darwin’s also-​ran in the articulation of a theory of natural selection), the democratic epistemology of empirical observation had a forceful political significance, and appeared in rather surprising places. Even in a pursuit that, to our sensibility, seems antagonistic to empiricism, Wallace saw the freedom of individual judgment: “The cardinal maxim of Spiritualism is, that every one must find out the truth for himself.” For a vast array of mid-​Victorian thinkers of a variety of intellectual persuasions, their programs relied to an unusual degree on what Peter Pels has called “a visualist conception of admissible evidence.” Pels argues persuasively about “the morality of empiricism,” and its connection to reformist politics, of the presumed link between observation and independence. He writes that when, as a boy, Wallace was dispatched to London and to the care of his brother, an apprentice carpenter, the two inquisitive working-​class lads passed their evenings at a “Hall of Science,” which Wallace would later describe as “a kind of club or mechanics’ institute for advanced thinkers among workmen.”48 It is not surprising in the least that a young man essentially reared in such a venue would come to maturity imbued with a deep sense of the role of visual judgment, and the concomitant belief in the democratic potential embodied in establishing the relevant proficiency. The rising interest in scientific knowledge among the working classes was fostered most directly by Mechanics’ Institutes, which had begun in the 1820s and had expanded to more than seven thousand chapters by the 1850s (fig. 6).49 These were settings constituted primarily to curb drunkenness, crime, and profligacy among the laborers whose efforts drove the industrial economy, demonstrating to the workers the scientific bases of their trades and consequently making them more efficient at their toil.50 What was remarkable about the Mechanics’ Institutes was the fact that they achieved this definitive political tractability of workers by virtue of expanding—​at least provisionally—​ those audiences certified to judge the veracity of their own visual experiences.

FIGURE 6

William Chester Walker, after Sir Humphry Davy, London Mechanics’ Institute, Southampton Buildings, Holborn: the Interior of the Laboratory, in a Cellar, 1828. Wood engraving. Wellcome Library, London.

In many ways, this movement reached its apotheosis with the foundation in 1838 of the Polytechnic Institution of London, which later enjoyed the patronage of the Prince Consort, eagerly adding “Royal” to its moniker.51 The prospectus for the Royal Polytechnic asserted that “it has been deemed desirable by many persons friendly to science, to establish in the western part of London, an Institution where the Public, at little expense, may acquire (by means of a Laboratory, Experiment Rooms, and a Gallery for the exhibition of novel inventions) a practical knowledge of the various arts and branches of science connected with Manufactures, Mining Operations, and Rural Economy.”52 There was little doubt about how these objectives were to be most efficiently achieved, for “the education of the eye is, undeniably the most important object in elementary education,” and the young industrial worker’s exposure to the “sectional and working models of the Institution will teach him a lesson he can never forget” (fig. 7). This tuition was embodied in an expansive range of demonstrations that mixed, often uneasily, the revelation of natural phenomena with the deceptive possibilities for those very occurrences. As the prospectus noted, on one typically productive afternoon, visitor could view “Novel Effects of the Fire—​Three Hundred Houses burnt—​being a Magnificent New Series of Dissolving Views, to which has been lately added magnificent effects of the fire at London Bridge,” followed immediately in the same room by a demonstration of “Faraday’s discoveries in Electricity, shown by improved apparatus and induction coil [and] Gassiot’s cascade, by which the electric fluid is made to assume volumes of beautiful colours,” and through which the newly improved dissolving views evidently gained their enhancement.53 The Polytechnic’s hybridity attests to the difficulty of maintaining the entranced spectatorship that the Mechanics’ Institutes desired to fashion once nominally educative visual experiences entered the province of profit-​making

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FIGURE 7

Great Hall of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, c. 1840s. Lithograph. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

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venues.54 Funded by an initial offering of hundred-​pound shares, the Polytechnic was nothing if not an ambitious capitalist enterprise, and it sought to enrich its shareholders by appealing to precisely the provisional visual agency granted in the context of the solemn scientific demonstration. While the workingman could be rendered a more efficient and politically compliant producer by the revelatory experience of scientific experiments, the discernment of the visual required by those activities made him the ideal consumer of entertainments that thematized that very ability, which engaged his recently honed sense of visible realities and deceptions. This transition was lampooned in what is surely the most memorable fictional account of a day passed at the Polytechnic, Dickens’s “Mr. Whelks Combining Instruction with Amusement,” published in his serial All the Year Round.55 Dickens’ working-​class everyman, Joe Whelks, wanders through the Polytechnic, viewing a dazzling array of entertainments whose didactic value seems to be rather marginal. When the disheveled master of ceremonies introduces “some further and wonderful discoveries of Sir David Brewster,” Dickens’s narrator acerbically doubts the relevance of such a program: “As to Mr. Whelks, if here were not already acquainted with the instrument, he would scarcely be rendered a better citizen, or better fitted for the seven-​pound franchise, by witnessing the formation of patterns on a sheet by the agency of a magic lantern.”56 The visit concludes with a damning epitaph, hissing that “the effort to combine very mild amusement with very feeble science was, in its result, not quite worthy of a Royal Institution founded for the diffusion of useful knowledge combined with pleasant entertainment.”57

The intertwined, and oftentimes competing, agendas of politics and profit inherent in an operation like the Polytechnic are indicative of the ambivalence of public deception and revelation in the age of photography’s nascence. These were the spaces with which photography intersected most prominently in its first decade, representing an addition to a network of visual experiences that seemed to hold the promise of seeing for oneself. And it was from photography’s very genesis—​within just a few months of its “invention”—​that the Polytechnic served as the most important stage for the new medium and its foray into the terrain of visual persuasion. By 1840, photography (both daguerreotypes and calotypes) had achieved a place of pride among the Polytechnic’s cornucopia of visual illusion. So central was this venue in the first years of photography that William Henry Fox Talbot, who otherwise kept a monopolistic stranglehold on his invention in Britain, made an exception for the Polytechnic, allowing its directors to perform demonstrations of the process for the edification of its public.58 Even in that first year the photograph had been enmeshed comfortably within this matrix (fig. 8). The institution’s catalogue attests to this surprisingly unelevated position: “the process of gilding and silvering by Electricity, the Daguerreotype and Photographic Portraits, the Calotype, Bain’s Electro-​Magnetic Telegraph, the Dissolving Views, Opaque Microscope, the Physioscope, and the Proteoscope.”59 In March of the following year, the first commercial photographic portrait studio in Britain opened in the top story of the Polytechnic, taking advantage of its fine northern exposure. Its proprietor, the former grocer Richard Beard, had obtained the exclusive franchise for Daguerre’s process in the British Isles and, under the immediate direction of the Polytechnic’s lecturer on optics and its consulting chemist, the operation flourished, marking a beginning of commercial photography (fig. 9).60 That the two men ultimately responsible for the inaugural commercial daguerreotypes in Britain, John Frederick Goddard and J. T. Cooper, split their time between the photographic studio upstairs and the demonstration of scientific illusions to the working classes downstairs underlines the remarkable adjacency of photography, in its earliest exposure, to these pursuits and their visual logic. Immersed as they were in this ambiance, photographs must have seemed, to their initial makers and viewers, to fall under the same roof as a long-​standing, but rapidly shifting, terrain of visual deception and conviction, and not as an isolated medium with a referential status that was beyond the grasp of the beholder. When Beard shrewdly advertised his ability to produce a “truth-​like picture,”61 photography was inserted into the ambivalent landscape of visual persuasion to which the Polytechnic had become a monument. The situation of photography against this background of commercialized visual discrimination comports with much recent scholarship on the role of public science in the Victorian era. In the introduction to their important collection of case studies, historians of science Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman have described this milieu as “a marketplace in which all sorts of scientific activities and experiences are on offer alongside the full range of other popular cultural forms.”62 This is, they claim, “a powerful image because it gives agency not only to those who create and market their products but also and especially to those who choose between them.” This new scholarly attention

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FIGURE 8

Poster listing the offerings of the Polytechnic Institution, c. 1840. Reproduced with the permission of the University of Westminster Archive.

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to the relative agency of viewers in the nineteenth century is an important, if potentially extreme, corrective to some of the dominant accounts of the historiography of photography of the last quarter century. It encourages us to revisit the primary set of assumptions guiding this orthodox history, and to inquire anew whether photography might ever be the vehicle for a truly bottom-​ up visual epistemology, or whether its immanent features would always make it vulnerable to the coercion of institutional powers. If the peril and promise of a differentiated subjectivity was the catalyst for the proliferation of spaces of visual discernment, were these, or any, venues permitted a truly emancipatory mode of visuality? Some of the most provocative and important scholarship of the previous generation that addressed

FIGURE 9

Richard Beard’s trade card for his photographic studio at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London, c. 1840. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

photography with theoretical sophistication was impressed by a decidedly Foucauldian stamp, and was accordingly doubtful about the possibility of resistance by the individual to institutional power.63 This appealing and dominant account assumes that photography’s status existed securely within a susceptible and monolithic viewership of the subjugated, among whom there was neither the ability nor the willingness to interrogate the nature of the images that compelled their submission. Such an approach takes for granted a state of equilibrium between the credulity of the viewer and the conviction of the institutions of power that the photograph would command such belief. However, it is not possible to reconcile the absolutely central role granted to the liberation of visual judgment with these accounts of domination rooted in an undifferentiated consensus about photography’s objectivity. Indeed, such a form of

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domination would have been entirely inimical to the political philosophy that characterized the sources of institutional power in the middle of the century.

d e c e p t i o n s o f po w e r, de ce pt i on s of re s i s t an ce

The most consequential of the earlier studies, John Tagg’s Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, indicated even in the plurals of its title the major premise of the book: What alone unites the diversity of sites in which photography operates is the social formation itself: the specific historical spaces for representation and practice which it constitutes. Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. . . . It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such.64

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The pioneering claim that emerges from Tagg’s text—​that photography exists resolutely and irreducibly within the field of the institutional forces that mobilize it—​remains an extraordinarily persuasive critical insight. Yet if we are to understand this field with greater historical specificity, it is essential to recover the extent to which one of the primary ways that institutional power did deploy the photograph was by making its status questionable, by carving out a space congenial to individual visual discernment and, ostensibly, to a correlative kind of autonomy. Some important recent scholarly interventions can help us to see this dimension more clearly. As Kate Flint has astutely remarked in her Victorians and the Visual Imagination, we must recognize that while the “hegemonic power of Western scopic techniques” performs the work of surveillance, those very “apparatuses can be remarked on as affecting domestic understandings of selfhood.”65 More particularly, the ambitious book by Chris Otter entitled The Victorian Eye has addressed the social ramifications of this duality. What this work elucidates is how the “liberal subject” of the middle of the century is defined by the possession of certain capacities, like the ability to “be clean, to read at night, to move at speed, to fight infection.”66 Otter argues that making these capacities possible is “a positive act” that needs to be thought of as “the foundation of a liberal subjectivity” that would be “stimulated and secured in a fundamentally noncoercive way.”67 Most crucially for our purposes, he makes the case that “these visual modalities required active, attentive agents rather than the abject, docile products of the panopticon. Their fundamentally nondisciplinary, nontotalizing and nonpanoptic morphology, and their conscious reliance on subjective agency defines them as liberal.”68 With his neologism “nonpanoptic,” Otter signals a dissatisfaction with some of the tidier Foucauldian accounts of the formation of subjectivity, and these certainly have their parallels in the history of photography. Indeed, this is a central respect in which Disillusioned fundamentally departs from some of the predecessors to which it is most indebted.69 Where many earlier accounts emphasized the primacy

of structural elements in the formation of photography’s authority, and where Otter emphasizes the agency of individual actors, I argue that it is precisely the contest between these two positions that informs the interaction of makers and users of Victorian photographs.70 It is my claim, in other words, that photography is a key mechanism through which the relative agency of individuals in modern society was negotiated. In this way photography accommodated the internal contradictions of the liberal capitalist enterprise in which it was enmeshed. The laissez-​faire ethos of liberal capitalism did not permit the kind of brute instrumentalization of photography that has been widely depicted. To the contrary, it was through the ostensive liberty of visual discernment, and the permissive interrogation of photographic objectivity through which this facility was exercised, that the ethic of self-​interest and its pursuit was made into a natural state of affairs. The individualism—​indeed, the “democracy”—​of capitalism was the construction through which a bourgeois elite enshrined the inequalities that had enabled its ascent. And, as Pierre Bourdieu has noted, “the charismatic representation of art experience never fulfills its function of mystifying so well as when it resorts to a ‘democratic’ language.”71 The notion that the perception of visual representations is equally the province of all citizens disregards the disparity of education and attendant initiation into the codes of comprehension that exist in bourgeois society. It suggests that the decipherment of these representations depends not upon a socially determined consciousness, but upon the attainments of the individual will. Such a system is commensurable with the variability of experience at the center of perceptual researches and the self-​empowering venues of visual instruction, as well as the free-​market ideology of political economy. This system required more of the photograph than the brute force of its unquestioned powers of conviction: it demanded a network within which the visual judgment of an individual might be exercised to make that decision for himself. If the history of photography is to constitute anything more ambitious than a genealogy of a particular technological and aesthetic métier, it will be by recovering its privileged and contemporaneous relationship to some of the most fundamental questions of how knowledge is produced, and how social forms as apparently immutable as “the individual” are negotiated around the historical specificities of that production. My exploration of the images, episodes, debates, and protagonists that constitute the following chapters begins from this premise.

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c h a p t e r

t w o

Shadowy Organization Combination Photography, Illusion, and Conspiracy

the first practitioners to recognize how easily the photograph might be manipulated, and to seize upon the possibilities of this vulnerability, were not the many innovative digital artists working today, nor were they the renowned modernists who cultivated photomontage early in the twentieth century. A pair of photographers who appear on the scene in 1850s Britain, and who would go on to produce some of the most controversial images of the nineteenth century, make stronger claims to that distinction. Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson wagered their commercial success on the proposition that viewers would be able, and indeed interested, to engage with photography in a way that was predicated from the start upon a recognition of its fundamentally mediated status.1 The process of composite photography or, as it was termed in the voluminous debates that greeted its proliferation in the 1850s, “combination” printing, represents one of the most intriguing of the photographic developments that suggest the limitations of our current perspective. This innovative technique, through which practitioners sought to overcome photography’s technological limitations by assembling portions from distinct photographic sources into a single coherent tableau, elicited a contentious discourse about the camera’s truth-​telling capacities and this seemingly hostile hybrid reality.2 As the critical response to the combination photographs of Rejlander and Robinson attests, fashioning one image out of several troubled the early conception of photography, as the properties of neutrality and objectivity were quickly undermined by images that had no holistic referent in reality. The commitment of the nineteenth-​century viewer to the unalloyed reality of the camera, an assumption upon which so much of our understanding of the visual culture of the period has comfortably rested, is one that these

often-​neglected images compel us to reconsider. In particular, recovering the status of these photographs as “worked” objects, as things that are the result of human labor rather than the imprint of nature and, therefore, vulnerable to manipulation, will help us to understand the complex social and political associations that the medium generated. It is especially instructive, then, to examine the parallel rhetorics of photographic and labor conflicts in the 1850s in Britain, with particular reference to the most controversial combination image of the period: Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life, exhibited in 1857 at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition (fig. 10). The explicit theme of this photograph—​which was also implicitly that of the event in which it was initially displayed—​was the two possibilities of existence for workers in modern industrial Britain: as one critic present at the exhibition put it, to be “a criminal in the grip of the police” or to be toiling “industriously in the workshop.”3 Hope in Repentance, as Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life was initially titled, was in fact composed of more than thirty negatives, and depicts a bearded sage guiding two young men through an archway set against a rustic vignette. Newly arrived in the city, they are confronted by two very disparate scenes, which represent the choice that every young man must make in the modern economy. The prologue of a text that Rejlander had almost certainly read and upon which his photograph may in some schematic way be based, G. W. M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1846), chronicled the divergent paths of two young workingmen in a modern industrial city: “From this city of strange contrasts branch off two roads, leading to two points totally distinct the one from the other. One winds its torturous way through all the noisome dens of crime, chicanery, dissipation, and voluptuousness; the other meanders amidst rugged rocks and wearisome acclivities, it is true, but on the wayside are the restingplaces of rectitude and virtue.”4 The left-​hand side of the composition consists of social actors who embody those temptations that can befall the rebellious: a prostitute, a bacchante, a murderer, a group of idlers, and a pair of men hunched over a gambling table (fig. 11). The culminating figure of these enticements at the extreme left of the photograph leaves no doubt about the future of those who succumb: a pinioned man being taken away, that “criminal in the grip of the police.” The wayward youth seems already to have yielded to the women who stand before him, embarking on a journey that will lead inevitably to a carceral fate. The antithetical possibilities that unfold before the second youth—​allegorical groups indicating religion, marriage, good works, and mental application—​conclude at the far right with an industrious group of workers: the carpenter at his bench, the mechanic wielding his hammer, and a woman weaving a textile (fig. 12). Despite the vitality of the political valences with which Rejlander’s image engaged, the intensity of the reaction to The Two Ways of Life has traditionally been understood in precisely the apolitical terms that his critics offered at the time. The dominant analysis was then, and has continued to be, that the photograph offended the prudish sensibilities of contemporary viewers who believed that the entire scene—​of debauched nude women in the company of impressionable young men—​was a single one taken from life. As Malcolm Daniel has put it, “the supposed impropriety of Rejlander’s image lay in the implied truthfulness of the image in toto—​the fear that Rejlander had staged exactly such a scene in order to photograph it. . . . [T]he moral criticism of

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Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life, 1857. Albumen print. Photo: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, New York.

FIGURE 10

FIGURE 11

Detail of Figure 10. FIGURE 12

Detail of Figure 10.

the photograph was largely criticism of the presumed theatrical event.”5 And yet, there was a message encoded in both the pictorial subject matter and in the novel technical form through which it was expressed that would ultimately prove to be far more problematic for the photograph’s social and institutional contexts than the mere showing of skin. The shrill pitch of the commentary that greeted this work suggests another set of stakes particular to the combination photograph. It was a practice whose properties seemed to reify with uncomfortable precision the ambivalent nature of the broader political projects in which photography had been enlisted, of harnessing the act of discernment to the management of the working class.6 The idiom in which this epistemological clash was issued was one with striking affinities to a contemporary political condition that likewise seemed to be destabilized by an invisible collusion: the organization of labor. Indeed, the very term used to describe these photographic agglomerations—“combinations”—​was one whose resonance would have been understood almost

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exclusively in relation to trade unionism. When William Lovett and John Collins drafted their epochal Chartism: A New Organization of the People in 1840, they envisioned a union of Britain’s working classes with recourse to this term, asserting that, to achieve their aims, “no other means are likely to be so effective as a combination of the millions.”7 This laudatory characterization of an organization of workers was matched by a more reactionary rhetoric in which a “combination” came to mean any undesirable conspiracy of men who sought, in the words of the Combination Acts, to “raise wages, or to increase or diminish the number of hours of work, or quantity of work, to be done.”8 The noted labor activist and historian George Howell wrote toward the end of the century that “strikes and lock-​outs were so prolific in the fifties” that the decade was “on the part of trade unions a struggle for existence as corporate bodies.”9 The corporeal metaphor here is hardly incidental, for the definition of the form of the trade union—​its constitution of parts and their concomitant visibility—​concerned both labor and conservative forces and was a task that Rejlander’s photograph seemed poised to engage. The shadow of this turmoil must have loomed over the Art Treasures exhibition, for the time and place of this putatively aesthetic display—​Manchester in 1857—​was the locus of the most serious threat to Britain’s industrial economy in generations. A financial crisis had spread from the United States and resulted in serious disruptions in the supply of raw cotton for Britain’s mills. Marx wrote ominously in his “Crisis in England”: “Seats of the British cotton industry limited their labor time to three days a week; a number of mills stopped their machines altogether; the disastrous reaction on other branches of industry was not wanting, and at this moment England trembles at the approach of the greatest economic catastrophe that has yet threatened her.”10 The crisis in the cotton industry was so inextricable from Manchester’s contemporary identity that a group of luminary members of the Society of Arts, on its visit to the Art Treasures exhibition, included in their itinerary trips to at least five of the city’s leading mills and manufactories.11 Teetering on the edge of this catastrophe, both elite and working-​class visitors would surely have been acutely attentive to any resonances of the crisis within the sanctuary of art, even if this required discarding certain closely held presumptions about photography’s objectivity.

c o t t a g e s o f c o n t e n t , palace s of product i v i t y

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The venues to which the photograph’s political didactic project had previously been entrusted were part of an elaborate network of ostensibly self-​empowering locales in which the working-​class viewer could be properly engaged. This period witnessed the reform of school curricula to include increased attention to observational science, a shift in the governance of scientific societies from aristocratic patrons to distinguished experimenters of increasingly diverse social positions, and, perhaps most crucially, the rising interest in scientific knowledge among the working classes fostered by Mechanics’ Institutes. Science, it was hoped, could ameliorate the need for the organization of laborers, for, as one contemporary commentator put it, “how surely science, at the call of

capital, will defeat every unjustifiable union which the laborers may form. . . . [W]hen capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility.”12 The egalitarian ethos of observational scientific experiments appealed to these newly visually enfranchised working classes as a means of attaining advancement through less drastic means than political revolution, and, simultaneously to institutional authorities by promoting concomitant stability. Presiding over this network in spirit if not in practice was Albert, Prince Consort, the paternal figure who sought to expose workers to the achievements of science and art. Indeed, the museum in South Kensington that now bears his name was specifically envisioned as a space that might provide these experiences in the service of the increased industrial efficiency of the nation.13 It was Prince Albert who, just a few months before the Manchester exhibition in 1857, propelled a still relatively obscure Wolverhampton photographer to national attention. The prince, an enthusiastic amateur photographer, summoned Rejlander to Buckingham Palace, where “he submitted to the inspection of His Royal Highness, a combination of sixteen figures which he has recently succeeded in producing for the forthcoming exhibition in Manchester.”14 The monarch, duly impressed, ordered three copies of Rejlander’s photograph to be displayed in his dressing room at each of the royal residences.15 The auspicious patronage afforded to Rejlander by Prince Albert can easily be seen within the broader context of the didactic projects that the royal adamantly championed, not least for the reason that the photograph the prince so admired evinced precisely the kind of instructive theme that was at the very center of his pragmatic benevolence. The topos of the photograph was one that had enjoyed a relatively prominent career in the broader networks of visual instruction to which Rejlander’s photograph at least obliquely made reference. A children’s game entitled The Cottage of Content: or, Right Roads and Wrong Ways (1848) dutifully took up the theme, displaying a labyrinthine trail with various perils and dead ends to which the immoral traveler might surrender, including the menacingly named “Punishment Path” and “Ruination Row” (fig. 13).16 A moralizing tract prepared around the same time warned that contentment was to be found in church and factory, and not in the tawdry “places of entertainment . . . which so injuriously abound in the suburbs of the gay metropolis.”17 In this admonitory lesson, vision is invested with considerable moral potential, and is opposed to the dissolute distraction offered by aural enticements. It cautioned, Should this pathetic narrative meet the eye of any young man who has already been lured by the siren voice of pleasure, to wander on such forbidden ground, I trust the affecting incidents here recorded will lead him to sober reflection, and induce him to retrace his steps before iniquity be his ruin. Or, if he is only approaching the fearful threshold; if his heart has not yet become hardened through the deceitfulness of sin; let this moving exhibition constrain him to pause; and to seek the aid of divine grace to enable him to withstand the allurements to a life of sinful pleasure, which would inevitably terminate in misery and disgrace.18

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FIGURE 13

William Spooner, The Cottage of Content; or, Right Roads and Wrong Ways, 1848. Lithograph, colored by hand, mounted on linen. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The denigrated paths of the game are likewise figured as being most dangerous to the visually susceptible, those unable to “withstand the allurements” of urban entertainments. Along “Gazer’s Row,” a family of peasants stares moronically and points at a pair of hot air balloons floating away; taking this path will cost the player, as he must “Pay 1 For a Sight.” The moral metaphor embodied in the geographic progress of the “right way” was already closely associated with avoiding the perils of credulity and distraction. This amusement sought to inculcate a logic of guided visual discernment, in which knowing what to make of what one encountered had very serious consequences for one’s arrival at the cottage of contentment, not to mention the shack of salvation. In The Two Ways of Life, this kind of directed looking is again privileged at the expense of the sonic distraction. The wayward youth slips away from his wise gatekeeper and cups his hand to his ear, intoxicated by the siren song of the female figure to his right. This initial temptation leads inevitably to the descent into the depraved byway populated by a grim cast of industrial-​ age reprobates. “Whoever, unaware, comes close and hears the Sirens’ voice,” Homer tells us, “will nevermore draw near his wife, his home, his infants: he’ll not share such joys again.” If, as Peter Sloterdijk asserts in his reading of the Odyssey, “The ear . . . is by nature the organ of gullible devotion to all things associated with the mother tongue, the fatherland,”19 the aural deception to which the young man has apparently succumbed tears him away from the salutary influence of his roots, and toward antisocial decadence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aurally saturated environment of the Victorian metropolis was a commonplace culprit for a range of urban maladies, both medical and moral. As the Times lamented, “There is no London nuisance equal to that of out-​door music! . . . O for a little quiet in London!”20 Pitted against this misguided foray into the insalubrious sensory milieu of sound is the pathway contemplated by the diligent young worker on the right side of the composition. Here, the conscientious youth who permits the mediation of his visual capacity by the bearded instructor is the privileged figure. This characterization betrays the central position that visual agency occupied in the instructive programs of which Rejlander’s photograph seems the apotheosis. Yet this model is strangely inconsistent with the neutrality that those pedagogic enterprises claimed for themselves, for it does not furnish its hero with visual autonomy, but rather requires that he abrogate his visual capacity to his learned elder. The mediation of vision that is posited by the photograph can be seen as standing for a much broader concern of the exhibition itself, and indeed of the entire industrial context within which Rejlander’s image operated. If the Virgilian figure, walking hand in hand with the industrious youth, furnished a kind of intervening visual guidance, the photograph’s viewer at the exhibition often arrived with a related sort of counsel in hand. The proliferation of guidebooks to the Art Treasures exhibition, both official and unauthorized, shared the common attribute of tendering the largesse of the learned author and his educated eye to the event’s working-​class visitors. One fairly representative text, the ambitiously titled How to See the Art Treasures Exhibition, to enable visitors to take a view, at once rapid and complete, of the Art Treasures Palace, written by the artist cum journalist W. Blanchard Jerrold, modulated this

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FIGURE 14

Cover, [James Taylor Staton], Bobby Shuttle and his Woife Sayroh’s Visit to Manchester un-th Greight Hert Treasures Palace, Owd-Traffort. Written for Bobby Hissel by th’ Hedditur oth’ “Bowton Luminary,” 1857. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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beneficence with an authoritarian itinerary: “It is our object to give the visitor a clear notion of the history of art, as shown in this Exhibition; and to this end we shall beg him to follow us straight down the nave to the transept and there, unmindful for the present of the many objects that may attract his eye, to turn sharply to the left.”21 A competing text likewise fretted that “on entering the Art Treasures Exhibition, the working man and his family appeared somewhat bewildered and dazzled” by the scene and graciously offered its insights.22 The visual agency of the uninitiated gently denigrated in these texts was forcefully lambasted by a series of parodic guides, supposedly written in the barely intelligible Lancastrian brogue of working-​class viewers. The cover of one memorable work, Bobby Shuttle and His Woife Sayroh’s Visit to Manchester Un-​Th Greight

Hert Treasures Palace, shows the two rubes finally arriving at the Exhibition, apparently quite in need of some of the sagacity peddled by Jerrold and his rivals (fig. 14). Indeed, a leitmotif of these works was the inability of these bumpkins to even make it to the exhibit; some picturesque event of street life inevitably distracted their gazes.23 Of course, these texts were clearly produced for those middle-​class viewers who (perhaps disdainfully) had to share the exhibition space with the uneducated rabble whose faux-​pas they might recognize in the provincial prattling of Bobby Shuttle. Those texts that purported to address the workers directly were likewise preoccupied with producing a mediated relationship between viewer and image, but they did so with far greater subtlety, by appealing to a more affirmative, but equally fraught, account of the worker in the modern industrial economy.

t h e f a nta s y o f t h e i n v i s i b l e h an d

As the almost exactly contemporary writings of Samuel Smiles and others make clear, the late 1850s witnessed a remarkable rise in the prestige accorded to manual laborers’ contributions to the industry. In 1858, Smiles lauded the “constant succession of noble workers—​the artisans of civilization” who “served to create order out of chaos in industry, science, and art.”24 This model of industry was one that demanded the unity of man and machine, the intervention of the human hand in the operation of those apparatuses that produced Britain’s wealth. Such a vision is evident not only in the toilers in Rejlander’s photograph, but equally in the apprehensiveness of the responses it elicited from its viewers. One critic denigrated the ambitions of The Two Ways of Life by asserting that photographs should not simply “be executed by a mechanical contrivance” alone, but through a collaborative endeavor with the human hand.25 And it was precisely the presence of Rejlander’s hand, of his manipulation of the ostensible neutrality of the photograph, that was at the very center of the ensuing critical firestorm. The ideal of industry that the photograph depicted and enacted, of a joint effort of hand and mechanical contrivance, collided with the nonintervention with which photography was associated and through which its power over the nation’s laborers had supposedly been secured. The equilibrium between the human laborer and his technological apparatus was not simply the key to industrial efficiency, but was imagined as a precondition of the kind of broader political stability under which that efficiency could prosper. The participants in earlier debates in the 1830s and 1840s upon the status of the worker’s presence had fantasized about the possibilities of a factory without laborers, most notoriously in Andrew Ure’s Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, in which he invoked a familiar trope in his utopian vision: “Whenever a process requires particular dexterity and steadiness of hand, it is withdrawn as soon as possible from the cunning workman, who is prone to irregularities of many kinds, and it is placed in charge of a peculiar mechanism, so self regulating that a child may superintend it. . . . [O]n the automatic plan, skilled labor gets progressively superseded, and will eventually be replaced by mere overlookers of machines.”26 As one scholar has noted, in the ambitious program of Ure’s manifesto it was hoped that “this new mechanical union would put an end to the folly of trade unions and

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secure a monopoly of coarse cotton fabrics to Great Britain.”27 And nowhere in Britain was this potential more salient than in the emerging center of the global cotton trade, for it was Manchester that would benefit from this new arrangement, or perish at the hands of its benighted predecessor. Ure’s replacement of man by machine was hardly without its adversaries, as the privileged position it receives in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), written by a son of a textile manufacturer and of Manchester, Friedrich Engels, attests. “Let us listen to the bourgeoisie speaking through the mouth of its chosen apostle, Dr. Ure,” whose proclamations, he insisted, were laced with “naive observation” about the consequences of mechanization.28 Engels writes with the passion of the crusading journalist, recounting the real costs of the industrial machines to which Ure attributed a pacifying force: “Besides the deformed persons, a great number of maimed ones may be seen going about in Manchester; this one has lost an arm or a part of one, that one a foot, the third half a leg. . . . In the year 1843, the Manchester Infirmary treated 962 cases of wounds and mutilations caused by machinery, while the number of all other accidents within the district of the hospital was 2,462, so that for five accidents from all other causes, two were caused by machinery.”29 The quite literal disappearance of the hand—​among other crucial parts—​is, in Engels’s account, not the source for the obviation of unions, but rather becomes the catalyst for their creation. He reminds us of the industrial proletariat that, “as a class, they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they resisted the introduction of machinery . . . later there took place a number of revolts against machinery . . . factories were demolished and machinery destroyed.” These nascent, violent reactions were ultimately indecisive, for “the machinery was introduced none the less.”30 It was from the imposition of these devices that “a new form of opposition had to be found,” and the very organizations that Ure had hoped to eviscerate were effectively reborn. Although the specific contours of the machine question had shifted by the 1850s, it is remarkable to note the persistence of the vexed issue of the relationship between the human hand and the increasingly autonomous apparatus. The proliferation of texts like Smiles’s indicate that while attention to the bottom-​up vector of scientific and technological advances provided a new veneration of the lowly laborer, the presence (or absence) of the hand remained a central explanatory motif of the industrial economy.31 Although a provisional parity had been achieved by virtue of the rise of Smiles’s “multitudes of smaller and less known men” and their contributions to industrial innovation, the laboring hand was nevertheless burdened with this consequential history of associations. Steve Edwards has provocatively juxtaposed Ure’s seemingly self-​producing industrial goods with William Henry Fox Talbot’s descriptions of the photograph in the first years of its history.32 If such affinities were present even in the infancy of photography, they culminate in the kind of picture that seemed to destabilize both the autogenesis of the image and the concomitant visions of labor with which political partisans had long invested it. In a demystifying discussion of the work presented before the Photographic Society of London the following year, Rejlander gave a detailed description of his photograph and the means by which its illusions were produced. What is particularly curious about the episode is the fact that it was only by reacting in such a way as to debunk this presumption of the photograph’s neutrality

FIGURE 15

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Study for The Two Ways of Life, 1857. Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

that Rejlander was able to restore its efficacy in the general didactic regimen of which the Manchester exhibition was an important installment. Rejlander asserted the central role of his manipulation of the image: “I carefully selected, and where I could I draped. I tried to show what was good and hide what was bad.”33 Such a description could have served as the motto for the entire system of instruction in which the photograph operated, yet crucially it was one rendered visible only in the aftermath, through a communication by the photographer. By failing to make the joins of his photograph visible within the work itself, Rejlander seemed to deny the centrality of human intervention that was a conceptual prerequisite to the model both of visuality and of productivity promoted by the exhibition. It was only when Rejlander explained and demonstrated that his photograph was anything but the neutral representation of a troubling scene that the furor died down. When The Two Ways of Life traveled throughout Great Britain during the two years following the Manchester exhibit, the demonstration of its composite nature became, quite surprisingly, its central attraction. In an exhibition at the Birmingham Photographic Society begun while the Art Treasures show was still drawing visitors, the full title in the catalogue directly revealed this feature, announcing “Two Ways of Life; or, Hope in Repentance, printed from 40 different negatives. (The celebrated Picture now Exhibiting at Manchester).” And throughout 1858, the photograph appeared almost exclusively broken down into its constituent photographic elements. At the London Photographic Society exhibit of that year, “Nine Studies from ‘The Two Ways of Life’ ” were shown, each available for five pounds apiece; a newspaper advertisement likewise offered for sale original “studies” as well as reduced copies of the entire tableau (figs. 15–16).34 The diplomacy of this term was dropped once the work reached Glasgow, which exhibited simply “Part of [the] Celebrated Two Ways of Life.” If these events placed the constructed status of the photograph at the center of their appeals, this status was reiterated most dramatically when the work traveled to Edinburgh the following year, and the organizers of

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FIGURE 16

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Study for The Two Ways of Life, 1857. Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

that exhibit repeated Rejlander’s metaphorical “draping” by covering the entire left-​hand side of the photograph with curtains, the ultimate index of mediation, reenacting upon the viewer the industrious youth’s surrender of visual agency. By 1869, the initial concealment of the photograph’s seams had been forgotten, for The Photographic News championed the work as the paradigm of openness. “The majority of photographers, and preeminently the best men,” the journal recounts, “do tell all they know, and are well satisfied that success does not depend upon secret dodges. . . . Rejlander and a host of others have repeatedly stated that they had no secrets.”35

“ a  pu b l i c l e s s e n g a ge d w i t h poli t i cs ”

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The exculpatory revelation of human intervention is thematized in a rich image that Rejlander produced a few years after the Manchester maelstrom. In a photograph provisionally entitled Did She? (c. 1862), we see Rejlander himself hunched over a seated man, apparently whispering a secret in his ear (fig. 17). We learn from an account by the journeyman critic of photography A. H. Wall that this photograph was an experiment in Rejlander’s ability to reveal, to make visible the nature of a secret communiqué. Wall recounted that the impetus for the image came from Rejlander’s witnessing such a whispered exchange, the specific nature of which was clearly indicated by the face of the recipient. The critic continues,

FIGURE 17

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Did She? c. 1860. Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

To test this, [Rejlander] invited the listener to his Hampstead studio to sit for a negative. When the focused plate was in the camera, and the sitter posed, he suddenly left the camera, and, putting his lips to his ear, whispered such a story therein as he imagined the original one to have been, while Mrs. Rejlander, at a signal he gave as pre-​arranged, uncapped the lens, just as the sitter, unconscious of her action, with the irrepressible and mischievous glee of a true scandalmonger, ejaculated the two expressive words which gave the resulting picture its title, “Did She?”36 Yet Rejlander’s composition strays from well-​established pictorial conventions of the subject it depicts, for the communicator of secret data is not seen in profile, but head-​on. We view just a sliver of Rejlander’s face, his right hand grasping an arm of the chair firmly, his left perched more precariously on his

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FIGURE 18

“Second Sight” trick of Jean-​Eugène Robert-​Houdin, c. 1852. Engraving. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

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companion’s back, as if peering back, through the man, at the camera he had momentarily abandoned to his wife. The limited role of Mrs. Rejlander’s contribution seems to reinforce the primacy of photographic neutrality: she merely uncaps the lens; no ejaculations are possible or necessary. Conversely, it is Mr. Rejlander’s body that assumes the pose of the real photographer, leaning over his apparatus, manipulating it skillfully to render a representation. It was this latter model that had exonerated Rejlander five years earlier, and in this photograph we again note that his intervention—​one that makes the nature of a secret visible to the viewer—​becomes the distinctive feature of his persona and of his production. As Wall was careful to note, while “the picture sprang from observation . . . the imagination was as quick as the perception.”37 Particular passages of The Two Ways of Life seemed to have crystallized a contemporary preoccupation with the political role of visual agency. When the great French magician Jean-​Eugène Robert-​Houdin arrived in England in the early 1850s, he brought with him his most renowned bit of legerdemain, which he suggestively called “Second Sight” (fig. 18). In this infamous trick, the conjuror would blindfold his young son and solicit from the audience objects of increasing obscurity. Despite his momentary visual incapacity, Robert-​Houdin fils would be able, through the agency of his father, to “see” the object and identify it to an astounded group of onlookers. When he performed in Manchester, he was surprised to find among his audience none of the sophisticates who regularly graced his Parisian show: “Manchester, as an eminent manufacturing city, counts its workmen by thousands. Well, these hardy artisans are all fond of the stage, and in their hand-to-​mouth existence they often give up one or two nights a week to this style of amusement.”38 Apparently these workers were eager for a kind of entertainment consonant with the Art Treasures exhibition. An engraving of the “Second Sight” illusion reiterates, through its echo of Rejlander’s picture, the vitality of the motif of proxy vision, of a productive relinquishing of the naive visual capacity of the child to that of the impresario. Having fled the turmoil of February 1848, Robert-​Houdin expressed his hope that he might find in England “a public less engaged with

politics, and consequently more apt to yield to the attraction of amusement,”39 but he entered instead into a visual milieu in which such distinctions were less easily drawn, in which even the apparent retreat from the regularities of factory life was infused with its instructive topoi. Why, then, was the concealed manipulation of The Two Ways of Life so incompatible with its didactic enterprise, and why did its subsequent revelation have such a salutary impact? It seems necessary, given the very manifest political aims of the Manchester exhibit, to move beyond the traditional account of the response to Rejlander’s photograph, and to attempt to locate these reactions more precisely within the expressly political framework of which they were a part. Doing so suggests that the primness of its viewers was hardly the central issue. Rather, these responses indicate that the discomfort the picture generated resulted from the fact that the combination photograph seemed to embody the signature attribute of precisely that group whose existence was antithetical to the photograph’s message, whose presence posed a considerable threat to the industrial stability of the nation and to the harmonized productivity of man and machine that was the rationale of the Manchester exhibition and the ethos of Rejlander’s public mea culpa.

“s ig na l s no t e v e n s e e n ”

The specter of combination is manifested most directly in The Two Ways of Life in the form of two figures who appear on the sinister side of the composition. Inserted between the men at their games of chance and the handcuffed criminal on his way to prison, we note two women whom Rejlander described with allegorical significance in his 1858 confessional to the Photographic Society: “Complicity whispers close behind.”40 This image, of two female confederates of questionable virtue communicating in secret, is not only a prescient preview of photographs like Did She? but also indicates the extent to which the ambivalent ethos of secrecy permeated Rejlander’s work and his social affairs. Rejlander, a Freemason, had produced in 1856 a photographic portrait of George Oliver, author of the organization’s instructional manual, which was subsequently engraved as the frontispiece to this text. The book prefaced by Brother Rejlander’s visual contribution was suffused with the centrality of steadfast secrecy to a Mason’s identity: “Masonic secrecy is a mysterious thing—​it has never been divulged. The most tattling man, if he be a Mason, keeps the secret. There is no risk of him. Enrage, discipline, expel—​he never tells! Mad, drunk, or crazy—​he never tells. Does he talk in his sleep? It is not about Masonry. Bribe him in his wants—​tempt him in his pleasure—​threaten him, or torture him, he will endure being a martyr, but—​he never tells!”41 Rejlander’s penchant for secret societies would ultimately dovetail with his photographic interests, when he became the vice chancellor of the Solar Club, an organization described in a similarly amorphous way by a contemporary: “Many of our readers may not have heard of the existence of a conclave of photographers which flourishes under the designation of the Solar Club. It is a strictly private institution, and all its proceedings are considered confidential. Hence we are prohibited from explaining with any degree of fullness the

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nature of its aims, ceremonies, and compacts.”42 These compacts, into which Rejlander had himself entered, apparently furnished him with a rich iconography of inveiglement. While he may have consigned the complicit confidantes to the cautionary side of the photograph, their very presence must have seemed to reiterate iconographically that which the composition had embodied structurally: an illegibility of communication that was inimical to the expansive aspirations of the project being undertaken in Manchester. Indeed, as the enforcement of anticombination legislation was tightened in the 1850s, it became clear that the dimension of these groupings that troubled industrial magnates and conservative commentators most palpably was their imperceptibility, and the extent to which the coherent and formidable force they constituted as a whole was comprised of an illegible and unquantifiable grouping of component parts. A central preoccupation of the antiunion texts of the period were the oaths of secrecy entered into by union members,43 an act that simultaneously bonded men together and concealed the nature of those bonds. A prerequisite of constituting such a network was the obligation to deny its very existence if interrogated. One such vow was characterized in the following way: “The oath was more vicious in its nature, introducing something about punishment and abhorrence of . . . a man who enters at a reduction of wages during a strike, or (what is a greater offense) by revealing the names of the secret committee.”44 These oaths, this author continues, “rendered it exceedingly difficult to obtain evidence in crimes connected with union conspiracies.”45 Even if a member of the union could be implicated in organizing, or even in sabotage, the nature of his relationship to the larger network would be illegible; the destabilizing activities could continue unabated. This illegible web was not merely an abstract danger; it was a very concrete hazard that was articulated in the abundant legal challenges brought against nascent unionism from the late 1830s. Indeed, as a recent study of the Glasgow spinners strike of 1838 has established, the primary mode of accusing the unions was to emphasize their affinities with the practices of secret societies.46 The indictment makes this fixation clear: “that they did ‘wickedly and feloniously conspire, confederate, and agree together, to set fire to, or attempt to set fire to the cotton mill’ by hiring an unnamed person . . . that they moved to appoint ‘a secret select committee, or a secret committee,’ the members of which were chosen ‘by ballot, or lot, or some other secret mode’ . . . that they did ‘wickedly and feloniously hire, engage, instigate, or direct’ certain unnamed members of the spinners’ union to assault David Gray and Edward Kean.”47 The opacity of the means by which the confederations were accomplished was not simply the rhetorical vehicle of the charges. The point on which the determination of guilt of conspiracy would turn was not only whether the actions alleged had been taken, but whether they had been accomplished by virtue of an agreement of two or more men. It was the burden of those who opposed the unions to make manifest the amorphous structural relationship among its members. In a very real sense, this manifestation was the evidentiary means by which the efforts of organized workingmen could be rendered impotent. The contours of the secret societies to which labor unions were likened were ones codified, to a considerable extent, in an essay that was written by Thomas De Quincey in 1847 and, revitalized by contemporary debates,

reprinted with some additions in 1858. He begins with a rumination whose rhetoric will by now be familiar: [S]mall fraternities of men forming themselves as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex of society; communicating silently in broad daylight by signals not even seen, or, if seen, not understood, except among themselves; and connected by the link either of purposes not safe to be avowed or by the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for their reception, are forced to retire, possibly for generations, behind thick curtains of secrecy. To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime; to come down hidden amongst crowds from distant generations is doubly sublime.48 Reacting to the Abbé Barruel’s infamous exposé on the machinations of the Jacobins,49 De Quincey recalls his predisposition to consider “every man that wrote a book . . . an essentially good man, being a revealer of hidden truth.”50 Somewhat chagrined by his youthful credulity, De Quincey registers the insufficiency of his skepticism of this account of the hidden instigators in a curious idiom. “I believed everybody as well as everything. And, indeed, the very starting-​point of my too importunate questions was exactly that incapacity of scepticism—​not lurking any jealousy that even part might be false, but confidence too absolute that the whole must be true.”51 He continues, “I believed in the aggregate of what he said; rebelliously I contradicted each separate sentence.”52 The mode used to describe the kind of belief compelled by Barruel’s account is strikingly commensurate with the subject of his study. The disparity of conviction between the components and the aggregate of his account mirrors that central feature of the secret societies themselves: the obscurity of the relationship of part to whole, a network like a cancer whose “horrid claws, spurs, or roots . . . connected itself with distant points, running underground, as it were, baffling detection and defying radical extirpation.”53 Amid the urgencies of contemporary politics, the combination seemed to be more than an undesirable gathering; it was simultaneously a fertile model for the structure of conviction itself.

ind u s tr y’s co r r e c t i v e v i si o n

The revelation of previously unseen bonds was from the outset a central tenet of the reception of the Art Treasures exhibition itself. Inspired in part by the dogged work of Gustav Waagen in combing the nation’s private art collections and publishing his discoveries as Treasures of Art in Great Britain in 1854, the exhibition aspired, as one scholar has recently argued, to raise “public awareness of the astonishingly rich artistic heritage that was hidden from public view.”54 The assemblage of these far-​flung works into a kind of temporary national gallery represented a combination not merely sanctioned by the pedagogic aims of the event, but constitutive of them. One extensive review of the exhibition put it this way: “While disconnected works lay scattered in distant

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churches, criticism could with difficulty assume a consecutive completeness, or throw into its treatment of dissevered parts the system inherent to a united whole. It seems, however, in these days the special use and province of museums . . . to group together into the completeness of a system materials which formerly lay scattered in individual isolation.”55 This joining of “dissevered parts” was one that crucially revealed the means of its grouping, as the source of each object in the exhibition was scrupulously indicated in its official catalogues.56 This confederation, antithetical in its legibility and productivity to that of the troublesome laborers, was, by virtue of this demonstrative visibility, in far greater accord with the ambitions of the event. The incompatibility of invisibility with these objectives was not recognized merely by the organizers and critics of the Art Treasures exhibition. Invisibility was a competing regime of proof to that espoused by the exhibit, for just a stone’s throw from the hall was an alternative space that was existentially invested in the imperceptible world. Two days before the exhibit’s premiere, the Reverend Hugh Stowell, chaplain to the Bishop of Manchester, aimed his Sunday sermon clearly at the “perishing pageant” down the road. Like many commentators, Stowell was concerned about the members of his flock “being unduly dazzled” by the terrestrial treasures on display, and he hoped to “excite them to a livelier admiration of the unsearchable treasures” to be discovered by embracing God.57 The pedagogic aims of the exhibition, and those of the broader tradition in which it was a crucial installment, were wedded inextricably to the power of the visible, for that was the faculty to be cultivated and calibrated among its viewership, and it was in this sense that the covert constructedness of The Two Ways of Life proved to be so disruptive. Stowell remarked directly on the success of this enterprise in his Word in Season, in Relation to the Art Treasures Exhibition (Manchester), Preached in Christ Church, Salford, on Sunday Morning, May 3rd, 1857, noting that “it is a melancholy fact that the redeemed children of men are, for the most part, intensely alive to the things seen and temporal, and utterly dead to the things unseen and eternal.” Yet he took comfort, for in those observers initiated in a different regime of perception lay salvation: “To him that lives looking at the things unseen and eternal, nothing here is very great or grand, in comparison with those things which the eye hath not seen. . . . There are those to whom the things not seen are, indeed and in truth, present, powerful, telling realities.”58 The presence of those unseen and powerful realities that Stowell posited as an antidote to the capacious visibility of the exhibition indicates how palpably an invisible realm destabilized the authority of the exhibition’s didactic aspirations. These ambitions were manifested across a range of educational programs and venues and shared a number of features, chief among them the conviction that the working classes were equipped with a distinct perceptual apparatus that was inferior to that of the higher orders and incommensurate with the needs of industrial efficiency. A chief defect of this characteristic sensibility was thought to be its incapacity, as Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes have commented, to “perceive those necessary connections between phenomena which gave the upper classes their integrated overall understanding of society and natural reality.”59 This deficiency might be remedied by an intensive course of scientific study that specifically would inculcate an ability to discern these connections and instill a reverence for the authority vested in this elite

epistemology. Breaking down a complex entity into its autonomously visible constituents, that approach to which Rejlander’s photograph initially posed such a fraught challenge, was charged with mediating the worker’s relationship to the natural—​and, indeed, the political—​universe. It would produce for his eye the presence of an underlying design to which he was oblivious and, in rendering this unseen structure of the natural world, he might be led to perceive “the rational organization of society, in its harmonious relationship with the natural world.”60

v is u a l a r t if ac t s o f t h e i n d u st r i a l age

This mode of observation was burdened with more than merely the social-​ improvement schemes of the period; rather, it sought to bind inextricably a measure of political stability to this supposedly emancipatory method of seeing and knowing. Herbert Spencer noted that “exhaustive observation is an element in all great success,” particularly since “no sound fabric of wisdom can be woven out of a rotten material.”61 This weaving together of the diffuse fragments of visual experience, of viewing these fragments arrayed in combination, has provided a surprisingly durable metaphorical repertoire for the structure of knowledge itself. It has emerged within the sociology of knowledge to describe the fallacies of “the declared aim of modern science” to “establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge.”62 Despite this ideal of objectivity, the relation between the parts and the coherent whole emphasizes an interdependence of social and individual knowledges. This model points toward an irreducibly subjective component even of those forms of knowledge acquired under the strictest of syllabi, for the parts that comprise the whole have been absorbed “tacitly,” and not from formal instruction. Michael Polanyi, a chemist turned philosopher, has written cogently and influentially about one of the most fundamental processes implicated in acquiring knowledge visually: the integration of subsidiary details into a “focal” whole. He asserts that there exist “two complementary efforts aiming at the elucidation of a comprehensive entity: one proceeds from a recognition of a whole towards an identification of its particulars, the other from the recognition of a group of presumed particulars towards the grasping of their relation in the whole.”63 The “tacit” component of our focal knowledge is one that is resistant to objective analysis, deriving as it does from “a personal judgment” fixed in individual perception. Polanyi wagers that “knowing is a process in two stages, the subsidiary and the focal, and these two can be defined only within the tacit act, which relies on the first for attending to the second. But again, why should this fact have been overlooked and a false ideal of science been perpetuated for centuries? Because the moment we admit that all knowing is rooted in an act of personal judgment, knowledge seems to lose all claim to objectivity.”64 Yet for centuries, the realization of the ambivalent status of visual objectivity was not entirely overlooked. Indeed, the case of Rejlander’s photograph indicates that the mid-​ Victorian authorities acutely understood the fragility of a claim to objectivity that rejected individual perceptual experience. The desire for economic efficiencies driving this Victorian visual enterprise found in the combination photograph a model gathering, one that could

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metaphorically accommodate the necessary centralization of workers not by relying upon the medium’s transparency, but rather by elucidating its politically resonant design. It demonstrated that ambivalent status that capital demanded of the modern working populace: it managed to “recapture isolated individuals as individuals isolated together,” sufficiently bound for efficiency, sufficiently dispersed to inhibit radical communications.65 The constitution of secret societies, viewed by the 1850s as being nearly identical to the illegible structure of labor unions, foregrounds a mode of discerning truth that is at the heart of the efficacy of the composite photograph. Only by rendering visible the joins of his image could Rejlander deny a politically problematic epistemological model by revealing those submerged links—​otherwise “baffling detection”—​that constituted the universe of the photograph. Rejlander’s presentation to the Photographic Society of London, and the fragmented exhibition of the image’s parts over the next two years, offered reassurance that the photograph’s didactic message and its technical approach were not antithetical. The dangerous combinations of the 1850s—​ their aim “to change the kingdoms of earth”66—​could not be allowed to hide in the dark margins of this picture of society.

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c h a p t e r

t h r e e

Same Time Tomorrow Serial Photographs and the Structure of Industrial Vision

like countless other victorians of high birth, photography in the 1850s was adapting to the chastening effects of industrial society. It was quickly forced to accept lodgings far from the sylvan abbey of its nascence and to enter the often unseemly realms of urban trade. The breakneck industrialization of photography had resulted in the expectoration into the visual spaces of London an astonishing glut of specimens, many of them poorly executed and cheaply sold. Progressively implicated in a variegated landscape of commodities, photographs and the infrastructure related to their production jammed the leading thoroughfares of the metropolis. One urban wanderer reported that “Regent Street is an avenue of superfluities—​a great trunk-​road in Vanity Fair. Fancy watchmakers, haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers, and fancy stay-​makers . . . these are the merchants whose wares are exhibited in this Bezesteen of the world.”1 That “photographers” are sandwiched into this catalogue of merchants suggests the heterogeneity of the scene, in which the photograph is merely another article of trade to be acquired on an amble through this metropolitan bazaar. At Number 21 Regent Street, presiding stoically over the din, sat the temporary headquarters of the rarefied Photographic Society of London, founded in 1853 largely as an exclusive organization of wealthy amateurs.2 Despite the efforts of the Society’s stalwarts, this newly commodified photography would presently cross its threshold, constituting what seemed to these gentlemen an almost existential threat. The sanctity of the Society’s organizing principle—​a thirst for the discussion and dissemination of the new medium among the baronial company of social equals—​had been sullied by the grime and soot of tradesmen, and their celebrated exhibitions had been invaded by the cheap produce of the commercial photographer. “We desire to see the Photographic

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Society taking and maintaining its proper place amidst the societies established for the advancement of Science and Art in this country,” lamented one reviewer, remarking dourly that “it has allowed itself to be overriden by the commercial element; and unless, ere yet it be too late, the council resolves to return to and maintain a far more independent position, the fate of the Society is sealed.”3 That fate was, as this writer presciently noted, perhaps inevitable, for the Society’s exhibitions had already ceded so much ground to the burgeoning practice of photography for profit: the catalogues had begun to list prices, and more than a few members fretted that the once-​noble ambitions of the annual event seemed little more than an elegant frame in which to swaddle crass appeals to potential buyers. Some of the more reactionary members even sought to prohibit the display of photographs that had been on commercial offer, but they were ultimately rebuffed.4 The Society suddenly seemed to them more akin to the street of bird-​sellers and petty entertainers than to the contemplative redoubts of the Linnaeans. Many of the increasingly irascible members of the Photographic Society, and the influential critics who comprised a newly vibrant photographic press, seethed over two particular dimensions of these images: their volume and their unoriginality. In an intemperate moment, Alfred H. Wall, a prolific commentator for the relatively conservative British Journal of Photography, exclaimed that “cheapness is the order of the day. In the advertisement columns of the daily papers almost every week shows us an increasing number of those photographers who are bent upon underselling their rivals. The carte portraits, the ‘postage stamp’ portraits, and the fifty reproduced portraits for half a crown, readily suggest themselves.” With new maladroit practitioners flocking to the lucrative pursuit on a daily basis, he wondered, “Where, then, is this race of cheapness to end?”5 The blizzard of photographic production noted by Siegfried Kracauer in his classic essay on photography was one that characterized not only the Weimar Germany in which he was writing but, perhaps even more acutely, the early years of the medium’s industrialization. Kracauer saw in this accumulation not just the odiousness of quantity that his British predecessors bewailed but also—​perhaps counterintuitively—​a possibility for a revolutionary reexamination of the capitalist realm that enabled this glut. “Photography,” he asserted, “is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production,” one that reifies the defining features of that system.6 Yet, Kracauer proposed, this repetitive confrontation of the production of photographs might in fact enable “a liberated consciousness [that] would be given an incomparable opportunity . . . less enmeshed in the natural bonds than ever before, it could prove its power in dealing with them.” The vacuity, superficiality, and repressiveness of the world of mass production could be revealed to the populace that knew where, and how, to look for it. This explicit link between judgment, visual acuity, and the discernment of the capitalist basis of the proliferating photograph is one that Kracauer articulated most directly, but the connection was forged at the time of photography’s first marriage to industry. In this chapter, I will explore visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy. It proceeds by excavating the conceptual bases on which a number of putatively frivolous photographs operated to modulate a particular kind of visual autonomy: one in which discernment itself was both commodified and infused with the logic of production.

It was an enterprise of urgency to a culture ever more permeated by the promise of capitalism and depended upon the malleability both of visual belief and of the exemplary visual medium through which that belief could be secured.

a g ency a nd g o o d t a s t e

In the appeals of the grouchy gentlemen amateurs, there is almost an obsession with the sheer quantity of photographs being produced under these new and very unsettling conditions. With the emergence of glass-​plate collodion negatives, the tight license restrictions on Talbot’s calotype, which had been the exclusive means of producing photographic multiples, were no longer an impediment to the execution of photography on a mass scale.7 It is remarkable how rapidly the transfer of the positive-​negative principle into the public domain shifted its aesthetic and political valences, for the venerable practice of the amateur was almost instantaneously recast as a vehicle for the moral degradation of culture at large.8 The increasing vehemence with which social-​improvement organizations like the Society for the Suppression of Vice condemned salacious photographs, and the broad support their interventions enjoyed among those displeased by the medium’s new ethos, indicates how intimately the notion of photography’s multiplicity was intertwined with its presumed immorality.9 One correspondent inquired of the Photographic News why images “of an indecent character are suffered to be openly exposed in the shop windows, so that a man who takes a walk with his wife and daughters dare not venture to look at the windows of many of our photographic publishers?”10 Naturally, the insalubrious photographs in question were, almost without exception, multiples, spawned by the proliferating collodion process. The cheapness of the images was twofold, residing in both their tawdry subject matter and their wide availability. The quest to rid the visual world of pornographic indecencies rarely extended to the erotica produced and circulated discreetly among a higher stratum of society.11 If the gentleman might have a monogamous relationship with his unique, deluxe bit of pornography, where was the harm? If, in contrast, a photographed woman shared that relationship with any workingman with the requisite coins, that was something else entirely. The promiscuity that mass-​produced photographs enacted was at least as destabilizing as that which they depicted. Of equal alarm to this multiplicity of production was the fact that these piles of images seemed to betray a repetition of conception in which the unoriginality of the physical object was matched by the paucity of creativity of its representation. The same reviewer who wrote so uneasily about the commercial infiltration of the 1859 Photographic Society exhibition cringed at the chief defect of these offerings: “The impression that we receive on entering the rooms is, that they exhibit a stereotype-​like sameness—​a repetition in character, with slight variations.”12 Wall was more direct in linking this sameness to the exigencies of mass production: You may picture one of these ‘artists’ for yourself, if you please. He is popping about in his sky-​parlour studio, from one to another of a row of canvasses. With four sweeps of a brush filled with blue paint four

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azure skies are completed; with the same number of dark violet streaks four silvery rivers; and four sets of a dozen dabs each manufacture four green backgrounds. Four windmills are as expeditiously originated, and four picturesque cottages occupy no more time . . . and lo! There are four “beautiful oil paintings” ready for the Dutch-​metal ‘gold’ frames of the cheap auctioneer or traveling peddler. This is what cheapness does for art.13

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If the standardization necessitated by the caprices of the market reduced paintings to such a level of degradation, what of photographs, which had the additional burden of overcoming their supposedly mechanical genesis? Under these conditions, how could they be seen as anything but the discharge of an apparatus lacking the agency to produce anything other than regular, homogenized commodities? There was, however, some hope of a middle ground, between the chastity of the single image and the licentiousness of its mass-​produced cousin. Just as Wall had pilloried the fifty portraits one might purchase for half a crown, he saw in a few promising men a compromise between the inevitable expansion of commercialism and the sensitivity and taste of amateur practice. The cause was pressing, and the metaphor military: “I consider myself as a kind of recruiting-​sergeant, beating up for recruits to serve in the army of Generals Robinson and Rejlander.”14 Wall’s enlistment on behalf of these two photographers was predicated upon reigning in that most deleterious dimension of commercial photography: quantity. “Such apostles of the True as Rejlander and Robinson represent,” he cautioned, “will assuredly fight the battle of our art in vain if we send forth our thousands of ludicrously inartistic card-​pictures to plead against them in nearly every shop window and from nearly every drawing-​ room table throughout Europe.”15 Unlike their predecessors at the forefront of photographic production, these two men were hardly of the smart social set of Talbot, nor did their interests in photography derive from scientific experimentation: Oscar Gustave Rejlander was a Swedish immigrant and provincial painter, Henry Peach Robinson an autodidact artist and sometime bookseller. By the late 1850s, they were both well-​known and successful professionals, and Wall’s encomium indicates that even among those with a pronounced distaste for commerce, the two were seen to have produced pictures of a redeeming caliber. One favorable review published by a gentleman indicates that in spite of their immersion in working-​class spaces of entertainment, Rejlander’s photographs are figured like jewels in the rough: “Mr. Rejlander’s works are not so familiar to us all as they should be, in consequence of that gentleman’s reluctance to send his work to photographic exhibitions; but to those who dared the annoyance of a low place of amusement such as the North-​Eastern London Exhibition unfortunately became before its close, what I have said would be found fully illustrated in the beautiful collection of works he there displayed.”16 What made Rejlander and Robinson the ideal generals to command the forward charge of photography? How did they reconcile their paradoxical status as both profit-​seeking professionals and men of judgment to whom the credibility of photography as an artistic force could be entrusted? Despite the commercial ambitions and successes of Robinson’s pictures, he retained in his work a conceptual affinity with the older amateurs. This

helped secure his position as a figure in whom many of the ambivalences of photography in the 1850s were embodied and, somewhat incompletely, reconciled. Robinson, unlike his colleague Rejlander, was a prolific writer and we know a good deal about his responses to contemporary photographic debates by virtue of his natural verbosity. When one critic claimed that “the true artist in pictures like these is the sitter rather than the photographer,” Robinson was driven nearly to apoplexy.17 In one of his most illuminating works, Robinson discussed the hotly contested role of the model in his photographs and, in particular, his desire to direct them with control: “My models are trained to strict obedience, and to make no suggestions. If a photographer has really got an idea in his head, he had better carry out that idea. Any interference, even from superior intelligence, is sure to go wrong.”18 The rhetoric that Robinson employed to describe his relationship to his models—​those individuals in his employ—​here takes on the flavor of the shop taskmaster, a persona that was not at all incommensurate with his actual status in the capitalized system of commercial photography. As Steve Edwards’s recent work has pointed out, the social position of photographers like Robinson and Rejlander overlaps in significant ways with that of the petit-​bourgeoisie, a group characterized in this moment by a drift from radicalism and solidarity with the aims of the Chartists to a far more reactionary distrust of labor which mirrored that of the large-​scale capitalists who increasingly funded their operations.19 This attitude was born of necessity, as Edwards asserts: “To appear worthy of credit, masters needed to run their workshops in a businesslike manner. This meant adopting middle-​ class norms of propriety and marking one’s distance from the working community. Fundamentally, it meant imposing capitalist work discipline on an artisan labor force. Most small masters accepted this logic of the market, turned against the customary culture of the workshop, and sought to subject their workforce to the new rhythms and patterns of work.”20 In Robinson’s disdain for the necessary presence of the model, we can locate an ideological accord with the social class to which the increasingly successful photographer aspired. The untidy business of business, a distinct distaste for the labor required to make Robinson’s photographic house work, was one that the gentlemen of the Photographic Society might easily recognize, for the gentry had, by the middle of the century, become a class of capitalists, whose intellectual pursuits were subsidized by the toil of their own workers, which—​unlike Robinson’s—​could be safely sequestered from view. Within this conception of production, to which a factory-​owning gentleman amateur might be especially sympathetic, Robinson was able to indicate a particular set of class allegiances while continuing to engage in commercial pursuits that otherwise would have seemed utterly antithetical to good taste. With Robinson’s assertion that his models were merely vessels comporting with his conception, he expressed his agency as a photographer, his intervention and judgment guiding a figure, almost always of low social class, to articulate his vision. If his models were to receive the lion’s share of the credit for Robinson’s photographs—​and in some cases they certainly had—​the surest way to reassert his status was to foreground his role as an arbiter of taste, a desire that paradoxically demanded that he make perfectly clear the mediated quality of his photographs. This very overt demonstration of Robinson’s good taste and sagacity was evocative of the selectivity and agency that seemed so lacking in

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the commercial photograph, and upon which organizations like the Photographic Society prided themselves. Such images, suffused with the marks of a particular photographic sensibility and variety, could hardly be the product of a mere machine: cultivation was reasserted as an essential trait of the successful photographer, even within the realm of commerce.

“ s o n e a r t h e r e al th i n g”

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What is signal about Robinson’s achievement, however, is not merely that he seemed to embody enough residual gentlemanly agency in his photography, but that the revelation of intervention—​to the amateurs a mode antithetical to crass commerce—​would itself become the very basis of Robinson’s commercial success. Robinson’s photographs evince a complex repertoire that engages the viewer’s ability to discern the mode of his mediation, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and consistent pictorial clues. By demonstrating how noncommercial his sensibility was—​how little his photographs were like those of the mass-​production line—​Robinson courted the pleasure that comes from visual perceptiveness, an experience that was surprisingly lucrative. As David Coleman has succinctly characterized Robinson’s aims, he was “asking the viewer to accept these fictions rather than to believe them as facts.”21 Indeed, one might say that Robinson’s central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. I would go even further, however, and assert that this dubiousness was the license by which Robinson produced an iconography that foregrounded the process of discerning his interventions. Robinson fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement to the pursuit of commercial pleasure. Robinson wagered his commercial success on the proposition that viewers would be able, and indeed interested, to engage with photography in a way that was predicated from the start upon a recognition of its fundamentally mediated status. That such an approach was even contemplated, let alone deployed to great interest, indicates just how deeply ambivalent photographic neutrality was in the 1850s. It suggests how readily the modes of visual education and discernment cultivated by institutional authorities could be commercialized precisely by denying the photograph its transparent dominion. Robinson summarized this project adeptly: “Cultivated minds do not require to believe that they are deceived, and that they look on an actual scene when they behold a pictorial representation.”22 This strange constellation of belief was pointed out in a review of an exhibition in which Rejlander and Robinson participated, the critic grousing that “it is with no small feeling of regret we observe that the Exhibition of the Arts and Manufactures of North-​Eastern London has degenerated into what is commonly known as a three-​penny gaff. . . . Science, art, and mountebankism are now here on equal footing, only the latter seems to possess the greatest attraction for the visitors. During our last visit the entertainment consisted of a display of tight-​rope dancing and juggling.”23 These games of discernment and recognition were, in Robinson’s own accounts, infused with the class dimensions that had proved so central to the assumptions surrounding the

efficacy of his friend Rejlander’s combination photograph The Two Ways of Life. The commitment to the idea of a physiological visual capacity rooted in the observer’s class that (mis)guided so many of the ploys of visual education of the period is still very much present in Robinson’s anecdotes about his own picture-​making. Protesting critiques of his choice and direction of aristocratic models for certain rustic, peasant scenes, he insisted that my models may be called to some extent artificial, but they are so near the real thing as to be taken for it by the real natives, just as the trout does not seem to know the difference between the natural and artificial fly. One day two of my models were walking across the park, and a gamekeeper, seeing them for the first time, made after them, shouting in the high tone that sounds like quarreling to the stranger when he first hears it in Wales. . . . [G]etting near them, he found to his dismay they were “the daughters of the house.”24 The gamekeeper’s undiscerning eye had caused him to engage in a social transgression: berating the daughters of his landed employer in a brogue that, like his visual sensibility, is marked by a rude provincialism. Taken in by the temporarily dressed-​down upmarket ladies, the dupe here might stand for the kind of uncultivated viewer who would be ill-​equipped to partake of Robinson’s photographs of visual discrimination. Indeed, Robinson would later express his self-​satisfaction at having pulled off a strikingly similar feat in his very famous combination photograph Bringing Home the May. Although this particular deception was not part of his original plan, the pleasure Robinson takes in revealing its constructedness is nonetheless telling: “The selected model for the back figure, although she had some practice, got nervous, and could not stand still. There was no time to select and train another, and the principal figure was quickly dressed in her clothes and performed the part. That there are two figures from one model has never been detected, and this is the first time it has been mentioned.”25 As in the case of this photograph, Robinson’s clues often emerge in a way that is entirely congruent with their conditions of production—​by way of the kind of belabored repetition so despised by many amateurs. The structure of commercial production, which produced a longitudinal accumulation of an iconography over time and across several pictures, became the organizing principle of many of Robinson’s games of discernment. His makeshift model, impossibly occupying two positions and personae at once, points to the limitations of the single photograph, an inadequacy to which the combination was, in some important ways, a major response. This was one of several ways in which the structure of the production of photographs made them ill-​suited to representing the referential world. If the combination served as a kind of compression and artificial obfuscation of a series of discrete, incommensurate moments, Robinson’s arsenal of deception was far more variegated than this single approach. Yet his repertoire remained immersed in the paradoxical relationship of the photograph to the coherent moment, for it was here that the medium’s lack of transparency might best be proffered to a commercial appetite for exercising visual discrimination.

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FIGURE 19

Henry Peach Robinson, Red Riding Hood, 1858. Albumen print. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

n e w l y c au g h t n a t u re

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The photographic moment and its connection to the artificial could hardly be more aptly demonstrated than by an image that Robinson exhibited at the 1859 Photographic Society annual exhibition, a venue by then fully infused by the presence of commercial photography. In a series of four photographs representing the famous Brothers Grimm tale Little Red Riding Hood, Robinson makes the central image of the group redolent with the problematic relationship between the time of a dynamic narrative and that of midcentury photographic technology. While the first two images in the sequence evoke the familiar story with effectiveness and economy, the climactic scene of the naive girl’s encounter with the wolf masquerading as her grandmother brings the progress of narrative to an abrupt halt (figs. 19–21). This scene received by far the greatest share of the critical attention, which tended to fixate on the unconvincing nature of the tableau. One critic was particularly displeased by the expression of the girl: “It is . . . very difficult for a sitter to preserve, for any length of time, the expression of astonishment when not at all astonished.”26

FIGURE 20

Henry Peach Robinson, Red Riding Hood, 1858. Albumen print. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

Yet the artificiality of this pose is one that has a conceptual equilibrium with that of the wolf. While the duration of the exposure time had compelled the model to assume an uneasy gesture, the stuffed wolf was the ideal sitter for such as scene, his mobility already arrested by the taxidermist. Robinson has juxtaposed the two in such a way that illuminates an affinity between these two methods of arresting time, photography and taxidermy, which both rely upon a shared presumption of referentiality to the things they represent. As one critic has recently written, “Taxidermy and photography are constructed from surfaces: both peel a layer from the world which they then present as truth. These are modern technologies which testify to a stubborn Western equation of appearance with reality. . . . [P]hotographs and stuffed animals are signs which have a real connection to their referents.”27 Robinson, however, is clearly interrogating this equation, for he has subsumed within one representational medium that stakes a dubious claim to reality another whose fabrication is pronounced, complicating their shared relationship to an unmediated trace.

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FIGURE 21

Henry Peach Robinson, Red Riding Hood, 1858. Albumen print. © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

The wolf is so artificial that its appearance is met by a reaction that, in its own fraudulence, suggests that Little Red Riding Hood has not been duped by the reality of the predator, nor should the picture’s viewer be convinced by her response. This photograph is, at its heart, about the affective modalities of uncovering visual deception. But it is a particular kind of faulty deception that occasions Robinson’s meditation: the technological inability of the camera to capture an instantaneous response or, for that matter, to discriminate between an animate wolf and a stuffed one. It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that a consuming debate among zoologists and natural historians in the 1850s concerned precisely the incapacity of properly preserving the ephemerality that characterized observation of the natural world. One handbook for taxidermists bemoaned the state of the art, noting that while “methods have been devised of arresting for a time the progress of decay . . . these seem gradually to lose their effect, and ultimately become mutilated and decomposed.”28 Its author goes on to recommend that if taxidermy is to reach its scientific potential, a new generation with the capacity to distinguish between live and stuffed specimens must be trained: “The first thing, therefore, to be attended to in all great natural history establishments, is to choose young persons who are yet in their boyhood to be instructed in this art, most important to science. . . . [E]very opportunity of examining the habits and actions of the living subject should be embraced” so that he may learn to cease the practice of making animals whose “proportions and character are likely to be devoid of all appearance of animation.”29 Such a desire was complemented by the opening in Regent’s Park in 1847 of the Zoological Society to the public at large at a moderate price, an institution that hoped to forge this next generation of sharp-​eyed connoisseurs of the wild. A beaming Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting the competing Surrey Gardens with his young son Julian, reported that the menagerie included “some skins of snakes so well stuffed that I took them for live serpents, till Julian discovered the deception.”30 If the new naturalists were already in training, a variety of venues hoped to cater to the didactic principles that might enhance their perceptiveness. The taxidermy manual illustrates its pedagogical lessons with a series of engravings that reveal the invisible insides of a well-​constructed specimen of a wolf, furnishing its readers with the kind of incisive eye to penetrate beyond the surface (fig. 22). Such an eye is implicit in those viewers who will decipher the status of Robinson’s wolf, who will have the capacity, gleaned from the panoply of alternatively instructive and didactic venues filled to the brim with a diversity of fauna, to know the unreality of what they are seeing. For Rejlander, Robinson’s sometime mentor and comrade, this project is the subject of two photographs made around the time of Robinson’s Little Red Riding Hood, emphasizing the importance of cultivating this particular kind of vision (fig. 23). Entitled A Young Naturalist (c. 1860), this photograph depicts the act of instructing a child in the discrimination of natural objects: fossils and skulls of similar appearance arrayed side by side, the ideal arrangement for a comparative education. In another contemporary image, The Fly Catcher (c. 1860), a young boy focuses his keen sight on a tiny speck of an insect on the wall, readying himself to capture it (fig. 24). He carries with him a pair of books, and, having seen the pleas of just one advocate of natural history education among many, it is not too difficult to speculate the genre, and objectives,

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FIGURE 22

W. Forrest, Taxidermy specimen of a wolf. From Captain Thomas Brown, The Taxidermist’s Manual; or, the Art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History (London: A. Fullarton, 1853). Courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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of these volumes. Yet the fly-​catching boy is somewhat distinct from his counterpart being educated in natural history amid the comforts of the home. His efforts are more predatory, for his eye is trained on the insect that he hopes to possess, and to extend beyond the ephemerality of the moment the ability to contemplate and view the evasive fly. He wants, that is, to achieve what Rejlander’s picture has putatively already accomplished, although we know the technological limitations of Rejlander’s lens would in fact preclude the instantaneity that is the photograph’s motif and metaphor. The boy’s status here echoes a kind of hybrid identity that both Rejlander and Robinson would adopt throughout their careers: the hunter-​photographer. Robinson directly associated this role with the question of deception when he wrote of his much-​debated models: “I am quite conscious that I am laying myself open to the charge of masquerading; but art is a slate of compromises and sacrifices, and I cannot but think what is lost in absolute unrelenting naturalness when substituting trained models for the newly-​caught nature.”31 This “catching” of nature is thus denied as a desirable or possible accomplishment in photography, and the hunter metaphor emerges as a signal of photographic manipulation rather than as a testament to the keenness of the photographer’s eye. The young fly-​catcher’s moment, necessarily a construction, invites the viewer to recognize that this artificial image of perceptiveness demands the genuine, antithetical counterpart from its observer, precisely so that he may identify the difference between the two. Rejlander’s self-​portrait Man Aiming Rifle (c. 1860) embraces this conceit, for while the photograph purports to show the hunter-​photographer in the exercise of his visual acuity, we note that he performs this act before a blank studio background that begins to roll up in parallel to his gun barrel (fig. 25). Photographic looking, even when it

FIGURE 23

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, A Young Naturalist, c. 1860. Albumen print. © NMPFT / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

is thematized so elegantly, is developed into a sign of the insufficiency of an uncritical apprehension of the photograph itself. The moment captured by the apparatus of even the most alert photographer is no more a reality than the stasis of the fly or the rusticity of the hunter’s setting. The conjoined fantasy of arresting the dynamism of the natural world by gun and by lens is itself a crucial lesson in the development of the discerning eye essential to the success of Rejlander’s and Robinson’s pictures. Of course, this association would nurture conceptually the development of a variety of photographic “weapons”: Jules Janssen’s photo revolver designed to record the transit of Venus across the sun in 1874 and, most famously, Étienne-​Jules Marey’s improved version several years later (fig. 26).32 A decade earlier, however, the notion of such artillery being truly instantaneous was still a technological impossibility. Even by the end of the century, after Marey’s masterly studies of animals in motion, the duration of exposure time required

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FIGURE 24

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Flycatcher, c. 1860. Albumen print. © NMPFT / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

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to capture the ephemerality of the natural world remained a challenge even for the most seasoned photographer. One guide from 1897 confessed that “the analysis of the flight of birds presents special difficulty. Owing to the extreme rapidity of the movements of the wings, an extremely short exposure is required. The direction, often capricious, of the flight of the bird, and the length of the path which must be followed, to include on the sensitized plate sufficiently sharp images, add to the difficulty. Several repetitions of the same experiment are generally required before success. The photographic gun is particularly valuable for taking photographs of birds.”33 Genuine instantaneity is the product of the contingent dynamism of the world, of the capricious path of the bird’s flight, not the contrived and immobile “moment” of the fly-​ catcher, which in the 1850s and 1860s was, of necessity, a duration disguised as instant. The capacity to capture photographically the wolf, and the fly, was a

FIGURE 25

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Man Aiming Rifle, c. 1860. Albumen print. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.

function of their collective imposture, one whose accomplice is the solitude of the image. It is little wonder that some of the first and most renowned images produced with the capacity for relative instantaneity again turned to the animal world—​the very subject to which the mode of photographic production it supplanted was unsusceptible—​and seized upon those features of movement that debunked conventional pictorial representation. The incapacities of the single image of the earlier generation were a foil for Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and their imitators. The fact that this inherent opposition of the photograph to a privileged moment—​indeed its travesty of such a possibility—​was an organizing principle of the most ambitious photographic work of the 1870s suggests just how pervasive the skepticism about the transparency of images like Robinson’s and Rejlander’s had become and, likely, always was. It was a skepticism that these earlier photographers thematized time and again in their

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FIGURE 26

Étienne-​Jules Marey’s photographic gun. Engraving. The World of Wonders (London: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1883). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

pictures, cultivating in their viewers a knowledge of the mediated nature of the images, reasserting their agency in the representations they created. It was nothing as capricious or arbitrary as nature that dictated the moments of their photographs.

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In many of the forms that the commercial dissemination of photographs took, the notion of the single, autonomous image and its relationship to the verisimilitude of the instant was implicated in the serial nature of mass production itself. Among the most common sources of inexpensive photographs from which the consumer would browse and select images were the so-​called index-​ books, visual catalogues of a given studio’s stock. One description of these volumes suggests the affinity of their display with the scale of their production: “Large apartments are appropriate to the baths in which cartes de visite are

immersed, and a feminine clatter of tongues directs us to the rooms in which the portraits are gummed on cardboard and packed up. Every portrait is pasted in a book, and numbered consecutively. This portrait index-​book contains many thousands of cartes de visite, and a reference to any one of them gives the clue to the whereabouts of the negative.”34 This writer goes on to describe, in excruciating detail, the organization of labor in which different departments of the studio are allotted distinct rooms of the building; the scale and ethos of the operation are nearly industrial. Regrettably, these index-​books, once apparently ubiquitous in London ateliers, have largely perished, save for a limited sample from the successful studio of Camille Silvy.35 However, a number of books from Paris have survived, including one from the studio of renowned portraitist Nadar. Beginning in the early 1870s, Nadar had gradually handed over the reins of his enterprise to his entrepreneurial son Paul, who eventually turned it into the kind of photo-​factory regularly described in London. This vital mode of consuming commercial photographs belies any epistemic naïveté on the part of their viewers. The characteristic features of commercial photography—​the artless repetition of models, props, settings, and motifs so derided by members of the Photographic Society—​were on full display in these arrays, with ever so slightly variant views arranged one next to the other. And most striking, these photographs were juxtaposed in ways that emphasized the peculiar linkage between the scale of their mass production and the serial dimensions of the illusions they offered. One of the most revealing display boards in this regard was produced by the Nadar studios depicting the actress Hélène Petit in a dramatization of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (fig. 27). A strip of four images depicts the crucial moment in Zola’s narrative. The protagonist Gervaise and her daughter Anna watch in horror as the family patriarch and tragically clumsy roofer Coupeau plunges from atop a structure he is helping to build. Although Coupeau survives the fall and is ensconced in the dedicated care of his wife, he is immobilized, despondent, and takes to drink.36 The moment depicted is the crucial one in Zola’s story, the point at which the fortunes of all concerned are irrevocably changed. The first image of this narrative apex, one effected by the dynamism of Coupeau’s plummet, seems on its own to reiterate the aspired instantaneity of Robinson’s and Rejlander’s photographs, ostensibly capturing a critical moment. Yet the effect is strikingly altered when one examines the group of four more closely, for they are not identical representations but have been subtly altered by the photographer. The gestures of Gervaise oscillate between the clutching of her head in horror, to the almost defensive disbelief of her hands, raised as if to shield herself from that dreadfulness. Anna’s pose shifts as well, and the appearance in the third and fourth photographs of a straw basket that, like Coupeau, has succumbed to gravity, adds to the pathos of the scene. Yet what we see in these four photographs is not a progression in time, but a variation of detail around a central immutable architecture, for while the photographer tinkers with his models and their accoutrements, the figure of Coupeau remains suspended in the same airborne position. The quantities of selection available to the consumers of the Nadar studio’s imagery—​the heart of its commercial advantage and the result of its adoption of an industrial scale of production—​had become entirely antithetical to any notion of photographic verisimilitude. Unless the photographer had taken the extraordinary step of

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FIGURE 27

Page from the index books of the Nadar Atelier, Hélène Petit dans “L’Assommoir,” c. 1879.

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heaving poor Coupeau from the roof over and over again, an abusive tactic even by Victorian labor standards, it is clear to the viewer of these images that the fall and the narrative crisis it precipitates is neither externally “real” nor, equally important, unique. And yet that was the very criticism of, and basis for, the expansion of commercial photographic production: the irrelevance of uniqueness, at the conceptual level of the ingenuity or singularity of the scene, and at the material level of the endless availability of these mass-​produced diversions. It is especially ironic to recall the biography of the chronoscope or “time-​ seer,” an instrument first invented in the late 1840s to measure the time of falling bodies, and that helped to verify Galileo’s assertion that such objects are uniform in their rate of acceleration. Later this device would help to set a standardized time signal, free from the errors associated with human astronomical observation.37 The rate of Coupeau’s descent is an extravagant hybrid of these desires for the chronoscope, his plummet made uniform among all his observers. His fall is outside of time, but nevertheless reifies the regularization of temporality that reached its apotheosis in this uniformity of viewed time. The negation of the singularity of the moment achieved in these images evokes Eugène Delacroix’s antithetical admonition to painters: “If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes him to get from the fifth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce a monumental work.”38 Whatever rapidity and contingency might have governed Delacroix’s scene, and the artistic potency required to render it in time, the Nadar studio’s imagery hardly aspired to monumentality; indeed, in incarnating its temporality of repetition and large-​scale production, the monumental would have seemed an irrelevant touchstone. André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri’s innovation of a multilens camera allowed cartes-de-visite to be produced in such quantities that many commentators christened the 1850s an era of “cartomania.”39 Furthermore, this novelty was part of a broader conceptual change, in which individual, standalone images relinquished their dominant position in the public’s experience of photography. With his cartes, Disdéri could fashion on a single collodion negative plate four or more tiny images, economizing—​and standardizing further—​the production

of the photograph. In one sheet of The Juggler Manoel (1861), Disdéri shows us a well-​known entertainer and, ostensibly, his great skill at keeping his objects aloft. However, as in the case of the airborne Coupeau, we note that while Manoel’s pose varies among the four cartes, his ball remains stationary. The use of the figure of the juggler is telling here, for he was a type that stood for a particular kind of visual discrimination that would be asked of viewers, one that is evident in this uncut series, but rather more submerged in the single image. Rejlander’s Juggler (c. 1860) demonstrates a more impressive trick than his French counterpart: two projectiles aloft and two more poised to join them (fig. 28). As remote from didactic purposes as juggling seems to our sensibilities, in the nineteenth century it was closely associated with a mode of training the eye and the mind to act in concert, and was proposed on more than one occasion as a vital addition to the nation’s school curricula. William Hazlitt, upon seeing an Indian juggler, exclaimed that “it is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever-​anxious application up to manhood can accomplish.”40 Another admirer asserted: The tricks performed by jugglers afford a most wonderful example of the perfection that our senses and organs are capable of attaining under the influence of exercise. . . . He must know the exact spot wither his ball will go, calculate the parabola that it will describe, and know the exact time that it will take to describe it. His eye must take in the position of three, four, or five balls that are sometimes several yards apart, and he must solve these different problems in optics, mechanics, and mathematics instantaneously, ten, fifteen, twenty times per minute. He concluded accordingly that “juggling has sufficient advantages as regards the development of the touch, the quick calculation of distances, the nimbleness of the fingers, and the accuracy of the eye and of motion, to cause it to be added to those gymnastic exercises which children are taught at school.”41 The number of visual scientific lessons that were consolidated into this practice is breathtaking, but its pedagogic efficacy is articulated with surprising regularity. Equally puzzling is an almost exactly contemporary definition of the term “juggling” as something apparently quite distinct from this noble exercise: “juggling, n., deception, imposture, artifice.”42 It was a pursuit, then, seen as deceptive to those uninitiated in its modalities, but also beneficial to those who might be initiated into them, a celebration of visual acuity and a denigration of visual gullibility. The airborne figure is in this sense akin to the stuffed specimen: they are both generic indices of the nature of the deception they are perpetrating. They occupy a place in photographic production that seemed especially suited to a program of visual discrimination, a place demarcated by an ambivalent relationship to the temporality of photography and its industrialization. And this temporality was one thread in the larger web of increasingly rationalized time that dictated the demands upon the viewers to whom Rejlander’s and Robinson’s photographs ostensibly appealed. The discernment of motion exemplified by the keen eye of the juggler was, to be sure, a key locus of visual discrimination in much of the perceptual theory

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FIGURE 28

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Juggler, c. 1860. Albumen print. © NMPFT / Royal Photographic Society / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

of the nineteenth century. More important, the ability to discern the illusion of motion was a major preoccupation of these investigations. One experimenter, Silvanus Thompson, lamented that “there are frequent occasions of conflict between the receptive faculties of the senses and the reflective faculties of the intellect. . . . [O]f all the senses none is more frequently the seat of such deceptive judgments than that of sight.” As his chief example, he noted that under certain circumstances “the retina ceases to perceive as a motion a steady succession of images that pass over a particular region for a sufficient time to induce fatigue.”43 A principal failure of the perceptual faculty was, then, an inability to discern motion by virtue of the fact that motion itself is made up of a “succession of images.” That is, Thompson’s account is implicitly invested in the notion that movement is comprised of a series of divisible, successive moments of immobility; time must be divisible if a “moment” of stasis can exist within a motion. This conception is deeply rooted in a classical philosophical debate on the nature of time and space, for it resurrects, in the guise of physiological experimentation, Zeno’s paradox of the flying arrow, which Aristotle’s Physics dedicated itself to resolving. Zeno paraphrased his predecessor’s claim: “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”44 Time, according to Zeno, is parceled out into discrete “nows,” a reality made visible only in the form of an object in flight. It is striking, and not happenstance, then, that the very account of time underlying industrial development—​of its divisibility and exchangeability—​is one whose expression resuscitates an ancient representation. The “now” of the juggler’s trick not only harbors a sophisticated account of photographic temporality, but it cultivates in its perceptual pedagogy an ideological time, the time of the modern worker and viewer.

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The didactic respectability of the precocious viewers in A Young Naturalist and The Fly-​Catcher has its wrong-side-of-the-​tracks counterpart in another of Rejlander’s photographs from the same period. Two Urchins Playing a Game (fig. 29) takes the visual skills cultivated by the juggler and his implied viewer into the streets, where a young boy glances skyward, preparing to catch an airborne object that is temporarily above the frame of the picture. It would be difficult, upon seeing this photograph, not to be struck by the extraordinary affinities it shares with the much later image made by Henri Cartier-​Bresson of a boy similarly awaiting the return of his object into the field of the photograph. Valencia (fig. 30) seems almost to be a direct reenactment of Rejlander’s photo, yet it is precisely the notion of staging a photographic homage that points to the crucial distinction between the two. One could hardly find a better embodiment than Valencia of Cartier-​Bresson’s mantra, which crystallized in the title of his 1952 manifesto, The Decisive Moment. For him, this decisive moment was one characterized by “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organization of forms which gave that event its proper expression.”45 This celebration of the serendipitous accident, the fetishization of the singularity and ephemerality

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FIGURE 29

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Two Urchins Playing a Game, c. 1860. Albumen print. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.

FIGURE 30

Henri Cartier-​ Bresson, Valencia, 1933. Courtesy Magnum Photos.

of a photographic moment, was antithetical to the notion of staging; any suggestion that Cartier-​Bresson planned his image in relationship to Rejlander’s would seem an utter blasphemy. Yet this pseudomorphism crucially delineates what was historically distinctive about the artificiality of nineteenth-​century photographic instantaneity, for the decisive moment of the latter century was both a technical and, more crucially, a conceptual impossibility in the former. Decisiveness aside, the moment itself was a consuming concern in the 1850s and 1860s, for the increasingly industrialized existence in Western Europe produced a reconceptualization of time that was amenable to the demands of capitalist production. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch and others have pointed out, the rationalization of time was a phenomenon that permitted a seeming continuum to be measured out into units.46 Karl Marx registered this emerging possibility when he argued that the calculation of commodity value derived from measuring the abstraction of labor in terms of time. The homogeneity of temporal experience that was the precondition of its currency emerged alongside the development of the modern discipline of statistics. This field was dedicated to rationalizing all the seemingly stochastic features of life and assimilating those events that in their solitude seemed to evade stable and predictable patterns. “The allure of aggregate figures for many social thinkers,” it has been persuasively argued, “lay precisely in their insensitivity to political and economic crises.”47 With the industrialist comforted by the so-​called law of large numbers, in which infinite repetition of events would always secure overall stable values despite the caprice of individual contingency, statistics were a vital participant in the debate about the humanity of industrialization. Indeed, it was quite literally the accidents involving machines that might befall workers that were an impetus for the collection of industrial data and its analysis, both for those who sought to measure and maximize efficiency and for the social reformers who questioned the brutality of the system.48 The mangled limbs of the worker and the consequent irregularities in production they caused came to stand for broader conceptual inefficiencies and, indeed, revolutionary

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interruptions, which were the adversaries of this program of numerical mastery.49 Chance and contingency were redolent with political connotations, for they represented the contested space of modern rationalization: even the most extreme anomalies of experience, the last redoubts of the inassimilable and unpredictable, were rapidly becoming accommodated to and defused by the relentless panopticism of statistical analysis. The “moment” of Rejlander and Robinson might be called indecisive since, for those appropriately discriminating viewers, it never made a bona fide claim to even constituting a moment. The coded but legible artifice of the photograph of the juggler virtuosically tossing his objects in the air obliterates the singularity of the moment, for the balls would be in the same position in the next moment, the next hour, the next day, suspended like Coupeau above the roofs of Paris while life goes on below. What seems a moment of utter exemplarity—​ the apex of the ball’s parabola, the girl recoiling from the wolf, the boy about to capture the fly—​is revealed to be just the opposite. It is singular in no way that relates to the scene represented. It is a moment of calculated, precise regularity masquerading as one of unstable contingency, one that seems to respond to Roland Barthes’s apprehensive evaluation of news photographs that “fix the most rare moment of a pattern of movement, its extreme peak—​the balletic leap of a footballer, the soaring high-​jump of an athlete, or the levitation of objects in a house haunted by poltergeists,” all “contrived with great technical skill.”50 The possibility of genuine singularity is foreclosed in these earlier photographs, a disposition strikingly in accord with the homogeneity and interchangeability of industrial time, that clock to which photography itself was increasingly set. These images reveal to the viewers initiated into their patterns of deception an account of the photographic moment that shows the contingent instant to be a victim of the rationalized experience of time mandated by the needs of capital. The fantasies of the statistician and those of the industrialist overlapped in the nineteenth century, for the integration of the unusual or recalcitrant into a stable regularity was their shared aspiration. One historian has described the conjunction: “Statistical writers persuaded their contemporaries that systems consisting of numerous autonomous individuals can be studied at a higher level than that of the diverse atomic constituents. They taught them that such systems could be presumed to generate large-​ scale order and regularity which would be virtually unaffected by the caprice that seemed to prevail in the actions of individuals.”51 The single moment, the autonomous individual, the solitary photograph—​casualties all of the regularity that drove industrial modernity. Mary Ann Doane has recently proposed that the rationalization of industrial time was nevertheless accompanied by “a structuring that attempted to ensure their residence outside structure, to make tolerable an incessant rationalization.” Contingency, she argues, “emerges as a form of resistance to rationalization which is saturated with ambivalence.”52 We might well wonder to what extent this account is descriptive of the representations under consideration here, for these photographs seem suffused with the kind of ambivalent relationship to contingency and to time posited as central to the development of modernity. Both Rejlander’s and Robinson’s photographs comprise, in their artificial embodiment of an instantaneous moment, a more ambivalent response than the resistant space carved out a century later by Cartier-​Bresson.

In a medium that, early in its history, was burdened with the notion that its images might be produced spontaneously by the objects they depicted, this apparent lack of agency suggested that, as James Lastra has written, “The camera made it possible, perhaps for the first time in history, to make a legible or meaningful representational image entirely by accident.”53 Such accidents were the impossibility of Robinson’s and Rejlander’s photographs, their coded evidence of intervention dispelling the element of chance. And if their apparent instantaneity might be confused with neutrality—​the presumption that in “capturing things as they actually looked at a particular moment in time . . . there was little room . . . for intervention by the photographer”—​the properly alert viewer would see otherwise.54 That their pictures would select precisely this feature of photographic fraudulence—​its inability to capture the moment of accident or contingency—​as the mode of their appeal to their discerning viewers suggests that those viewers’ sensibilities were already calibrated by a rationalized sense of what the moment constituted. Yet they nevertheless appeared to demand a capacity antithetical to that regularity: an ability to discern that would mark off the contemplation of their photographs as an experience entirely dependent upon the vagaries of subjectivity, a differentiation of viewing that capitalized on rationalized modes of looking, but in doing so comprised a space of provisional autonomy. This apparent exteriority to the structures of industrial life is not, however, equivalent to freedom from them, but rather the reorganization of the visual habituations of that experience to the putatively distinct realm of commerce. Perhaps the crucial dimension of temporal perception associated with the rise of wage employment is a newly complex sense of the demarcation between time “on” and “off” the clock. The laborer’s own time, with its newly commodified ethos, was, in the case of viewing photographs like the ones we have examined, spent in a milieu that seemed to offer a respite from the inculcation of time’s homogenized value—​the conceptual basis for industrial capitalism—​even as it reiterated that characterization in its denial of the exemplary moment. The repertoire of visual discrimination upon which Rejlander and Robinson relied for their commercial success served in the vital role of what Doane has described as a mode of representation that resides outside the space of rationalization that renders it a tolerable regime under which to live, but which is nevertheless permeated by its prerogatives. This insidious extension of the manufactory’s tentacles was perspicuously expressed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their analysis of the “culture industry.” Their characterization could easily serve as a description of the phenomena embodied in these photographs: “By occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day . . . his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself.”55 I take the figure of “afterimages” here to be more than a haphazardly chosen turn of phrase, for it is not simply the case that these modes of amusement “bear the impress” of work but, further, that they furnish a space in which the discernment of the difference between work and play can be made only with recourse to the very visual brand of judgment licensed by industrial toil. The cultivation of visual discernment among an emerging viewership in the 1850s could be a remarkably lucrative space of leisure, but only by appealing

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to modes of looking that had become inescapably infused by the sensibilities and demands of work. Rejlander and Robinson could thus position their works to appeal to two seemingly antithetical constituencies, for they embraced the kind of intervention and authorial presence that seemed to an older generation of gentlemen amateurs inimical to the prerogatives of mass production, but also tailored the revelation of that intervention to a visual sensibility that presupposed the primacy of that very mode of production. Of course, any such program of self-​revealing photographic deception can exist only within a visual universe accustomed to a deep ambivalence about photographic objectivity, a skepticism that is the concomitant of the visual demands of industrial capitalism: of a realm of commercial leisure recalibrated to erect the illusion of a space beyond the grip of the factory and its time-​thrift. One was never entirely “off the clock” if one could see. The improved shackling of the human being to the regularities of that clock came with the wide dissemination of wristwatches, a device that tethered the worker to the synchronized realm of labor that he sought, in vain, to abandon. The inculcation of the temporality of work achieved by this appendage ramified the logic of time’s divisibility, and, as Jean Baudrillard has written, “By treating time as a substance that can be cut up, it turns it into an object of consumption.” For Baudrillard, this severable time is intimately linked with the denial of singularity that consumption requires, for “the truly unique object—​absolute, entirely without antecedent, incapable of being integrated into any sort of set—​is unthinkable. . . . [W]ithout the series there would be no possibility of playing the game.”56 The inconceivable unique object is not an immutable feature of civilization, but rather a historically specific product of the refinement of capitalist production and consumption, a denial of the singularity of time spent in either of those pursuits. That industrial time is infused with the logic of the series seems to reiterate at a conceptual level that which we observed in the debunking of “decisive” moments in the photographs of Rejlander and Robinson. The singularity of experience denied to the worker by industrial temporality fuels a desire that, in the perverse vicious circle of consumer capitalism, can only be fulfilled by a futile chase for the possession of that unique object that his own labor has helped to make extinct. The series of divisible units of time through which labor could be calculated infiltrated the disposition of leisure time, tethering it to an account of consumption that might reiterate the ethos of work even in the space of the laborer’s most intimate fantasies of possession, or, rather, of self-​possession. We cannot overestimate the deep concern among reformers in industrial cities that the streets were, in the words of E. P. Thompson, packed with “idle ragged children; who are not only losing their Time, but learning habits of gaming.”57 The loss of Time was the unequaled transgression in this world of efficiencies and calculable regularities. Such sins could, however, be ameliorated, wrote one advocate: “There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.”58 Agreeable and entertaining: an aspiration of capital aided by the spaces of ostensible leisure constituted by the visual apprehension of photographic images. Rejlander’s Two Urchins Playing

a Game might be an emblem of this system, for in the idle, useless gaming of the two children is encoded the practice of visual discrimination as a kind of productive leisure. The leisure of lost time is not the worthy practice of the juggler and the refinement of his mathematical mind, nor that of the budding geologist. This gaming, fully outside the sanctioned off-​time space of visual discernment, is what the photograph itself seeks to supplant. It is a misuse of that vital capacity, the embodiment of individual caprice, the unassimilated profligacy of time and of vision. This era’s greatest logician and statistician, John Venn, described the desires that gave rise to this denigrated ludic mode. “Some persons,” Venn wrote, “find life too monotonous for their taste, or rather the region of what can be predicted with certainty is too large and predominant in their estimation. . . . [T]hey may invent games or other pursuits, the individual contingencies of which are entirely removed from all possible human prevision, and then make heavy money consequences depend upon these contingencies.”59 But Venn cautions his reader that the pursuit of this course is “for the most part of a risky and enticing kind, to say nothing of its ignoble and often dishonest character.” The creation of such games as those practiced by the two urchins—​tomorrow’s workers—​was not only an unproductive brand of leisure, but one that sought to transgress the regularity of industrial experience. Games of chance were permissible only as long as the outcome was never in question, the very promise of the Urchins photograph. The viewer of the photograph, in his discernment of the artificiality of the instant it constructs, of the impossibility of an exemplary moment existing in industrial modernity or registering before the camera, is himself the antidote to the kind of unproductive visual discrimination practiced by the boy, his eye fixed on a nonexistent airborne object. Discerning photographic artifice was the visual autonomy granted to the worker in exchange for his discernment of the cost of that freedom: of the very artifice that was his temporary liberty.

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c h a p t e r

f o u r

Hand in Hand Gender and Collaboration in Victorian Photography

sketching out the rudiments of what would become a surprisingly durable origin story of her photographic production, Julia Margaret Cameron wrote in 1874 of her breakthrough more than a decade earlier, casting herself as a naive, if not accidental, initiate into the medium: “I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass. . . . I got my first picture, and this was the one I effaced when holding it triumphantly to dry.”1 The obliteration of the photographic image by the novice technique of this presumably self-​taught woman was hardly the most consequential effacement to occur in this particular mythology. While Cameron cultivated this autodidactic persona throughout her life, it is evident that her “first success” in 1864, the treasured portrait of the local girl Annie Philpot, was not the irruptive revolution Cameron’s account would seem to suggest. Indeed, what this anecdote wipes from view is the course of training that Cameron had undertaken in the preceding year from the phenomenally successful commercial photographer Rejlander and the very startling photographs that emerged from this period of instruction and collaboration. The ambivalent tension between the effacement and assertion of her photographic agency was complicated further by the peculiar constellation of identities involved in the collaboration of an amateur woman and a professional man. Cameron’s recollection of her initial triumph readily deleted this alliance from the historical record, yet it was paradoxically in a series of procedures of effacing herself that Cameron was to negotiate the question of her gender in the production of photographic agency, by seeming to absent herself from the image or to defer to the expertise of her male tutor, only to return in terms that seemed to destabilize the very possibility of such an absence, of a photograph

without an author.2 Gender was, in this unique collaboration, the category through which photographic neutrality was aggressively interrogated, and in which the mythologies of femininity and transparency might be consolidated and engaged.3 It seems probable that Cameron and Rejlander first met when the latter traveled to the Isle of Wight to photograph Cameron’s closest neighbor and England’s most beloved poet, Alfred Tennyson, in 1863.4 The intellectual community on the island was close-​knit, and the arrival of one of London’s most-​ discussed photographers might easily have induced Cameron to plan one of her seemingly innumerable salons at her country estate, Dimbola. Whatever the source of their initial encounter, the two were soon to collaborate on a number of photographs that indicate, from the start, their unconventional, and rather charged, interaction. Although it has been traditional to characterize Rejlander and Cameron’s relationship as that of mentor and protégée, more recent scholarship has expressed the likelihood that it was in fact one of employer and employee, with the socially superior Cameron engaging the services of the commercial photographer Rejlander.5 The noted photographer P. H. Emerson published a hagiography of Cameron’s life and work in 1890 in consultation with one of Cameron’s surviving sons. Emerson asserted that “long before that memorable day in 1864, on which little Miss Philpot was conjured as with a magician’s wand upon a glass plate covered with a chemical film . . . Mrs. Cameron had spent hundreds of pounds in paying the degraders of the art to fix the faces of her friends. Her generous nature did not consider money, photographers were ordered with lavishness to work for her, often under her immediate supervision. The best of this vicarious photography was Rejlander’s portrait of Tennyson.”6 If, as this passage suggests, Rejlander was one of those “degraders” whose services Cameron had procured, it certainly seems imperative to reconsider the consequences of this “vicarious photography” and the account of authorship and agency that it implies. Viewing their relationship in this manner makes a group of collaborative pictures from 1863 much more intriguing. Two photographs of very similar composition depict the arrival of tradesmen at the back door to Dimbola: The Butcher’s Visit and Receiving the Post (figs. 31–32). The interaction between the utopia of the Cameron estate and the outside world is mediated through these exchanges, for even paradise needs its meat and its mail. Yet the pronounced class dimensions of these photographs are difficult to overlook, the butcher and postman dressed in their work clothes and negotiating with the staff at the servants’ entrance. Another photograph executed in a similar vein, The Hurdy-​Gurdy Man, depicts the itinerant entertainer playing his music box for the benefit of the four women encircling him (fig. 33). However, this installment in the series differs crucially from the previous two, for the man in question is Rejlander himself, cranking away to the delight of the maidens. The association between the tradesmen, bringing to Dimbola the necessities of the outside world, and Rejlander, who comes to provide pleasure through the performance of a mechanical device, indicates that the stakes of this “vicarious photography” were far more problematic than the romanticized teacher and student dynamic often attributed to these two figures. That Rejlander would appear in front of the camera manipulating one mechanical tool while Cameron stood behind it, employing another, proposes

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FIGURE 31

Julia Margaret Cameron, possibly with Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Butcher’s Visit, c. 1863. FIGURE 32

Julia Margaret Cameron, Receiving the Post, c. 1863.

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a complex account of the agency of the photographer that would be articulated in the most contested product of this uneasy association. It was likely during this same sojourn that Rejlander produced a photograph of Kate Dore, a local peasant girl, depicting her in a bust-​length portrait in profile (fig. 34).7 This image reemerges in a photograph that is perhaps the most emblematic of the complexities of the Rejlander-​Cameron collaborations. An image provisionally entitled Kate Dore with Frame of Plant Forms is a most curious kind of dual effort, for we note that the object is in fact a photogram, a cameraless picture, which Cameron has produced by encasing Rejlander’s earlier portrait within a frame of ferns placed directly onto the photographic paper and exposed to light (fig. 35). This use of the photogram technique does not recur in Cameron’s corpus, and its deployment here proposes that it held a particularly attractive set of associations for Cameron’s objectives.8 Initially, the photogram seems to be a rather deferential production, for it reproduces Rejlander’s photograph without any overt revision of the portrait itself. Indeed, Cameron’s contribution seems relegated to one of embellishment, for she has only added a decorative frame to the original image. Moreover, that embellishment is one that has appeared through a technique that seems to obviate the presence of an author, in which the natural flora appears as if by organic growth, having physically touched the photosensitive paper. Yet this deferral or absence is, as I intend to argue, a strategically feigned one, shot through with an acute awareness of the peculiarities of being a woman and a photographer in the first decades of the medium, and of the very specific history of that tenuous alliance.

p h o to g r a ph y

sub rosa

If it had been Cameron’s aim truly to be deferential in the execution of a merely reproductive and decorative reiteration of Rejlander’s original work, she had done so in a way that is strikingly marked by the conjunction of the questions of gender and objectivity that attended early photography. The presence of the ferns in Cameron’s photogram had become, by the early 1860s, readily associated with a particularly female kind of contribution to the flowering of the medium. Most famously, the celebrated cyanotypes of Anna Atkins created over an eleven-​year period in the 1840s and 1850s had culminated in two albums dedicated not to the algae with which she has since been associated, but to Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853).9 Atkins’s work was, as Carol Armstrong has argued, a project in which the limitations of Atkins’s gender in producing a work of positivist taxonomy that might be widely accepted by orthodox science in fact empowered her to reexamine the more fundamental questions of the photograph’s suitability to this enterprise. Atkins “wandered into a photographic and scientific cul-de-​sac, and liking it there, stayed to entertain herself by problematizing the system of positivist classification and the apparatus of the illustration,” an undertaking “possible only at the outer limits of the patriarchal conduct of normal science.”10 The title page of this volume, which was itself a cyanotype, shows Atkins’s hand-​lettering enframed by the very ferns that are to be the subject of her study (fig. 36). The script of the title rhymes visually with the structure of the ferns, eliding Atkins’s subjective presence with the ostensibly objective, natural appearance of the flora. That these two registers would be visually conflated, rather than

FIGURE 33

Julia Margaret Cameron, Hurdy-​Gurdy Man, c. 1863.

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FIGURE 34

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Kate Dore, c. 1862. Library of Congress. FIGURE 35

Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, Kate Dore with Photogram Frame of “Ferns,” c. 1862. Albumen print; the ferns were added by the photogram technique. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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contrasted, suggests that the naturalization of the female photographer, of an agency that vanishes into the organicism of the fern, is wedded to the equally problematic naturalization of photographic neutrality itself. The presence of the woman photographer was paradoxically indicated by precisely that visual trope that seemed to obviate the necessity of her existence: the autogenetic flowering of nature. The complexity of asserting artistic agency for women was of course a torturous route on which photography constituted only one stop, but it was this medium that brings the problem into particular relief because the photograph’s reproductive, and possibly authorless, copying of nature itself replicated a variety of stereotypes of women’s creativity that had solidified in the later eighteenth century.11 Yet the one genre that did seem, even from the eighteenth century, to offer a certain degree of autonomy to the woman artist was the marginal practice of flower painting. Since this was already seen as a thoroughly feminized and subsidiary pursuit, it was not policed with the same vigor as those genres in which the demarcation between masculine and feminine, professional and amateur, was essential. Ann Bermingham has illuminated “the language of flowers,” a process through which subtle codes could be displayed by women in the sub-​rosa idiom of flora, articulating messages about their romantic status and intentions. It “offered women an opportunity to bide their time, to express a possible romantic interest without having to own it, to observe a lover without having to commit to him, and to tantalize him with the possibility of intimacy and affection without having to actually give them.”12 Under the guise of the natural, comparatively bold statements were articulated, attesting to an agency that would have been utterly inconceivable in the context of polite society.13 And it was to this well-​established

FIGURE 36

Anna Atkins, title page of Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853. Cyanotype. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

camouflage that Cameron turned in her creation of the photogram portrait of Kate Dore. The ferns of that photogram were thus implicated in Cameron’s labyrinthine presence, for the photographer had used a topos of naturalness to absent herself from the work, yet that very topos was resonant of one of the very few genuinely emancipatory possibilities for the woman artist. It was a space traditionally outside the slavish copying mandated by the traditional drawing master and lady amateur dynamic, perhaps the only space in which the woman-as-​copyist might be exploded. And yet, Cameron’s photogram was in a very real sense precisely that: a copy of Rejlander’s work, embellished and decorated by the hands of a woman. This paradoxical assertion of Cameron’s hand, at once absent and present, original and derivative, is a crucial locus not only of the troubled, gendered nature of photographic collaboration, but of the very fluid demands of authorial agency in the medium at large. This approach had already proven to be quite adept at the gendered modulation of the presence and agency of two collaborators. The most visually

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FIGURE 37

John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn with Her Microscope, c. 1854. Salted paper print from glass negative. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

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arresting precedent for Cameron’s photogram is the one evidently produced by the Welsh amateur John Dillwyn Llewelyn, representing his precocious daughter Thereza looking through the eyepiece of a microscope (fig. 37).14 This central image has been placed within an ovoid vignette and surrounded by the familiar photogram wreath of ferns. Thereza was by all accounts an extraordinarily polymathic woman who had mastered the principles of both botany and astronomy. She is pictured here in her own laboratory, viewing slides of specimens that she had fashioned herself. The eldest of Llewelyn’s daughters, Thereza became a collaborator with her father on a number of his scientific researches.15 The contours of this relationship enliven Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn with Her Microscope with a complex reflexivity. The ostentatious ocularity of the vignette suggests an affinity with Thereza’s own view through the eyepiece lens, even as the ferns that surround this scene echo the botanical specimen that might be under glass. The act of looking that is depicted and the one that is enacted in the photograph are difficult to disentangle, and the positions accorded to Thereza, her father, and the viewer are locked

in a mise-en-​abyme. Is the “author” of this work the person who (ostensibly) created the ensemble, or rather the person whose vision is formally equated with it? While this object has generally been attributed to Llewelyn pere, there have been so many reattributions of pictures within his oeuvre to other, female members of his family that it is not fanciful to think that Thereza may have been involved in fashioning this image of herself.16 Indeed, there exist several prints of the central image of Thereza from which the fragment within the vignette seems to have been derived. The attributional complexities of John Dillwyn and Thereza Llewelyn’s photographs only mirror the broader intricacies of authorial agency that suffuse their entangled corpus. This knotted agency is perhaps most clearly articulated by the Llewelyns’ endeavors to make photographs in concert with their shared obsession with another branch of science. In 1855, the father-and-​daughter pair, operating out of the astronomical observatory that the former had constructed to encourage his young child’s scientific precociousness, produced a photograph of the moon. Many of the most well-known lunar photographs of the 1850s were jointly attributed, notably the iconic ones made by Whipple and Bond at the Harvard College Observatory and subsequently displayed to the amazed visitors to the Great Exhibition.17 The multiplicity of simultaneous tasks involved in making such an image made this work ideally suited for two partners working in concert.18 In her memoirs, Thereza recounts the division of labor: “As the moon’s light is much less than that of direct sunlight, the necessary exposure in the camera must have been a long one, and it was my job to keep the telescope moving steadily as the telescope had no clockwork motion while the photograph was being formed.”19 This raises the question of authorship in a decidedly direct way since, as one historian of astronomy has asserted, Thereza “was the primary observer who handled the telescope (her father presumably processed the photograph).”20 John Dillwyn Llewelyn added his initials to a label accompanying the photograph, and Thereza deferentially recounts that “he (my father) made a photo of the moon.” The case of the Llewelyns reveals the plurality of possible collaborative models, but this plurality is nevertheless infused with both the formal motifs and conceptual strategies that informed Cameron’s activity a decade later. This regularity draws our attention to the circumscription of available expressive modes, even within the labors of a most extraordinarily progressive union of father-and-​daughter amateur scientists.

a f a mil y o n t h e t h r o n e

The collaboration between men and women in its most essential form in the nineteenth century was of course that of marriage. An endless parade of commentators on the nature of this relationship indicates the conventional apportionment of agency. One representative text, The Women of England by Mrs. Ellis, described the arrangement: “Women, considered in their distinct and abstract nature, as isolated beings, must lose more than half their worth. They are, in fact, from their own constitution, and from the station they occupy in the world, strictly speaking, relative creatures.”21 Another writer, attentive to this problematic tradition, nicely summarized the predominant account: “We underestimate the character of woman, and keep her in a state of forced

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FIGURE 38

John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-​ Gotha and Queen Victoria, 1860. Albumen carte-de-​visite.

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submission to man: who, in all his transactions with her, treats her as an inferior. She has no legal rights. She is not supposed to exist as a citizen. Her personality is merged in that of man. She is always a minor, never reaching majority.”22 This rhetoric, of a minority or subsumed status of the woman to her husband, was certainly a dominant strain of domestic ideology in Victorian Britain. Yet it needs to be read against the availability of a new and more complex model of male-​female collaboration, one that was invested with the most momentous political and representational stakes for the nation, and that would furnish a template for a much more fluid set of gender roles and the agency concomitantly accorded to them. In February 1840, as news of Louis Daguerre’s and William Fox Talbot’s “inventions” continued to spread, the newly crowned Queen Victoria wed her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-​Coburg and Gotha. The anomaly of a married female monarch was to problematize the gender roles of typical matrimony, as the ostensibly incompatible hierarchies of the royal and the domestic met on an increasingly visible, and visual, stage.23 A pair of images produced by the noted photographer John Jabez Edwin Mayall highlights the representational challenge posed by this novel arrangement (figs. 38–39). Reproduced as cartes-de-​visite, Mayall’s photographs were most decidedly not for the private consumption of the royal household, but were part of a vast and sophisticated campaign of image management, and were widely disseminated through this cheap and wildly popular format. In both photographs, Albert is seated with a book in his lap, Victoria leaning over him in consultation. As Margaret Homans has described, the two pictures, for all their similarity, differ in the attitude assumed by the Prince Consort. In the first of these, he looks up at Victoria boldly, while she stares sheepishly at the floor. In the second photograph, Albert is less direct in his manner, while Victoria seems to guide the direction of the interaction. This duo of representations does not permit a conclusive assessment of the relative powers of the two, but rather indicates an equilibrium in flux, as though the regnant and the

FIGURE 39

John Jabez Edwin Mayall, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-​ Gotha and Queen Victoria, 1860. Albumen carte-de-​visite. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

deferential could both be available to the couple’s presentation of themselves. It is particularly striking to notice the ambiguity of agency that is offered by the second photograph, which, when reproduced in subsequent texts, was given the caption “The Prince verifies a reference.”24 It is an act that deliberately obscures the vector of the task, as Homans writes: “On the one hand, his verifying a reference makes him the authority to whom Victoria defers, and that is what her stance conveys here and in the other [photographs] from this session; on the other hand, if he is verifying a reference, his eyes deferential towards her act of reading, we are reminded for whom he works: Victoria Regina. Does the caption disguise her servility as her mastery, or does the pose disguise her real mastery as feigned servility?”25 It is especially significant that this ambiguity is heightened by the act of scholarship, of gaining and transmitting knowledge. Whatever project the royals are engaged in, it is one that requires consulting an authority, but it is hard to know who directs and who defers. This dual thrust might be said to characterize the couple’s creation of themselves as a couple, as a way of negotiating the unprecedented representational minefield that their collaboration mandated. The historiography of this enterprise has itself struggled with the apportionment of appropriate agency to the royal couple. For instance, Homans suggests that “Victoria’s own contemporaries saw her both as producer of ‘the royal image’ ” and as subjected to its construction.26 However, the art historian Winslow Ames lauded Prince Albert in these terms: “His great creations were his wife as an admirable monarch; the modern sort of art museum; and the notion that art and science could both be applied to products of industry.”27 Nancy Armstrong, by contrast, finds that while Albert was keenly aware of the “special problem this semiotic of visibility posed for the Queen,” his “well-​ meaning attempts to carry out that form of service were consistently ignored or rejected.”28 Yet it seems evident that this ambivalence is not merely the product

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of a lack of sufficient historical analysis, but is in fact the effect of a collaboration precisely devised to make the authorship of the royals-as-​representation malleable and mobile. What is paradoxical—​and, later, prototypical—​about Victoria’s presence in her authorship of her own image is that it seems to assert her agency not through the grand and domineering gesture of the despots of old, but rather by way of a calculated deferral. Dorothy Thompson has argued that a domestic monarchy was insulated from the accusations of aloofness and excess regularly proffered by political modernizers, quoting Walter Bagehot’s pithy observation that “a family on the throne is an interesting idea” since it “brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.”29 As Victoria and Albert began to fashion themselves as the nation’s bourgeois couple-in-​chief, the task required making a domestic wife and mother out of the queen, an act that would only be possible by ceding some of her putative monarchic power. Yet it was by aligning herself with the ascendant bourgeoisie, whose commercial and industrial proficiency was underwriting the successful Britain over which she presided, that Victoria was able to increase her power by sacrificing her overt agency. That is, by presenting herself in visual representations as akin to a middle-​class, domestic woman, she was able to expand her authority among her subjects by sacrificing the trappings of power to the prerogatives of her married partnership. Her very ability to portray herself as ordinary and domestic derives, of course, from tremendous unordinary qualities; in short, from the power to make a bourgeois matriarch out of a queen. As Homans persuasively proposes, “She was unique, a woman whose life was related to ordinary female domesticity only by analogy and masterful tricks of representation, with powers that included her having—​ if any individual could be said to have it—​individual agency.” Agency secured by absence, by a feigned deferral to the demands of a masculinist hierarchy of the home, permitted Victoria to solidify her power and secure the loyalty of the new ruling class by seeming to abrogate that very agency. This supposed self-​abnegation, and its deference to bourgeois gender roles, was a strategy that developed in concert with the rise of photographic representation and, crucially, served as a kind of conceptual template for women to assert their agency while still comporting with the deference required in a collaborative enterprise with a man. The idea that the appearance of self-​denial might in fact be a potentially emancipatory tactic was nurtured by the royal example and would become entangled in the ideology of the photograph itself, a medium whose very definition was invested in the fluctuating presence and absence of this authorial agency.

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With a few very dramatic exceptions like the prolific painter Angelica Kauffman, the woman artist in this period was an amateur of social standing, often acting under the watchful eye of a hired drawing master. Critically, this work often consisted almost exclusively of tracing and copying. As Ann Bermingham’s study has persuasively argued, “The amateur’s own style is necessarily and properly effaced through the reproduction of work done elsewhere. The woman amateur is not fully present in her work; in fact the signs of such

presence—​a prominent brushstroke or a stray line—​could be construed as faulty technique.”30 This model of male-​female collaboration in the visual arts announced the impossible bind in which the latter was placed: either she was a mere reproducer, aping the work of her male tutor and suppressing her agency in the process, or, if she managed to deviate from this mechanical process and assert her authorship, those indices of agency were inevitably marked as failures to conform to the pattern to which she was inescapably tethered. The coding of the assertion of agency by women photographers as a technical failing was resurrected as recently as Helmut Gernsheim’s study of Cameron’s work.31 What is striking is that this inaptitude is rendered within the context of another of Cameron’s collaborations, her longtime intellectual exchange with John Herschel. Gernsheim writes that “Mrs. Cameron was so obsessed by the spiritual quality of her pictures that she paid too little attention to whether the image was sharp or not, whether the sitter had moved, or whether the plate was covered in blemishes. Lacking training, she had a complete disregard for technical perfection. Exactly one year after taking up photography she asked Sir John Herschel in a letter, ‘What is focus—​and who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?’ ”32 Of course, Cameron’s query was a rhetorical musing, not a reverent solicitation for Herschel to furnish her with an actual definition of “focus.” Yet this account underscores the apparent impossibility of a woman photographer expressing her generative agency without being denigrated for insufficient attention to technical—​that is, deferentially reproductive—​features of the art. The iconography of this deferential and mechanical copying was embedded in the very origin story of visual representation itself.33 The tale of the Corinthian Maid, expressed most definitively by Pliny the Elder, recounts the efforts of a young woman to fix the likeness of her lover before he departs: “She was in love with a youth, and when he was leaving the country she traced the outline of the shadow which his face cast on the wall by lamplight. Her father filled in the outline with clay and made a model; this he dried and baked with the rest of his pottery.”34 This association was reinscribed into the more specific history of photography itself when, in 1857, Rejlander produced a work entitled The First Negative, which depicts the traditional scene of the maid tracing her lover’s silhouette (fig. 40). This particular neoclassical trope had become rather forlorn by the 1850s, and Rejlander’s recourse to it indicates that the new medium had revitalized the gendered implications of the originary account of visual reproduction.35 If this photograph represented one extreme of feminine production—​ the simple tracing of a shadow—​the image that I consider to be its pendant, produced by Rejlander in the same year, engages the alternative, but equally immoderate, account of the agency of women in producing photographs. The pair of images conveys a sense of the very polarized, and ultimately marginal, possibilities that the new medium furnished for women: as the derided copyist or the vilified usurper of masculine prerogatives. The dichotomy was embodied in the two rather unappealing personages of the perfunctory, passive Corinthian Maid and the menacing, transgressive biblical Judith. It was to another saga from the deep recesses of Western culture that Rejlander would turn in producing his remarkable Judith and Holofernes (fig. 41). The heroine of this narrative had come to epitomize, along with Salome, the

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FIGURE 40

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The First Negative, 1857. Salted paper print. © RMN-​ Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

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feminine threat to civilization, the fundamental antagonism between a woman’s autonomous action and the ordering forces of masculinist culture. And the nature of this threat is here articulated in specifically representational, indeed photographic, terms. While The First Negative merely seems to graft the new medium’s reproductive features onto a readily available if moribund iconography, Judith and Holofernes elides the danger of its female protagonist’s corporeal transgression with an artistic one. As Judith has seduced the invading Babylonian general with the lure of her sexuality and an appropriate volume of drink, she slices the brute’s head from his body and parades it victoriously around the city she had saved. Rejlander’s photograph is of course a composite,

FIGURE 41

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Judith and Holofernes, 1857.

Holofernes’s head and the scene of the triumphant Judith joined through the process of manipulation for which the photographer was to become infamous. Judith, with her sword, has become the proxy for Rejlander’s own photographic editing, chopping away at the putative integrity of Holofernes’s body much as Rejlander would have to have done to create the picture itself. This woman is hardly the passive copyist of The First Negative; she is a woman whose agency is manifested in a way that makes explicit the photographic nature of her action. Judith is no meager tracer, but a composer, whose cuts come at the point of a sword. It is not mere happenstance that the only woman to whom Rejlander would attribute this kind of autonomy was a woman who, by virtue of her very assertiveness, seemed to many of the period’s more reactionary writers the incarnation of feminine agency run amok. The threat of woman’s representation, of a representation that deviated from the inert mechanics of the tracing of a male lover’s head to its brutal severing, indicates the distinctly gendered stakes of photographic representation. The woman’s agency in making—​let us say, executing—​a photograph that is something beyond the simple tracing of reality is thematized as a necessarily hostile assault on masculine integrity, a precedent that would have marked repercussions for the ambivalence with which Julia Margaret Cameron sought to announce her own presence in the photographs she began to produce several years later. The trophy head of Holofernes, grasped brutally by his left ear, indicates the conjunction raised by Judith’s transgressive status as a violator of the sanctity of both photographic and corporeal integrity. The image of the decapitated head, a familiar one since the Renaissance, can be seen as a motif that indicates the divided nature of representational practice, in particular a practice that takes the problem of its own making directly into account. As Michael Fried has written of Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1605–6): “The head of Goliath bears Caravaggio’s features. . . . Caravaggio’s self-​portraits often find ways to suggest the immersive and specular ‘moments’ in the process by which they were brought into the world . . . thematizing the divided

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nature of his practice even as it inevitably stresses the ‘specular’ moment as such, a ‘moment’ I have characterized as one of separation, distancing, and discontinuity.”36 For Fried, this kind of self-​decapitation manifests a fundamental division that characterizes Caravaggio’s production, mediating the shift from an immersive to a specular relationship with his own work, from viewing the picture as its maker to observing it as a viewer. This is the paradox of the painting: that a particular kind of exteriority to the representation produced can only be achieved by disembodiment (really, disembowelment), and it is only through such physical acts of self-​violence that the artist can pry himself away from an interested immersion in the picture and move toward something like a spectatorial distance from it. In the nineteenth century, such a possibility was licensed by physiological studies of decapitated heads, including Edward Rigby’s report in the London Medical Gazette in 1836, in which he collected “anecdotes of blinking and moving eyes, of wrinkled noses, of lips moving up to two minutes after the cut had been made.”37 That these movements could be readily observed suggested that consciousness might survive what Ludmilla Jordanova has called “drastic bodily mutilation.”38 This divided self, consisting of an ambivalence toward authorial presence so intense that it might require corporeal destruction to achieve a desired exteriority, is a burden that a woman—​encumbered by the limited exemplars of the Corinthian Maid and Judith—​had to negotiate in ways that the special objectivity claims of the photograph made even more formidable. Decapitation was perhaps the most extreme form of self-​annihilation, but it focuses our attention on the degree to which the oscillating presence of the photographer’s agency was an enormously consequential enterprise.

t h e v i e w fr o m w h e r e ?

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Self-​abnegation was increasingly seen in Victorian culture as a prerequisite to the kind of objectivity that a desire for knowledge about the world seemed to mandate. The safest route to knowledge, in which nature might speak for itself, was to deny all of the interested distortions that being a human with a body appeared to entail. This sensibility was especially pronounced in scientific enterprises, for, as Peter Galison has insisted, “In the nineteenth century . . . the desired character of the natural philosopher inverted to one of self-​abnegation . . . more saint-​like in self-​denial than powerful in genial interpretation.”39 As Lorraine Daston and others have discussed, the case of the midcentury study of the physiology and perception of color provides an especially rich instance of how the problem of visual objectivity was mutating in significant ways. The signal shift came around 1850, when the unreliability of the perceiver became newly pronounced. Datson writes, “Whereas [chemist Michel Eugène] Chevreul and his predecessors had assumed that an investigation of visual phenomena would yield . . . generalizations, Helmholtz and his colleagues worried about the incorrigible inter-​individual variability that was part and parcel of the subjective.”40 This development, whose origins have themselves been the subject of important scholarly attention in recent years, nurtured the flowering of a regime of scientific training that “required the

scientist to progress through a series of ever more demanding exercises in self-​observation, until complete visual passivity was attained.”41 For women, the liberating potential of this self-​denial was magnified by the fact that it was their supposedly marked vulnerability to all of those interfering characteristics of temperament, desire, and emotion that made them so unsuited to the gathering of knowledge. If, in the self-​abnegation exemplified by death, by the transcendence of the limitations of human corporeality, one might find a privileged access to the world, it was an especially promising state for a woman, since it seemed to offer something that life could not. Harriet Martineau, the polymathic feminist, found in these kinds of scientific pursuits, unencumbered by her female body and its limitations, a freedom unavailable elsewhere. Her recollection in her Autobiography crucially fashions this liberation in terms that will be familiar to us: “I had got out of the prison of my self, wherein I had formerly sat trying to interpret life and the world,—​much as a captive might undertake to paint the aspect of Nature from the gleams and shadows and faint colour reflected on his dungeon walls.”42 The specter of the Corinthian Maid looms large here, as though the prison of the female self is a kind of spatial adjunct to the imprisonment of the woman in representation, bound as she was to mere “gleams and shadows,” deprived of a more panoramic vista by virtue of her female embodiment. George Levine’s provocative recent study has posited the centrality of this ethos in nineteenth-​century literature and its embodiment in a particularly extreme metaphorical structure. In his Dying to Know, Levine seeks to describe the rise of “a passion for knowing so intense that one would risk one’s life to achieve it . . . a willingness to repress the aspiring, desiring, emotion-​ridden self and everything merely personal, contingent, historical, material that might get in the way of acquiring knowledge.”43 And, for Levine, it is only in death that such a complete purification of epistemological processes can be achieved, for it is “a kind of liminal position, at the edge of nonbeing, and it implies a persistent tragedy: only in death can one understand what it has meant to be alive. The continuing aspiration to get it straight, to understand what it means, to transcend the limits imposed by the limiting self, depends upon the elimination of the self.”44 Such a transcendence, however, seems to bring us dangerously close to what Donna Haraway has called the “god trick,” a disembodied vision that, despite its apparent liberty for figures like Martineau, is nevertheless wedded to a view from nowhere,45 accountable to nobody but the patriarchal panopticism that licenses it. Haraway advocates something quite different, and in doing so illuminates the peculiarities of many Victorian women’s relationship to objectivity. It is not universality, but the always ambivalent and contradictory specificity of epistemology, of “situated knowledges,” that might furnish something like a feminist objectivity. The figure in which such an undertaking is embodied is, for Haraway, the split self, an actor whose features seem, in crucial ways, to codify the fluid absence and presence that Julia Margaret Cameron uneasily sought to assert for herself. “The split and contradictory self,” Haraway emphasizes, “is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge.”46 Cameron was sensitive to

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this splitting in a way that few others in the middle of the nineteenth century were, enamored as many of them were of the freedom apparently offered by a complete transcendence of the self as the most secure route to objectivity. In Cameron’s photographs, this is the more fundamental “split” that plays out: on the one hand, an objectivity that could come to women only by repressing emotionality and corporeality and, on the other, the promise of a new, photographic modality of female agency expressible only by negating the possibility of objectivity itself. How was one to be neither the Corinthian Maid nor the eccentric hysteric, both the sober investigator and the agent of creativity? How, in short, was one to be absent and present at the same time and in the right proportions, especially when one was burdened with all of the impossible contradictions of female agency? One approach to the problem that engaged directly with Rejlander’s work had been proffered only a few years prior to his collaboration with Cameron. In a fascinatingly intricate photograph of her two eldest daughters in the interior of their South Kensington home, Clementina, Lady Hawarden, interrogated the causal sequence of visual reproduction that had minimized the efforts of so many female makers of images (fig. 42).47 Isabella Grace and Clementina Maude, 5 Princes Gardens links this shifting sequence to the gendered problematics of visual reproduction. The two daughters face each other, one reading and the other sewing. The wall behind them is adorned with framed representations: five prints surrounding a portrait, and above this ensemble a small horizontal fragment from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.48 What seems at first to be a straightforward decorative deployment of representations made by others is deeply complicated by the actual character of these reproductions. Moreover, the group of prints is by Sir Francis Seymour Haden, the family doctor and an able etcher, but it is now thought that these prints may have been based upon photographs made by Hawarden herself, as others by the engraver demonstrably were.49 There is a very striking resemblance, for instance, between one of Hawarden’s photographs of Clementina Maude and two genre scenes produced by Haden the following year, the chronology of which can only indicate Hawarden’s role as the originator of the images that embellish her domestic milieu. Even more notable than this unexpected reversal of representational agency is the one that is embodied in the fragment of Raphael that crowns the display. For this fragment is, in fact, Rejlander’s After Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (fig. 43), in which the roles of the cherubic occupants of the lower ledge of painting have been assumed by two small children photographed in Rejlander’s studio. That Hawarden has elected to include what is perhaps the most obviously derivative work in Rejlander’s entire oeuvre in her wall of images is a pointed gesture. For while Hawarden has quite obviously reproduced Rejlander’s photograph within the space of her own, the more strident pastiche is the one that After Raphael’s Sistine Madonna itself enacts, of aping in photographic form one of the most instantly recognizable images of Western painting. There is unquestionably a criticality to Hawarden’s interpellation of both Haden and Rejlander that is nevertheless attenuated by the setting in which their originality has been probed. For we are, after all, within the domestic interior, whose adornment is as squarely within the purview of an agentially marginal woman as the language of flowers.

FIGURE 42

Clementina, Lady Hawarden, Isabella Grace, c. 1861–62. Albumen print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

And yet it is precisely Hawarden’s characteristic treatment of the spatiality of this setting that offers the possibility of more forceful expression. As Carol Amstrong has demonstrated in her virtuosic reading of Hawarden’s oeuvre, these photographs “speak to the claustral condition—​at once claustrophobia and claustrophilia—​that is their enabling circumstance.”50 They are overrun by “mirrors, windows, walls, fabric, and light,” which simultaneously expand and contract the spatiality of domesticity by which Hawarden’s life is enframed. Indeed, one might say that it is the act of eerie doubling, of reflections indistinguishable from their referent, and, most acutely, of the disrupted causal relationships of reproduction to which the works of her two male “imitators” are subjected that are the enabling conditions of this malleability. The mirrors and windows, Armstrong recognizes, “speak to the division and the threshold—​the connection and the cut—​between interior and exterior, private and public, the fact of confinement and the fantasy of escape that it enframes.”51 Hawarden brilliantly, if only partly successfully, maps the nominally derivative task of arranging pictures to decorate a wall onto that spatial dichotomy, negotiating in her own way the potentially emancipatory modes of this idiom.

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fr o m d e at h : s ym p at h y an d t he pos t m ort e m phot ograph

FIGURE 43

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Child Study after Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, c. 1854–56. Albumen print. Photo: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, New York.

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An important and recurrent theme of some of the most insightful analysis of Cameron’s representations is the relationship between her overt demonstration of the technical procedures through which her photographs were produced and the gendered agency that this assertion would seem to entail. Again, Armstrong’s study has been deeply searching: “[Cameron’s] insistence on visible process rather than masterfully hidden technique, and her declaration of home-​staging, all serving the interests, ultimately, of demonstrating the personal quality of the truth of her fictions, Cameron’s photographs not only pronounce how they are made, but also identify the locus and condition of their making as that of the female domain of the home.”52 Clearly, this description is apt for much of Cameron’s corpus, but, as I have suggested, it seems as though this view represents only one extreme of a more dynamic declaration of agency that the strangely overlapping assumptions of photographic objectivity and feminine subjectivity required. To be only overtly present would have meant reinforcing the supposed feminine insufficiency of self-​possession. What was required was a presence that naturalized its appearance but did so through a process that indicated the savoir faire of an agent familiar with the most penetrating questions about photography itself. The remarkable conceptual move that Cameron demonstrated in her early collaborative photograph with Rejlander of Kate Dore reappears at a later moment in Cameron’s production,

in a suite of images that constitute her most ambitious epistemological interrogation of the medium, and of her relationship to it. In 1872, young Adeline Grace Clogstoun, one of the several children adopted into the utopian kingdom of the Cameron household, broke her back while playing with her sister and died soon thereafter. Her adoptive mother took a group of photographs of Adeline lying in repose, all from subtly different points of view and with distinct strategies of positioning objects in the room, including, very probably, the decedent herself (figs. 44–46). Common to each of the images is the presence of flowers strewn about the corpse and the bed on which she rests. Nearly a decade after the photogram of Kate Dore, Cameron has returned to the motif of a florally embellished portrait of a young girl, although this time the flowers are found “in” the original scene itself, adorning the lifeless body of her beloved child. Yet, in these photos, the flowers are not the products of natural growth exemplified in the Dore portrait, but are very clearly positioned by a human hand, a memorial gesture that entails a much more attentive presence. We have in the photographs of Adeline a subject who has achieved at least the predicate for epistemological objectivity, a girl freed from the corporeal cell and its connection to the vagaries of a vision insufficiently insulated from emotion and interest. But, crucially, her mother is unwilling to replicate this status, unwilling to swap the sanctity of the intact body for knowledge, a conviction revealed in her refusal to permit an autopsy that is equally strewn with floral metaphors: “It has been like a mysterious dream losing that blossom of my old heart thus and in such a way! . . . I did not after all have my darling opened.”53 This adamant refusal to make the bargain of female objectivity brought tantalizingly close by the death of her daughter, to reject the primacy of a patriarchal episteme that seemed to many other women the only route to emancipation as a knowing subject, indicates how deeply fraught these photographs were for Cameron. Opening her darling was simply too far to go. And yet, there is something oddly attractive about the liminality of that space, a way in which it seemed to open up a tentative resolution to Cameron’s objectivity problem in a way that the coroner’s scalpel could not. There, in the last of the images, is Cameron’s assertion of her presence in the creation of the photograph: a camera looming above the deathbed (fig. 47). However, this is not the camera that has taken the photograph, but an additional camera, a prop strategically placed in the scene. This was a way—​perhaps the only way—​for Cameron to rebut simultaneously the presumption of the inescapable objectivity of the photograph and the irredeemable subjectivity of the woman. In the most emotionally charged scene of her oeuvre, Cameron is as composed as the most imperturbable investigator, but can become so only by making her production itself the subject of the photograph, by showing objectivity to be but one strategy rather than the natural state of affairs. In Adeline was the figure of a substitute, whose death could be like taking away the blossom of one’s own heart, leaving behind a changed, diminished, partial self. Amanda Anderson’s recent account describes the cultivation of detachment as a narrative, epistemic, and political strategy that was “a prevalent Victorian preoccupation,” that was “characterized by ambivalence and uncertainty about the significance and consequences of such practices.”54 Anderson insightfully indicates one recurring approach to reconciling that ambivalence, which receives

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FIGURE 44

Julia Margaret Cameron, Adeline Grace Clogstoun, 1872. FIGURE 45

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Lovely Remains of my Little Adeline, 1872. FIGURE 46

Julia Margaret Cameron, Deathbed Study of Adeline Grace Clogstoun, 1872. Albumen print from collodion negative. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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FIGURE 47

Detail of Figure 46.

its most considered articulation in the writings of John Stuart Mill. The philosopher negotiated the problem of objectivity through “a complex dialectic of detachment and engagement: ethical and epistemological progress is achieved through the flexible agency of sympathetic understanding.”55 “Sympathy,” that is, sympatheia, to suffer together, itself implies the metaphysically impossible duality achieved by Cameron in these haunting photographs, of a presence split apart by the loss of the child, managing through that joint suffering to be both transported to the world of postmortem objectivity and, tragically, to remain tethered to the world in which that view was precluded. Cameron annotated hundreds of her photographs in her own handwriting throughout her career with her signature assurance of verisimilitude: “from life.” On the matte of the first photograph of Adeline, we see the crucial inversion inscribed: “From death . . . the sacred and lovely remains of my little adopted child.” The odd phraseology begs the question: Does the photograph come from death, from an absence so deeply felt as to provide a horrifically privileged view from the outside? “To die—​without the Dying / And live—​ without the Life,” Emily Dickinson echoed, “This is the hardest Miracle / Propounded to Belief.” The promise of this liminality was nurtured by the scientific investigation of death itself in the 1870s, a period with a rich lexicon that evokes the new permeability attributed to the two states: trance, coma, syncope, catalepsy, insensibility, suspended animation, human hibernation, mesmerism, and anesthesia, all products of the Victorian sensibility.56 The literary device of prosopopoeia, of furnishing a corpse with a voice, might seem to have no analogue in visual representation, but the tradition of posthumous photography—​in particular that of the fragile mortality of Victorian children—​ is clearly related.57 The achievement of posthumous agency, which seems to have belatedly had the perspective to access some objective truths about the world, is of course one of the central aspirations with which the photograph has been widely associated. Diana Fuss has written pointedly of what she calls the “corpse poem,” noting that this particular literary form underlines something about literature and representation more broadly: “Any poem is readable

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without its author. In a poem, a word exists independently, signifies on its own; words communicate and circulate in the writer’s absence . . . all writing presumes the radical absence of the agent who produced it.”58 This particular device, then, exemplified the disembodied, detached quality of all literature. Fuss is here elaborating on Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” which envisions as a central condition of modernism the shift from literature to text, from author to scriptor. Barthes asserts, with typical flair, that “the removal of the author (with Bertolt Brecht, we might speak here of a veritable distancing)” has begun to undermine the fraudulent coherence of an authorial voice upon which “positivism, crown and conclusion of capitalist ideology . . . has granted the greatest importance to the author’s ‘person.’ ” The refusal to comport with this ideology, the rejection of the charade of a single meaning dictated by the prestige of the author, is, for Barthes, a truly revolutionary possibility in the realm of both representation and politics. Barthes does not metaphorize this authorial absence in a haphazard way; the carefully selected term of his title indicates that death remains a potent mode of altering one’s relationship to an objective account of the world. This now moribund figure of the author is inevitably linked to the inherently masculine bias of modern culture: “The author is reputed to be the father and the owner of his work; literary science thus teaches us to respect the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions, and society postulates a legality of the author’s relation to his work. The text, on the other hand, is read without the Father’s inscription.”59 The father’s inscription is quite directly supplanted in one of Cameron’s postmortem photographs of Adeline. Just above the child’s reposing head is a framed image of a military scene, a space occupied in two previous images by a blank space and by Cameron’s reflection of her camera, respectively (fig. 48). Cameron has provided, directly on top of this portion of the photograph, her own handwritten inscription: “Her father’s charge at Madras for which he won the Victoria Cross.” The father’s fatal action, which ultimately led to Adeline’s passage into Cameron’s home, is memorialized by a conjunction saturated with apparently deferential female agency: of the photographer who inscribes the scene of her creation and of the monarch whose largesse sanctified the father’s service. Cameron’s agency is thus asserted, in the form of her handwritten inscription, by apparently deferring to the deceased warrior, by cloaking her intervention in the description of his gallantry. The deliberate arrangement of the objects significantly looming above Adeline’s head, transitioning from a darkened cavity in an empty wall to the textual dedication to the father to the visual reflection of the maternal photographer, marks the space as the laboratory of Cameron’s expression of gendered presence. The complex displacement of the father must be viewed as a central strategy of this photograph, and, I believe, of Cameron’s project at large. What seems to be an examination of the problem of female agency in the photograph becomes an even more ambitious interrogation of what that problem can reveal about the notion of objectivity itself. The death of the author can liberate writing from patriarchy, yet it equally demands the obliteration of agency, female or otherwise. But the partial death of the author, the feigned, proxy, split “death,” which straddles the intermedial chasm between the objective clarity of the god trick and the subjective assertiveness of situated knowledge, may preserve both in a flexible dynamic. To the list of hypostases of capitalist and patriarchal ideology occupied by the male Author, historians

FIGURE 48

Detail of Figure 45.

have traditionally added the photograph, a modern invention equally wedded to the notion of a holistic and true representation of the world. Yet to do so is to underestimate the fluidity with which agency, and especially the agency of a woman, was negotiated and deployed. If the photograph’s putative objectivity was the guarantor of its persuasiveness and significance, women were paradoxically situated in this equation, for they were both inside and outside of the objectivity: too slavishly objective in their copying of the master’s work and too emotional to be properly objective. Cameron seized upon this stratified position to make herself into an agent who examined the nature of photography and the problematic masculine prerogatives that governed its privileged status. Cameron’s ambivalence registers most poignantly in the place where we, and she, began: in the wistful recollection of her supposed “first triumph,” her portrait of young Annie Philpot. Here the incommensurable accounts of agency are memorably joined in a recollection that evokes the complexity of Cameron’s photographic authorship: “I felt as if [Annie] had entirely made the picture. I printed, toned, fixed and framed it, and presented it to her father that same day: size 11in. by 9in. Sweet, sunny haired little Annie! No later prize has effaced the memory of this joy, and now that this same Annie is 18, how much I long to meet her and try my master hand upon her.”60

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c h a p t e r

f i v e

Signature Style Francis Frith and the Rise of Corporate Photographic Authorship

to the reader of francis frith’s 1860 account of his photographic journey to Egypt and Palestine, the author left no doubt as to the arduousness of the undertaking. “With the thermometer at 110 degrees in my tent the collodion actually boiled when poured upon the glass plate,” Frith averred, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole. He “suffered a good deal,” but all was worthwhile, for “there is no effectual substitute for actual travel” in the making, and subsequent viewing, of photographs. Going on to denigrate the “man sitting quietly at home in London or New York [who] may write even a Book of Travel . . . without the cost and labor of travelling,” Frith engages in a familiar privileging of the immediacy of his medium over those of the writer, painter, or engraver.1 His individual presence at the prodigious landmarks represented in his photographs is, conventionally, the guarantor of the referential quality of those pictures. Yet, by the time of his death some four decades later, Frith’s name would be affixed to thousands of photographs he had not taken, representing places he had never visited. These images bearing the imprint of “Francis Frith & Co.” nevertheless enjoyed tremendous success as documents, as virtual witnesses to the earth’s full panoply, and were reproduced by the millions. The metamorphosis of “Frith” from the individual, expeditionary photographer of the 1850s into the moniker of a collective practice for picturing the whole of the world clearly attests to a number of crucial shifts in the modes of authorial identity that could certify these photographs of remote regions as reliable. The genre in which Frith’s corpus consisted—​the travel view—​ carried perhaps the strongest presumptions of a referential linkage, of the indispensable presence of the photographer at the scene represented.2 Indeed, the rigors of the journey evinced in Frith’s text were but one mode of tacitly

asserting a special kind of identity between the photographer and the far-​flung scene. In no other photographic genre was the causality of this relationship so predicated on surmounting a spatial divide, where simply being present demanded a level of conviction hardly required by the comfortable precincts of the portrait studio.3 And yet it was within the confines of this taut indexical structure that the evolution of authorship manifested itself in unusually revealing and problematic ways. The referential and evidentiary qualities of travel views were clearly dependent upon the status of the individual and his negotiation of—​indeed, his subsumption to—​collective modes of authorship associated with the rise of the corporation. These multifarious formations link the development of this particularly successful firm to a host of contemporaneous debates about authorship and its evidentiary, moral, and political ramifications in an age when the definition of the individual seemed so tenuous, and so consequential. Frith’s process of assimilating multiple individual authors into a single corporate identity manifests the larger social processes of mediating between individuals and groups that is central to the history of photography.

f r o m f ra ncis fr i t h t o fr i t h   & c o .

The incorporation of Francis Frith, the creation of an autonomous firm under Frith’s name that increasingly detached itself from his actual orbit, was of course a legal fiction. Frith’s transformation in 1860 from an individual photographer into a firm occurred amid a most far-​reaching redefinition of the legal entity of the company. As one legal historian has argued, the “linguistic and perceptual change” between the 1856 Joint Stock Companies Act and the 1862 Companies Act is revealing.4 While the former asserted that persons may “form themselves into an incorporated company,” the latter omitted the words “themselves into,” indicating in the mere six intervening years a markedly greater autonomy of the company from the human beings who were its constituents. Thus, “while the 1856 Act clearly identified the company with its members, the 1862 Act suggested that it had an existence external to them. . . . Seen as a thing made by, but not of, people, the incorporated company was depersonalized and ‘completely separated’ from its members.”5 The doctrine of “separate personality,” of a company that not only exists independently of its members but has been “cleansed and emptied of them,” was coalescing into law and permeating culture at the very moment when Francis Frith had likewise begun to detach his personal agency from that of Francis Frith & Co. The insistent “I” of Frith’s expeditionary account to the Near East is transformed by the end of his life into the “we” of his firm. “Messrs. F. Frith & Co are represented in almost every town by one or more Agents,” a later catalogue boasted, “from whom any of their views may be obtained.”6 The recent resurgence of interest in the works of Francis Frith has been catalyzed by an understanding that, in the words of Douglas Nickel, “The assumed unity of the author does not cohere or works against itself.”7 It is particularly frustrating, then, that Nickel’s pioneering study limits itself to Frith’s oeuvre before 1860, terminating at the very moment when that incoherence was codified into a new legal and authorial entity and its ramifications began to be concretely manifested.

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FIGURE 49

Francis Frith, Sculptures from the Outer Wall, Dendera, 1858–59. Albumen print. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

A comparison of a “Frith” photograph with ones from “Frith & Co.” indicates both how their distinct authorial identities were expressed and the particularity of that expression to the referential structures of the travel photograph. The photographs that Frith made during his journeys to Egypt and Palestine share with their introductory text (quoted at the outset) a labored expression of immediacy and individuality and aspire to a clear referential bond between the present photographer and the scene represented. In many of these images, Frith’s signature is inscribed in the negative, already a signal of his proximity to, and contiguity with, the scenes of these ancient lands. This elision is particularly pronounced in photographs of ancient inscriptions, to which Frith has added his own, modern glyph. In Sculptures from the Outer Wall, Dendera (figs. 49–50), the photographer has turned his own signature ninety degrees, so that it echoes the vertical, tabular form of the Egyptian inscriptions he records. Similarly, his signature is frequently incised in a part of the negative where it might initially be mistaken for one of the “actual” impressions on the stone. This practice implies that Frith was linked proximally enough with these sites to mark them, as when courting lovers scratch their initials into the bark of a tree. The conflation of the surface of the photographic negative with that of the tablet is an attestation to the contiguity of the two spatial realms. The signature is, in Frith’s own logic, the vehicle for linking authorship with presence, a bond that would be forcefully severed with the development of his firm.

FIGURE 50

Detail of Figure 49.

Images from the Frith repertoire of three decades later indicate the shifting models of authorship that attended the making, distribution, and reception of these photographs. By the time that the Frith firm issued its 1892 Catalogue of the principal series of photo-​pictures printed and published by F. Frith & Co., Francis Frith had long given up daily control of the company and had retired to a life of theological writing and contemplation. This gargantuan tome, at more than seven hundred pages of succinct description, is a tribute to the encyclopedic reach of the firm’s photographic apparatus. But, more important, it is a testament to the ease with which the countless and generally nameless individual photographers who traveled the globe making pictures were assimilated into the corporate identity of F. Frith & Co. In the decades of the firm’s prosperity, a revealing shift in its cataloguing of its stock unfolded, as the name of the individual photographer ceded to the location depicted as the organizing principle.8 Nowhere in this all-​encompassing atlas are we introduced to these journeymen by name, and the sober catalogue of locations, inventory numbers, and sizes available for purchase serves to smooth out any rough edges of idiosyncrasy in the corpus. The authorial configurations deemed reliable—authoritative—​to Victorian consumers of texts and images evolved dramatically throughout the latter half of the century. As one probing study has recently put it, “For the Victorians, individual author figures could be productions of corporate groups,”9 an arrangement that aptly describes the Frith firm’s organization by the end of the century. The use of the editorial “we” and the anonymous, unsigned review—​ whose legitimacy was much debated in contemporary literary and political circles—​were expressions of the authority produced by replacing the name of the individual author with that of the publication.10 Indeed, it was the very absence of a single, named author that often secured the reliability of the text, for whatever interests that individual might harbor were understood to wither in the face of the corrective, collective voice of the publication. The Conservative writer and politician A. J. B. Beresford Hope, in an influential essay on newspapers and their writers, made this case explicitly: “It is obvious that the reciprocal dependence thus created must tend to check individual recklessness,” and that permitting individual authors to sign their contributions would “weaken the feeling of mutual corporate dependence—​you give an impulse to crotchetiness, foolhardiness, and violence, when you so far emancipate every man’s colleagues from their share in the results of their partner’s behaviour.”11

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Since the trustworthy writings are “really those of a corporate body,” any deviation from this corporate model might risk the particular claim to reliability and authority affected by the checking of “individual recklessness.” The association of corporate authorship with a disinterested commitment to objectivity was embraced by Frith, who, on the eve of the incorporation of his firm, wrote an article for the Art Journal extolling the inherent truth of the photograph and denigrating the adulteration by capricious “artists” and “amateurs” of that purity. Formulating this division in technological terms, Frith opposed the glass-​plate negatives of his métier with paper negatives, to which he attributed a capricious interference of authorial presence. He averred that the chief virtue of the glass-​plate negative’s characteristics, “the most obvious, and that which undoubtedly lies at the root of its popularity, is its essential truthfulness.” Anticipating his retirement from photography to a spiritual life, Frith linked this truthfulness to a religious claim: “We can scarcely avoid moralizing in connection with this subject; since truth is a divine quality, at the very foundation of everything that is lovely in earth and heaven; and it is, we argue, quite impossible that this quality can so obviously and largely pervade a popular art, without exercising the happiest and most important influence, both upon the tastes and the morals of the people.”12 To this divine objectivity Frith opposes the calotype, whose material properties lend themselves to assertions of human agency. As Valerie Lloyd has argued, Frith’s “dissatisfaction with the calotype method is clearly linked to the physical interference of the paper texture, the lack of clarity, in prints from paper negatives, as if this softness or texture (very visible, and aesthetically utilized) . . . deprive[s] the viewer of part of the truth, the visible essence, of the objects before the camera.”13 This debased method, Frith asserts, “is chiefly employed by artists and amateur travellers who are not so much anxious to produce fine pictures, as to carry away suggestions and remembrances.”14 It was precisely these pretensions that the Frith firm’s oeuvre sought to mitigate, blending out the contaminations of the distinctively aesthetic and the personal, banishing the personal remembrances of the traveler and the idiosyncratic marks of the artist. The moral, even religious, bases of corporate authorship were embedded in Frith’s logic even from this first year of his incorporation.

i n t h e f i e l d fo r f r i t h

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Of course the categories of “individual” and “corporate” authorship remain poles on a very broad continuum that encompasses varying degrees of hybridity, several of which are represented in the Frith oeuvre. And, as recent work in Victorian literary history has reminded us, Victorian readers, and viewers, encountered a widening array of authorial structures. As Leah Price has noted of the final decades of the century, “The balance of power between those who tangibly produced documents and those to whom ultimately their content was assigned became more disputed.”15 What is nevertheless striking is how skillfully this variety was embraced by, and subsumed to, “Frith.” The ingenuity in corralling individual authorship—​even when that authorship was the very thing that made the photograph salable—​into the strictures of the corporate identity, is illustrated by a few distinctive models employed by the firm in the second

half of the nineteenth century. Opportunities to glimpse the procedure for this assimilation are few because the authors of only an infinitesimally small portion of the “Frith” photographs can now be identified; but in the cases where such reconstructions are possible, the results are illuminating. There is no indication in the voluminous register of 1892 that the photographs offered in the section devoted to images of “Constantinople” were taken not by Francis Frith but by his one-​time assistant, Frank Mason Good. Item number 1732 in the catalogue, “Fountain of the Seraglio,” depicts the Ottoman Rococo structure in the large public square in front of the Topkapi Palace, now known by the eponym of its patron, Sultan Ahmet III (fig. 51). The lower left-​hand corner of the photograph is a thicket of authorial assertions and indices: a blindstamp embossed on the print “Frith’s Series,” white lettering in block capitals noting “1732. fountain of the seraglio. constantinople,” and, finally, the distinctive graphical signature in the negative of the photographer himself: “F.M. Good” (fig. 52). The juxtaposition of the standardizing and collective imprint of Frith with the flourish of Good’s assertion of authorship is extremely rare. Indeed it seems probable that Good’s own personal service to Frith on his 1857–58 expedition was the justification for this unusual courtesy. Nevertheless, when the photograph served as the basis for a woodcut illustration to a popular travel guide in 1882, the contradiction was readily reconciled by cropping out the entire corner of the image (fig. 53).16 The clumsiness of the circular vignette in which Good’s scene is inserted is betrayed by the too-​tall

FIGURE 51

Frank Mason Good, for Frith and Co., Fountain of the Seraglio, n.d. Whole-​plate albumen print from wet collodion glass negative. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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FIGURE 52

Detail of Figure 51. FIGURE 53

From a photograph by Messrs. F. Frith and Co., Fountain of the Seraglio, n.d. Engraving. From Edwin Hodder, Cities of the World (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Company, 1882). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

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minaret of a nearby mosque piercing its border. The caption unproblematically grants the authorship of the image to “Messrs. F. Frith & Co.” What the publisher desired here was not the work of a particular photographer, but rather that of a standardized, unembellished, and illustrative view. This was the means through which Frith & Co. attained their considerable financial success, and this cropping out of Good’s signature is emblematic of the general shift in the identity of these photographs as the century progressed.

FIGURE 54

Robert P. Napper, Gardens at the Alcázar, Seville, c. 1860. Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Museo Universidad de Navarra.

Another, likely far more typical, relationship between the firm and one of its journeymen is suggested by the recently unearthed case of a previously unidentified photographer. The photographs offered for sale in the section of the Catalogue devoted to views of Iberia were probably the work of multiple authors, but the identity of one has emerged from the dustbin. Robert P. Napper, a Welshman, has been persuasively proposed as the author of a large number of “Frith” views of Andalusia and Portugal from the early 1860s. Typically, no signatures adorn these photographs, only the favored “Frith’s Series” blindstamp in the lower left corner, occasional information indicating the location, and a stock number to mark a correspondence with the catalogue (figs. 54–55). What is noteworthy in this instance, beyond the recovery of Napper’s identity, is that the Frith firm’s characteristic subsumption of its photographers’ identities to that of the company’s was met with resistance. And what seems to have sparked this recalcitrance on the part of Napper was his desire to maintain his prerogative to the selection of subject matter and the articulation of a coherent pictorial style. Napper’s Andalusian views were evidently made under an agreement with Frith & Co., although the details of this arrangement remain murky. Very soon after his completion of a suite of photographs depicting the region’s landscape and architecture, but also its inhabitants and their folkways, Napper apparently had a falling out with Frith. The contretemps led to Napper’s attempt to sell many of his views privately, and he even boasted that he would do so at “considerably less than what Mr. Frith charged.”17 In quick succession, Napper published his Views in Andalusia photographed by R.P. Napper, a compendium of seventy-​one images that encompassed, in the words of his own advertisement, “a choice collection of the more / Interesting objects & views in Andalusia / Costumes of the Peasantry.”18 The bold assertion of authorship in the eponymous title, the declaration of a selection of particularly “choice” views, and the prominence of ethnographic studies all indicate how closely

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FIGURE 55

Francis Frith and Co., Alcázar Gardens, Seville, c. 1860s. Whole-​plate albumen print from wet collodion glass negative. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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individual agency and the concomitant ability to select subject matter were bound together in Napper’s enterprise. And these features were precisely what made Napper’s project incompatible with the demands of the Frith operation. Frith’s catalogue had, as one study has emphasized, “no views of peasants in costume listed. Such human interest material was not part of the austere program of the company.”19 Indeed, the severity of this program is evident in the photographs by Napper that nevertheless did make their way into the Frith catalogue. Without exception, they have excised much of what Views in Andalusia foregrounded: local types and customs, picaresque incidents, and romantic vignettes (fig. 56). This assimilation was not always entirely successful, as is evident from one instance of a view of the Square of San Francisco, Seville, where the Frith office has inadvertently left in one of Napper’s locals at the lower left (figs. 57–58). In almost every other instance, the merciless blade of the cropper has done its job more thoroughly. Just a few years later, while in the employ of another photographic agency, The British and Foreign Portrait Company, Napper boldly asserted a special referential contiguity between himself and the scene he photographed. In the Vale of Neath, in South Wales, he produced a pleasing view of a quiet cranny, which he then assertively christened “Napper’s Glen.”20 Exercising the explorer’s prerogative to name this tract of scenery after himself, with this eponymous claim Napper insists upon the necessity of his presence. That Napper undertook this somewhat presumptuous approach to representing the land can

FIGURE 56

Robert P. Napper, Group of Smugglers, Gibraltar, c. 1860. Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Museo Universidad de Navarra.

easily be understood as an antidote to the strictures of the Frith operation at which he had previously chafed. The notion that the production of an image of a site might be contingent upon the presence of a particular, even somewhat self-​aggrandizing, photographer would undermine the conceptual logic of the entire Frith undertaking. Indeed, such contingencies are cleansed from the Frith corpus not only through the brute force of commercial agreements, but equally through the resolute deployment of congenial aesthetic conventions.

b u il d ing a “ h o u s e st yl e ”

The rigorous policing of the Frith catalogue, the weeding out of views that did not meet established criteria, in Napper’s case and in those of countless other, nameless, photographers, had the effect of instituting for the firm a kind of negative style, a series of conventions defined by their lack of the marks of individual authorship. As Martin Barnes has suggested, “Though Frith’s Series consists of images made by numerous photographers, there is a clearly detectable ‘house style’ that was followed; or else selections were edited to fit the tenor of the whole.”21 The standardization that would come to characterize a “Frith” photograph was in fact the total absence of what we would normally identify as an individual “style.” It was, in brief, a picture that might have been made by any competent photographer, amply illustrating the monument in question, and minimizing any distracting idiosyncrasies that might inhibit the practical polysemy of the image. And, as Joel Smith has articulated, there was a concrete economic rationale for subsuming individual style to a corporate style. He notes that “the reliably style-​less style of the Frith’s Series view, in which the composition is resolutely centered upon the subject” was not a detriment

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FIGURE 57

Robert P. Napper, Square of San Francisco, Seville, c. 1860. Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Museo Universidad de Navarra.

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to sales but, rather, “the very regularity of ‘Frith’s Series’—​in effect, the generic resemblance of each view to all the others—​was itself the bankable product.”22 The Frith firm’s use of “style” as a kind of cudgel to ensure the coherence of its catalogue was evidently so successful that it was, and is, trumpeted as one of the organization’s major achievements. “Although only a small proportion of the photographs . . . were taken by Frith himself,” one representative account asserted, “the Frith style of photography, with its emphasis on truthfulness, technical brilliance, balanced composition, and fine detail, persisted” across the firm’s production.23 One of the first modern studies of Frith’s oeuvre went an important step further: “Although it is impossible to state categorically that Frith actually exposed the plate for any particular picture, it is still fair to attribute the results to him. The photographs are undoubtedly stamped with his style and authority so that even his assistants’ work is indistinguishable from his own.”24 This linkage of “style” with “authority” tells us much about the stakes of the disappearing individual photographer under the Frith banner, for the visibility of that individual was directly linked to the ontological status of the photograph and its position in an era of what one historian has called “the increasingly depersonalized system of corporate ownership” of information.25 The term “style” has made more than its share of art historians uncomfortable, in part because the historically variable understanding of “style” is so intimately connected with the relationship among individual and corporate modes of aesthetic production.26 And, as James Elkins has noted, “It may be suggested that the chief reason for the problematic nature of style is that it so closely follows the inchoate ways in which people conceive of personality. Definitions of style may indeed collapse into metaphors of personality.”27 Such definitions are bound to be especially problematic in their application to the photographs of the Frith firm because of their hybrid status as the products of a corporate personality; but for those reasons, they are also indicative of the

FIGURE 58

Francis Frith and Co., Square of San Francisco, Seville, c. 1860s. Albumen print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

important shifts in the referential implications of photographs toward the end of the century. Heinrich Wölfflin proposed that the “root of style” was double, that it encompassed both individual style and period or group style, and many others have followed in seeking to differentiate the rules that govern these two roots.28 What we have in the case of the Frith style is the latter, or group style, proposed as though it were the former, individual style. Yet the individual is no longer the discrete human being, but rather the corporate personality born of the economic reorganizations of the middle of the nineteenth century. The Frith style, then, is not simply a rejection of the possibility of individual photographic authorship. It is rather a redefinition of the mode of individuality eligible to carry the referential guarantees that had made the travel photograph uniquely compelling. It indicates that the presence of any particular photographer before the scene represented in a photograph is irrelevant. For what secures the reliability of that photograph is not the distinctive stylistic testimony of that journeyman, but rather the absence of such distinctiveness, which cedes to the sacral objectivity of Frith’s coherently styleless style. Where the contiguity of the particular photographer’s presence with the space represented was the key to the referential structure of Francis Frith’s Egyptian pictures, the replacement three decades later of photographers’ signatures with regular, capitalized assertions of property—“frith series”—​is indicative of a marked evolution. As Anne McCauley has argued, “The cursive signature denoted a more personal, chirographic type of authorship in which the body of the maker was invested in the product; its uniqueness and authenticity were functions of its status as a material trace of the distinctive gestures of an equally unique and coherent personality.”29 The denial of distinctiveness is fundamentally a rejection of the linkage of presence and veracity and is affected by overturning the very device that Francis Frith, expeditionary photographer, had previously employed to mark the particular testimonial potency of his own photographs.

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The conceptual foundations for this shift, and the corresponding commercial interests that it satisfied, were most clearly explicated in the legal battles in which the Frith firm found itself embroiled in the last two decades of the century. Here, in the law courts and in the photographic press, the obviation of the physical presence of the photographer emerged as the vehicle for addressing some of the most fundamental tensions of the rise of corporate authorship. These skirmishes underlined, crucially, how photography’s contested referential status implicated it very directly in the definition of authorial identity at the end of the century.

t h e c a s e o f au t h o r v e r s us ope rat or

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“Who is the author of a photograph?” earnestly queried the chairman of a hearing of a select committee of the House of Lords appointed in 1899 to sort out the thorny disarray of photographic copyright law.30 This long-​standing question had been given particular urgency in the wake of a series of court cases that had tried, with little success, to submit that philosophical inquiry to legal analysis. The trial in Nottage v. Jackson, maligned as a mere “curiosity of copyright law” in its own time and disregarded by historians of art ever since, immediately concerned the apparently minor matter of the reproduction of a photograph of a club of Australian cricketers.31 The London Stereoscopic Company had sued Mr. J. H. Jackson of Leeds on the grounds that he had sold pirated copies of the photograph in question, one that had been registered for copyright at Stationers’ Hall in the name of the company. There was no dispute that Jackson had indeed reproduced the photograph and had sold those copies; he admitted as much at trial. What was contested was whether the rights to a photograph could be assigned to a firm at all, or whether the name of the particular photographer—​or “operator” as the plaintiffs dismissively referred to him—​was required on the copyright application. The presiding justice concluded, after many weeks of deliberation, that the copyright was legally vested only in the actual photographer who had attended the appearance of the cricketers at Kennington Oval and had uncapped the lens before them. As such, the proprietors of the London Stereoscopic Company, not having been the owners of the copyright, had no standing to enjoin Jackson from his piracy and their case was dismissed. On appeal, the court upheld the decision against the proprietors of the firm and took pains to reiterate its view that the presence of the author at the site of the photograph was, in the eyes of the law, indispensable. “In this very case,” the reasoning went, “it is not pretended that either of the plaintiffs went to the Oval. No doubt the idea of a photograph of the cricketers occurred to one of the plaintiffs . . . but the man who went to the Oval had to arrange the group, to put in the plate, and to adjust the lenses.”32 And the author of the photograph is, therefore, “the person who effectively is, as near as he can be, the cause of the picture which is produced.”33 The necessity of proximity, and its intimate bond with the causality of the photograph being taken, is continually draped in spatial terms. One notice in the legal press asserted that the owner of the studio might “not live within 200 miles of the shop where the business is carried on,” and another commentary thundered that “a firm

which keeps a photographic establishment, provides material and apparatus, and employs men to take photographs, the members of which firm may never have been near the place where the photograph was taken . . . may, indeed, never have become aware that such a photograph existed.”34 And no genre of photography was more strikingly impacted by this shift of referential proximity than the travel view, the very kind of picture whose reliability seemed to rest principally on the “having-been-​there” of the individual photographer. What had begun as an unremarkable proceeding to control the unauthorized copying and sale of a negligible photograph had concluded as a devastating blow to the agency of the photographic firm. From the moment the appeal was handed down, an extraordinarily cohesive campaign was mounted in the photographic press to condemn this denigration of corporate authorship. This apparent victory for the individual photographer, in this case an employee of the company called Reynolds, was entirely incompatible with the contemporary realities of the photographic industry. The consequences of assigning copyright—​and thus authorship—​in this fashion ignored a core structural element of the business of photography. As an editorial in the British Journal of Photography put it, “It is manifest that many thousands of the landscapes, published by such firms as Frith . . . may be pirated without legal remedy, because the negatives were, in most instances, taken by artists employed for the purpose and not by the principals themselves.”35 This organizational fact was readily paired with a characterization of the individual photographer as an “operator” or “employee.” These terms were used consistently to distinguish the manual laborer who exposed the plate from the authorial figure who had conceived the idea for the photograph. In an especially hyperbolic, but by no means unique, letter to the editor, a correspondent drew upon the paradigm of a visionary architect and the lumbering mason who brings the master’s conception into materiality: “To the artist the ‘idea’ of a cathedral will resolve itself into a visionary fabric full of harmonious detail. The beautiful is formed by the creation of his brain, but the real does not exist till the ‘man who does the work’ steps forward in the shape of the mason; and his rude hands, according to the Court of Appeal, are to be dubbed author’s hands! ”36 The individual photographer’s standing was diminished even further by the time that the parliamentary committee made its report. Not content to liken the “operator” to the rude mason, that time-​tested figure free from agency and volition—​the child—​is invoked: “Whilst pretending to be based on ‘high art’ principles, the Bill lays it down that any child who takes the cap off a lens, leaving it to the London Stereoscopic Company to ‘do the rest’ of the photograph, is as good an artist as the originators of styles of engraving.”37 At the hearing, the Viscount Knutsford had reacted with a premonitory disbelief to the notion of assigning any rights or agency to the individual who had taken this insignificant step: “You do not mean the boy who under orders took off the cap?”38 The ongoing denigration of the “child who takes the cap off a lens” was not merely an expression of the corporate authorship sought by the large firms and countenanced by photographic culture at large. It also registered a newly evolving referential logic of the photograph, in which the proximity of the operator to the scene ultimately depicted was no longer a guarantor of that depiction’s reliability. To the contrary, it seemed now that such spatial and temporal nearness was the very thing that distinguished the mere “operator”

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from the bona-​fide photographer, the former simply manually culminating the vision and intentionality of the latter. Surely this was the commodity on offer in the 1892 Frith and Co. catalogue, which assured the potential client of “having a large group of first-​class operators [who] can be sent to any part of the country, and good work will be guaranteed at very moderate prices.”39 It is hardly happenstance that the speciality of the Frith enterprise was precisely the genre whose traditional alliance with the individual, named photographer was so decisively severed by the developments in Parliament and in the photographic press. The parliamentary proceedings provided the means for codifying in law a definition of photographic authorship that derived quite precisely from the business arrangements that the largest commercial firms had found to be optimal. Little surprise, then, that one of the witnessed called to enshrine this definition was none other than Eustace Frith, son of Francis, and then managing director of the firm at Reigate that bore his family name. The senior Frith, the daring adventurer who had witnessed and recorded the majesties of Egypt and the Holy Land, had died only months earlier at his seaside villa in Cannes. This passage was an ideal, if melancholy, demonstration of the now-​total autonomy of the Frith name from any one photographer. With the appearance of Eustace in the committee room, the corporate form of photographic authorship had symbolically vanquished its rivals in the arena of the law. With the unceasing production of Frith views under the corporate banner and with no grounding in traditions of photographic referentiality, all the world was drawn near, purified of the troublesome mark of the “operator.” The journey, in its literal and metaphorical dimensions, was an obligatory part of the historical development of the individual. The transformation of travel from an exercise in emulation of textually predetermined itineraries to an undertaking that privileged the particularity of individual visual experience is, as several scholars have noted, a crucial element in the formation of the modern subject.40 And to a great extent, the first decades of photographic travel views accrued their referential potency from the individualistic guarantees of the traveler’s implied presence at the locales represented.41 Yet this model was ultimately incompatible with the demands of the emergent corporate personality, an entity that came increasingly to dominate the commercial realm of photography. The development of a Frith “house style” was a pointed strategy for thwarting that for which visual discernment had in the recent past proved so adept: the apportionment of the relative agency of particular photographers against that of the corporate identity. It was by actively depriving the users of “Frith” photographs of the visual means by which to identify the nature of those photographs’ authorship that the firm achieves its corporate authorial identity. This mastery of the corporate style achieves its force both by obliterating the visual traces of individual agency and by negating the kind of individuality required to detect those traces. The rise of the Frith firm remains a revealing episode in the conjoined fortunes of individual agency and photographic referentiality, one made especially poignant by the erasure from history of those journeymen who had most ably mastered the corporate style. Throughout the half-​century of this development, the social unit through which photography’s testimonial assurances were offered had shifted decisively, adding to the arsenal of an already empowered corporate system the broken arrow of photographic objectivity.

c h a p t e r

s i x

Indistinct Relics Discerning the Origins of Photography

for most o f the medium’s histor y, the query “who invented photography?” was a driving force behind an extraordinary share of research in the field. Yet in the last fifteen years or so, this question has been posed in a way that is superficially similar, but is in fact disruptively divergent. Historians tend now to speak of “origins” rather than “inventions,” of the conditions of possibility from which the medium arose. The distinction between these two lines of inquiry is subtle, but the disparity in the treatment that each has received is marked. Indeed, the question of photography’s prehistory has been among the most dominant leitmotifs in recent scholarship. Geoffrey Batchen’s Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997) made clear the implications of this distinction with force and sophistication. One of the major achievements of Batchen’s work is, in its own words, “to shift emphasis from that traditional economy of originality and priority to the appearance of a ‘regular’ discursive practice for which photography seems to be the desired object.”1 He asks not “Who Invented Photography?” but, rather, “Within which specific dynamic of cultural/social forces was it possible for photography to be thought by anybody?” Batchen rightly rejects the conventional practice of assigning to a single individual the paternity of photography, recognizing that a “regular discursive practice,” such as the one embodied in the conception of photography, must be one in which multiple agents participate over a period of time. It might be accurate to say that photography, as it has been conceptualized in the years since Batchen’s study appeared, belongs to what Thomas Kuhn called a “troublesome class” of discoveries, a category to which he devoted much of his voluminous and influential oeuvre. In this category he included oxygen, electrons, and x-​rays. In such instances as these, attributing

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the discovery to any individual is necessarily arbitrary, because the elongated chain of events that constitute the discovery of unpredictable phenomena involves, as Kuhn puts it, “recognizing both that something is and what it is.”2 Accordingly, “many scientific discoveries, particularly the most interesting and important, are not the sort of event about which the questions ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’ can appropriately be asked.”3 As Kuhn concludes in his study of the discovery of oxygen, the minimum number of investigators to whom that distinction could reasonably be attributed is three, all working in different countries and in different intervals within the same stretch of the mid-1770s. Here the question of priority, of assigning precedence to a single agent, is hopelessly complicated by that discovery’s diachronic nature. Yet the anointment of this multiplicity of regular discursive practitioners constitutes a trade-​off more significant than simply the spreading of credit. It implies the inevitability of photography’s conception, for the shared desire for photography to appear is distributed widely enough to ensure against the removal of any single investigator from the collective endeavor. Would we really be deprived of paper photography if, on a bitterly cold February day in Dorset in 1800, the child welcomed into the world by William Davenport Talbot and Lady Elisabeth Fox Strangways succumbed, as many of his contemporaries did, to pneumonia? If, across the channel, in the Val d’Oise, an inquisitive youth was fatally crushed by a plummeting branch of a birch tree weakened by the Invernal gnawing of the bronze birch borer so reviled by arborists in the Île-de-​France, do we believe that we would be without the daguerreotype? These seem to us rather inane counterfactuals, not only because, in fact, the young Talbot was hardy and the adolescent Daguerre cautious, but because of the dilution of the duopoly that these men once enjoyed over photography’s origins. How much richer our stew is nowadays, peppered with a touch of Hippolyte Bayard, a dash of Nicéphore Niépce, a sprinkle of Thomas Wedgwood. Convinced, as many of us are, that photography’s conception was born of a collective expressive desire rather than the tinkering of a gentleman-​chemist or dioramic impresario, it would seem that we need not concern ourselves unduly with the causal necessity of either man in the efflorescence of the phenomenon we identify as photography. But when we deny the centrality not just of Talbot and Daguerre, but of any single historical figure, we have already made a decisive judgment about the inevitability of photography’s appearance. Whatever its genuine merits, this judgment belies the extraordinary indecision about the origins of photography that preoccupied the early historians of the medium and, in particular, obscures the political and epistemological roles of alternative origin stories that proliferated during this era. In tracing one especially curious such instance, we can begin to recover just how consequential the question of the attribution of photography’s invention was to the conception of technological progress and individual agency in industrial society. Indeed, a forceful rebuttal to this inevitability had been anticipated (at least) as early as 1839, the year in which François Arago concluded his discussion of a dispute of national priority thusly: “And now you have been made acquainted with the invention for which France and England have contended, as formerly the seven cities of Greece respectively claimed the honour of being the birthplace of Homer.”4 Arago, who in the first week of that year had secured for Daguerre the purchase by the state of the latter’s eponymous

photographic process, was writing here not of the contentious international rivalry for photography’s rightful attribution, but of that for the forerunner to the steam engine. Arago derisively dispatches the argument for an invention’s inevitability, rebutting those who objected to the patent awarded to James Watt on the grounds that “in a very short time” his ideas “would . . . have occurred to all the world.” “According to this reasoning,” Arago scolded, “neither days nor months, nor years of priority should confer the slightest privilege.”5 The origin story of photography, which has occupied a central position in scholarly discourse in recent years, also suffused the photographic culture of the 1850s and 1860s in Britain, when the attribution of priority was intersecting with the heightening stakes of intellectual property and industrial development. Indeed, the debates about whether any invention or discovery could be attributed to an individual were themselves the forums for determining the structures through which knowledge could be made into property. The proximity of photography’s announcement to these controversies situated it ideally to participate in this disputation, embroiled as the medium was from 1839 in an international contest for priority. We need, then, to reconsider the generally marginalized practices through which the partisans of the middle of the century fashioned origin stories, some laughably ludicrous, but others keenly reflective of the consequences that new paradigms of “origins” would have upon modern industrial society. In the most intriguing of these episodes, it was James Watt himself, the exemplar of Arago’s insistence upon individuality in invention, who would be offered up as an alternative father of photography. The test to which that alleged paternity was put was a predominantly visual one, in which a group of artifacts resembling photographs were placed before an assembly of the leading authorities on the medium. It required reconciling the appearance of new and anomalous visual evidence to the structures of expertise that were deeply invested in the orthodox history of photography already in formation. Whatever conclusions were drawn from the visual examination of the unknown objects would have to carry the burden of defining the origins and indeed the very identity of the photographic medium.

e v id e nce o f s o m e t h i n g

At the first meeting of its winter session of 1863, the members of the Photographic Society of London gathered amid murmurs of an extraordinary discovery that would dramatically change the history of their cherished art. The chairman, noting that his brethren “were doubtless anxiously waiting for further details,” recognized Mr. Francis Pettit Smith to share the fruits of his inquiry.6 Smith revealed to the gathering that he had found a group of objects among the papers of an eminent inventor of the previous century (fig. 59). The pictures, which had been tantalizingly arrayed upon a table, were then passed around to be examined by the members while Smith recounted the circumstances of their acquisition. In the autumn of the previous year, in his capacity as curator of the Museum of Patents in South Kensington, Smith had occasion to visit the old factory in Soho, near Birmingham, of Matthew Boulton, business partner of the great inventor James Watt, whose steam engines had

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FIGURE 59

Francis Eginton, after Benjamin West, Venus and Adonis, 1778–81. Mechanical painting process of aquatint on albumen surface. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

virtually powered the Industrial Revolution. Here, in Boulton’s library, which had reportedly been sealed off since the 1790s, Smith discovered a number of prints on paper and two images on silver plate. The former appeared to be reproductions of paintings by Benjamin West and Angelica Kauffman, among others. As The Photographic Journal reported, “The question as to whether the pictures were produced by means of a lens and camera was then discussed in a desultory conversation,”7 in which a variety of hostile perspectives were enunciated. A deputy chairman of the National Portrait Gallery declared that the pictures on paper “were not produced either by engraving, drawing, or painting, or by any method of which he had any knowledge; they bore no traces of handiwork whatever.”8 Another expert averred that “whatever opinion might be formed as regarded the paper pictures, the silver plates were, in his opinion, unquestionably photographs.”9 Revealing what these objects actually were found to be is anticlimactic and so is best revealed at the outset: they were, alas, some misdated and poorly preserved daguerreotypes, and the relics of an impracticable process of reproducing paintings, respectively. The technical identifications of these mysterious images are far less illuminating than the efforts at discernment that their materialization elicited.10 These debates suggest that the history of photography had, even by the 1860s, already become the object of ideological positioning by antagonists in a dispute of far more widely reaching consequences. For Francis Pettit Smith, who had endeavored to restore to Matthew Boulton and James Watt some measure of the paternity of photography, had done so not only in his capacity as a representative of the patent museum, but as a promoter of an entire philosophical orientation to which that institution was itself a monument.11 He did so as the embodiment of and an advocate for an ideology of invention in which nothing was inevitable, and in which credit could always be attributed to some man to whom the protections of intellectual property must be duly accorded. And such a position was timely in 1863, when a royal commission was deliberating on the possibility of abolishing patents altogether and with them, men like Smith feared, the incentive system for a culture of invention and ingenuity that had propelled Britain to its position of industrial might.12 It was a system of belief to which Smith had arrived by the torturous journey of his own experience. Smith’s own contributions to the field of maritime engineering were of national significance. His screw propeller had been deployed on the most advanced of the Royal Navy’s ships of war and on nearly all new commercial vessels, reducing transit times and increasing the range of navigation considerably. He “spent his money, his labor, and his ingenuity in conferring a great public benefit, without receiving any adequate reward”13 and constantly reinvested the proceeds of his Ship Propeller Company in pursuit of further refinements. Smith’s patent expired in 1856, leaving him with an unprotected asset and plunging him into penury. Stripped of the protections of the patent, Smith had to endure the additional insult of an attack on his claims to innovation, which sought to deprive him of his only remaining form of compensation: public esteem. In a brutal publication, unambiguously entitled Who invented the screw propeller? Were the patented propellers of Francis Pettit Smith . . . in every respect direct plagiarisms? (1858), James Nicol assailed Smith, claiming that no individual, let alone one as “destitute of such resources” as education and ingenuity as Smith, could be assigned priority for an invention like the screw

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propeller. Nicol’s broadside did not simply aim to reattribute the invention to another inventor; rather, it implicitly sought to declare the impossibility of an attribution to any single actor. He doubted whether “the development, through all its intellectual stages, within so brief a period, of an original and essentially complex idea” could be accomplished “by one individual [in whom] a diversity of scientific and mechanical resources must necessarily be concentrated.”14 The expiration of Smith’s patent, and the apparently concomitant attack on both his particular ingenuity and on the very possibility of any individual possessing the requisite range of learning to claim authorship of a complex innovation, struck several of his influential allies as both unfair to Smith and undesirable to the culture of industrial innovation at large. This injustice was remedied only slowly and rather inequitably, first by an annual pension, and later by his elevation to the honor of knighthood. But by far the most consequential compensation for Smith’s maltreatment at the hands of a weak patent system was his appropriately symmetrical appointment in 1860 as curator of the patent museum in South Kensington, as guardian of the public expression of the organization of proprietary knowledge about whose shortcomings he had come, by hard experience, to form some very strong beliefs. Perhaps the most publicly visible manifestation of the patent-​worthy individual as the prime mover of innovation was the Victorian penchant for heroizing industrial pacesetters, not only in the stone of public monuments but also in popular literature. This practice had matured since the beginning of the nineteenth century into a well-​oiled hagiography machine.15 The most successful of its impresarios, Samuel Smiles, churned out a hefty stack of these volumes, including Lives of the Engineers, Industrial Biography, and Men of Invention and Industry. The egalitarian thrust of Smiles’s biographies was embodied in the notion of “self-​help,” the liberal doctrine that a man’s fortunes were held tightly in the grasp of his own hands, as attested by the achievements of the exemplars of often undistinguished background that populated his pantheon. These were (exclusively) men whose contributions had been decisive in the crystallization of technological advances: “It is not the man who gives the first idea of a machine who is entitled to the merit of its introduction, or the man who repeats the idea and re repeats it, but the man who is so deeply impressed with the importance of the discovery that he insists upon its adoption, will take no denial, and at the risk of fame and fortune, pushes through all opposition and is determined that what he thinks he has discovered shall not perish for want of a fair trial.”16 They were celebrated men like James Watt, but also the unjustly unheralded, including an innovator in naval propulsion to whom Smiles would dedicate an entire chapter in the latter volume, one Francis Pettit Smith.17

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One of the most thorough appraisals of the “ante-​Daguerreian theory of photography” proposed that winter night at the Photographic Society recognized how closely intertwined that debate was with the contemporaneous contest in the arena of patent law. As a preface to the detailed recounting of the appearance of Smith’s new evidence, the author offered this assessment: The thoroughgoing advocate of the privilege [of patent law] insists on its being admitted as an axiom that but for some such shield provided for him by the State the inventor would work stealthily and, whenever

it was possible, carry the secret of his discovery with him to the grave. The opponent of patent rights, on the other hand, ridicules the idea that trade secrets can be kept at all, or that an invention which has once proved itself useful in practice can possibly die out. . . . That the following “true story” will have any influence upon the views of the parties to the debate it would be venturesome indeed to say, the policy of Letters-​ patent for Inventions lying just within that portion of debatable land on which men, otherwise at one upon the dogmas of Political Economy, are found arrayed on opposite sides, and into the discussion of which something of theological acrimony has managed to find its way.18 The granting of a patent had acquired a variety of undesirable political associations, not least the residual, if anachronistic, view that this privilege was essentially a monopoly bestowed by the Crown unto its favored. Such a privilege was inimical to the laisser-​faire ethos of the 1860s, when any intervention that might impede the free flow of trade was seen as a hurdle to be surmounted.19 There developed in this period of abolitionist fervor a caricature of the patentee as a kind of sinister twin to the dexterous inventor. As one historian of patent law has lamented of such crudities, that should an inventor “seek and obtain a patent for his invention . . . he immediately becomes the enemy of man-kind—​a grasping, selfish, greedy grinder of the faces of the poor, using his power to create a monopoly to the detriment of his fellow man.”20 For an advocate of the patent system, the existing fathers of photography were a problematic lot. Talbot in particular had, in the view of many, brought discredit upon himself and upon the system itself by litigiously enforcing his own patent with such zeal as to stifle innovation and the expansion of the economic benefits of his invention. One account from the photographic literature makes this accusation acutely. It tells of a young photographer named Thomas Sims who had operated his two modest portrait studios in London with laudable diligence, when he received a letter from the great Talbot, praising his work and inviting him to call upon the master. “Flattered by the invitation of so eminent a man,” Sims arrived at the designated address to find “waiting for him, not Talbot, but Talbot’s attorney, who advised him that he was guilty of infringing his client’s technique” and demanded payment of a license fee of some £325.21 Although Sims refused, Talbot pursued the matter in the courts, bankrupting the young photographer and forcing him to close his galleries. Such anecdotes are plentiful and effectively caricatured Talbot as an abuser of patent rights. Whatever the merits of his achievements, these tales of shaking down industrious young men made Talbot an almost uniquely unsuitable exemplar for the expansion of patent rights, and an easily adduced example for the abolitionist camp. It would have to be from a deeper past that a fitting standard-​bearer for the necessity of patent protections would emerge.

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e ns h r i ning o r i g i n al i t y

James Watt’s reputation, so lofty in the writings of popularizers like Smiles, had by the middle of the century become a proxy for how invention was to be understood and its laurels distributed.22 The technological determinists

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dismissed Watt as merely a keen aggregator of previous knowledge and, worse, a beneficiary of the great accident of history that had made his age one in which his innovations were possible and desired. As the fierce proponent of abolishing the patent system Thomas Hodgskin wrote in his Popular Political Economy, Watt “was indebted for most of his scientific and mechanical knowledge, for everything, indeed which constituted his talents, and which contributed to his glorious success, to his having been born in Britain in the 18th century.”23 To be sure, Watt had the acumen to connect the “scattered truths, the consequences of numberless previous discoveries”24 that were prerequisites to his invention, but this work is that of the dutiful puzzle-​solver, not the inspired genius. He relied upon the contributions of many skilled workmen, and upon the society whose largesse had educated them, and in doing so Hodgskin and his cohort averred, Watt had forfeited his right to the exclusivity that a patent entailed. Notwithstanding the considerable mileage that the patent abolitionists traveled by denigrating Watt’s status, their adversaries were ultimately to prevail through a far more concerted institutional apparatus. The most prominent of these was undoubtedly the Museum of Patents, founded in the mid-1850s and located among the growing museum complex in South Kensington (fig. 60).25 The location, design, and curatorial program of the patent museum reacted to a chief complaint of the abolitionist faction: that the process of patenting an invention was glacial, costly, and grossly mismanaged by the relevant and overlapping bureaucracies.26 One supporter of patent rights sought to undercut this objection by concurring with the condemnation of the labyrinthine process that had long existed and proposing a series of procedural improvements as an alternative to the more radical aims of the abolitionists. The anecdotal evidence with which he chose to mollify them was telling: “Having examined the objections made against patents on the ground of the obstructive character that may be imputed to them, we proceed to describe the mode in which these grants work, and the relative effects produced by them on the patentee and the public. No better illustration could perhaps be chosen than the most famous of all patents, that of James Watt.” In a somewhat fanciful re-​creation of Watt’s Sisyphean visits to London, the author reports the agonies of analogue data storage to which the inventor was subjected: “Specifications are written on skins of parchment, stitched together so as to form a long scroll, which is kept rolled up. Many specifications may be contained in the same roll, and it was a matter sometimes of great difficulty to consult them, as a given specification might be at the beginning, or in the middle, or at the end of the roll.”27 Furthermore, these hoary parchments were scattered among at least three different offices, no note-​taking or copying was permitted, and no assistance was provided in the search by the well-​paid and indolent holders of sinecures at the patent office. And this search of the specification was only the first step in a nine-​part trial that awaited the eager inventor. Thus, the construction of the museum was cast as part of a more comprehensive modernization of the patent system, in which the colocation of specifications with working models would streamline the dissemination of inventions. Watt, again, provided the historical precedent of the deserving and dogged inventor who was lamentably forced to work as persistently on his patent as on the innovation it would protect.

The kernels of the museum’s collection are to be found in the surpluses of industrial machinery displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and in the overstuffed storerooms of the Royal Society of Arts. To these inauspicious caches Bennet Woodcroft, a textile manufacturer and Francis Pettit Smith’s superior at the museum, added specimens yielded by his own indefatigable archaeology of industrial England. In one of his more ghoulish forays into the historical ground of industrial England, Woodcroft led an expedition to the Marquess of Worcester’s tomb to confirm the legendary presence of a model of an engine buried with the aristocratic innovator. Woodcroft failed to exhume any evidence of such a model, but his zealousness for attributing the origins of inventions to a single, albeit decayed body, is instructive. Woodcroft contributed his own hagiography to the inventor of individual genius in the Smilesian tradition, Brief Biographies of Inventors of Machines for the Manufacture of Textile Fabrics, in whose opening paragraph we find a virtual prospectus for the institution he superintended. “A peculiar characteristic of Britain,” he confidently pronounced, “[is] that almost all the inventions on which her colossal system of manufactures has been founded have been produced by individual projectors, mostly poor and of obscure condition, toiling unaided with a view to their own immediate advantage, but meritorious, nevertheless, on public grounds, and worthy of all honour.”28

FIGURE 60

Unknown photographer, Interior view of the Patent Museum, South Kensington Museum (‘the Brompton Boilers’), 1859. Albumen print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Prince Albert bestowed his blessing on the museum, undoubtedly pleased that “these models of mechanical inventions [w]ould be placed in those spots to which the working classes were in the habit of resorting for that kind of amusement and instruction,” an aspiration that aligned the museum with the ideals of his industrial-​educational complex in South Kensington.29 At the behest of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers there commenced the remedial “erection and maintenance of a central commodious Patent Office worthy of the country, where ready access may be had to a Library, Reading Room, and Museum furnished with papers, books, and models indispensable to the right direction and advance of British Industry.”30 The “right” direction was easily discerned in this spatial expression of the indispensability of patent protections. Smith understood this keenly and soon made certain that the mysterious pictures first presented to the Photographic Society could subsequently be seen only within this rather dogmatic frame.

an a g r e e a b l e f r am e

On many occasions the periodical literature narrates the transformation of even the most incredulous investigators into proselytizers for the photographic authorship of Watt. One such inquiry was initiated “to trace to its origin the cause of what we believed to be some extraordinary mistake” of attribution, its pursuers convinced that the reports of the supposed photographs were “a veritable canard.” They make haste to the “Patent Museum, and though not as yet arranged for public exhibition, we were, by the courtesy of the gentleman in whose custody they are, favored with a sight of the plates, and afforded much interesting information relative to their discovery.” By the time they exit the institution’s doors, they aver that “there is sufficient foundation for the supposition . . . that the first discovery of our art must be dated half a century earlier than we had hitherto any idea of being the case.”31 The authors’ deference to their courteous gatekeeper extended as far as honoring his request to delay reporting the specific bases on which they had reconsidered their initial skepticism. Joseph Sidebotham, whose knowledge was sufficient to produce a moderately successful dryplate process based upon a mixture of collodion and albumen, came away from a visit to Smith’s museum more agnostic than skeptical:

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Through the kindness of Mr. Smith, we had an opportunity of examining these pictures carefully, hearing what he had to say on the subject, and seeing some of the original letters and papers. Mr. Smith also gave me a small portion from one of the torn pictures, and has since sent me another, for the purpose of careful examination. . . . How the images were formed I cannot even venture a suggestion. The process, if re-​discovered, would be still valuable, even with our other and various modes of reproduction.32 George Shadbolt, a founder of the Photographic Society, longtime editor of the British Journal of Photography, and as near an establishment figure as anyone in the photographic community, reported to the Photographic Society in its June

1863 ordinary general meeting that while “his mouth was sealed as to details, Mr. Smith having told him all the particulars, but in confidence,” he could nonetheless “express his convictions as to say he believed there was sufficient [evidence] to prove that James Watt was the inventor of photography in this country.”33 Even for an unnamed but evidently discriminating “distinguished chemist,” a visit to the patent museum was entirely convincing in its attribution to Watt’s photographic paternity. He confided to a correspondent: Yesterday I was at the Patent Museum, and inspected some recent additions obtained from lumber, formerly in the possession of the Boulton family. . . . On one is a photographic image of the old house at Soho. It has been ascertained that the house was altered at a certain date, and that the image in question is of the house before the alteration. This was produced by James Watt! There are also many paper photographs which were produced by J. W. Further, distinct evidence has been got to show that J. W. was engaged in photographic experiments, and that he took portraits.34 The frame that the patent museum provided to the mysterious relics had clearly succeeded in locating the objects within a context congenial to its mission, and had done so convincingly enough to win over these knowledgeable experts, to say nothing of its persuasiveness among the much more general audience whose views the museum hoped to shape. And in very short order after their contentious debut at the Photographic Society, Smith’s relics had taken their position alongside Watt’s engine and the panoply of industrial artifacts. Charles Dickens Jr., in his widely read Dickens’s Dictionary of London: An Unconventional Handbook, praised the didactic aims of the museum and the objects through which they were achieved: There are, however, few institutions more worthy of a visit. There, crowded together, are mechanical inventions of all kinds, some exhibited in model, some of full size. There are locomotive and marine engines, pumps, bridges, docks, and machinery of all sorts. Of special interest are the primitive steam-​engines from which have sprung the enormous development with which we are familiar. . . . There is Watt’s first “Sun and Planet” engine for winding and pumping. The patent was taken out in 1760, and the engine was erected in 1795.35 By placing the proposed photographs here, amid the models that, at least in principle, had been submitted in conjunction with patent applications, Smith evidently hoped to perform a kind of metonymic assertion of priority and intellectual property for photography. An uninitiated visitor might be forgiven for concluding that Watt had deposited these specimens for the same purpose as he had his engine: as proof of the viability of an innovative process. Indeed, a slightly later catalogue presents some of the thirty-​six models of Watt’s machines in the museum in precisely this manner, elucidating the principle demonstrated and the date of the Specification of Patent granted to Watt. That one such object was labeled as “apparently belonging to one of the models selected from the Soho Works by the late Sir Francis Smith” serves to

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remind us of the original rationale of Smith’s journey to Birmingham, whence the supposed “sun picture of Old Soho” was discovered. With the aim of “obtaining Watt’s first engine for exhibition at the Museum of Patents,” Smith had located a group of objects with the potential to secure for Watt perhaps an even greater measure of praise. But more consequentially, he found, as we always do to some extent, what he was looking for: objects in accord with his cosmology of invention, originality, and intellectual property. If the orthodox histories of science and of art share anything with one another structurally, it might be the master trope of the rivalrous contest for priority. The sanctification of originality and the cultish quests for its roots are hardly viable historical procedures nowadays. But among our Victorian forebears, this Prioritatsstreit served a vital function in a society endeavoring earnestly to hammer out the legal and philosophical bases of intellectual property. In an important sense, the interlude of 1863 that I have traced was functionally a process of apportioning the rights of property among communities and individuals in order to arrive at a conceptual model for the circulation and commodification of knowledge. Robert Merton has claimed that “in short, property rights in science become whittled down to just this one: the recognition by others of the scientist’s distinctive part in having brought the results into being.”36 Yet it was precisely the sufficiency of this recognition that was on the docket in the 1860s, when debating priority was far more significant than the antiquarian pursuit into which it would, at least in the case of photography, complacently decline. The uneasiness with which many of us approach a history of photography that traces the medium’s origins to a particular individual acting in a clearly attributable moment and location is not especially surprising. Indeed, this skepticism is consistent with an orientation to knowledge and innovation that was critiqued most memorably by Kuhn in the early 1960s. “Rather than being seen as a complex development extended both in space and time,” he insisted, “discovering something has usually seemed to be a unitary event, one which, like seeing something, happens to an individual at a specific time and place.”37 As surely as Kuhn’s dictum has been heeded by sociologists of science, so have its implications infiltrated the quest for photography’s source. In viewing photography’s invention as a longitudinal and communal process unfolding in a congenial climate of desire and possibility, we have assimilated this explanatory model to the point of ideology. This is not to say that this view is not, on balance, a better approach than its predecessors’ dogged search for “the make-​believe of a beginning.” It is to suggest, though, that this now totally naturalized perspective obscures the vitality, and the epistemic function, of the alternative origin stories on which men like Francis Pettit Smith labored with the sure hand of the most dexterous mechanic. 130 d is i llu s i o ned

c h a p t e r

s e v e n

The Limits of Looking The Tiny, Distant, and Rapid Subjects of Photography

“ t h e p h o t o g r a p h , ” t h e t h e o r i s t j e a n - ​l o u i s c o m o l l i o n c e declared with a flourish, “stands as at once the triumph and the grave of the eye.” This oxymoronic metaphysics of the camera is a resonant, and highly specific, assessment of the relationship among photography, vision, and knowledge in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The account of the preceding chapters of this book has indicated the indispensable place of visual discernment in the creation of knowledge and of social relations. There was an important, if provisional, kind of liberty embodied in this ocularcentric account of photography, situating agency in the eye of the viewer. But by the 1870s, the triumphal, discriminating eye, whose elevation had come by virtue of the privilege bestowed upon it by photography’s variable verisimilitude, was moribund. Comolli explained that in “the second half of the nineteenth century . . . the human eye loses its immemorial privilege” and “the mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in its place.”1 And this shift of agency is certainly symptomatic of what Martin Jay identified as “a more fundamental denigration of the visual tout court.”2 If so much of the identity of photography during the 1850s and 1860s was the product of the visual agency inherent in discernment, what are the contexts in which this reapportionment needs to be understood? How does photography continue to inscribe societies and individuals after this transition, during which, decentered, the eye relinquishes its prominence? The narrative that constitutes a response to these initial queries is almost always driven by a series of admittedly astonishing technological innovations in photographic representation in the 1870s. Indeed, those novelties are tangible, visually arresting reifications of the problem of the entombment of the eye. The first two generations of photographers collaborated with microscopy and astronomical telescopy, technologies known since the seventeenth century,

harnessing the representational powers of their medium to the extension of human vision to the tiny and the remote. By contrast, the subsequent production of photographic representations that differed in kind, rather than in degree, from relatively familiar visual experiences formed a leading edge of the discourse of the anti-​ocularity. Photographic records of electricity and magnetism, of the internal structures of living organisms, or of the shock wave produced by a bullet propelled through space, seemed to sever the long-​standing, if heterogeneously articulated, connection between vision and photography. The fundamental change is to be found not merely at the level of technology, but rather in the shift in the paradigm of visual evidence of which it was reflective. The mastery of the natural world implied by its susceptibility to human perception underwrote much of the activity described in the preceding chapters. What chiefly distinguished the novel demonstrations in the 1870s of the existence of invisible phenomena from the subjects of earlier photography was the introduction of a level of abstraction that would not yield to the supposedly egalitarian techniques of discernment cultivated in the previous decades. While anyone reasonably attentive to the relevant visual codes could decipher the presence of a stuffed wolf in a narrative scene, the repertoire required to make sense of a photograph of an electromagnetic field belonged to a far more circumscribed—​and increasingly professionalized—​group of experts. The photograph’s variable authority as a neutral document of the natural world was clearly dependent upon the venues and voices that structured the distribution and reception of these images. Jennifer Tucker has persuasively suggested that the social contexts of invisibility—​of the realm beyond human vision—​need to be central to any study of scientific photography. The role of expertise and authority in interpreting photographic “evidence” became increasingly essential in the latter years of the century.3 Photographs of the unseen were increasingly associated “with scientific professionalization and expertise and with access to special instruments, equipment, and knowledge.” With photography no longer the expression of egalitarian observation, its affiliation with expertise meant that evaluating the objectivity of an image was a referendum on the authority of the interpreter as much as an analysis of the inherent qualities of the representation. The rhetorical packaging in which these interpretations were proffered by scientific popularizers and exhibitors, often regarded as ancillary if not marginal features in histories of photography’s reception, are central to the persuasiveness of the image.

l o s i n g “ t h e fac u l t y of s e e i n g t hi n gs for t he m s e lv e s ” 132 d is i llu s i o ned

There is scarcely a more disingenuous anecdote in Victorian culture than the one that T. H. Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog” and one of the most influential scientific educators in modern history, recited to the audience of an awards ceremony in South Kensington in 1882: I remember after having given a lecture, accompanied in my ordinary way by drawings on the blackboard, that I went to look through the microscope, and see what one of the students who had heard this

lecture was drawing. To my astonishment, I saw that his drawing was the thing I had drawn on the blackboard and not the thing under the microscope. I said to him, What is this? this is not at all like what is under the microscope. No, he said, that is what is on the blackboard. He did not believe nature, he believed me; and the great lesson I have tried to teach, which is the fundamental basis of scientific teaching, is do not put too much faith in your teacher, but do believe nature.4 Huxley had of course spent years codifying a program of instruction in which he—​the teacher—​was the absolutely indispensable source of authority, an arrangement widely echoed throughout Britain. Given the great lengths to which Huxley went to manage the dissemination of visual observation and interpretation, we can look skeptically at his lament: “Nothing is more surprising to me than to find a number of instructed persons coming up here for scientific education, and to discover that they cannot observe . . . they have been so accustomed to take statements on credit from books and word of mouth that they have almost lost the faculty of seeing things for themselves.”5 As a number of studies have made increasingly clear, Victorian microscopical instruction readily eschewed the validity of seeing for oneself. The very structure of teaching laboratories cleverly predisposed the observer to arrive at the orthodox conclusion in a number of ways, and the fact that Huxley was instructing future science teachers all but assured the replication of the program throughout the entire educational system. The sharing of microscopes, in which budding investigators were paired off to check one another’s observations against the example given by the professor, tended toward communal conclusions. Furthermore, by scheduling the laboratory investigation immediately following the lecture, the prototypical visual interpretation was one to which any idiosyncrasies were easily assimilated. As Graeme Gooday has remarked, these approaches ensured that “the ‘knowledge’ they learned was only that which had been authoritatively stage-​managed and vigilantly scrutinized by the demonstrators.”6 The ways in which the social organization of the laboratory in the 1870s and 1880s acted to intervene between the observer and his object of study only added to the sense of distance between the two that had long roiled epistemological considerations of scientific devices for observation. And it was proximity, metaphorically and physically, that was the determining criterion of photography’s privileged relationship to nature. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have attributed the photograph’s unique position not to its heightened verisimilitude, but rather to its “nonintervention,” to the secure chain of custody between object and image.7 Of course the integrity of this chain was disrupted almost from the beginning of scientific education employing photography. As early as 1845, the first photographically illustrated volume intended to train medical students in microscopy, Alfred Donné and Jean Bernard Leon Foucault’s Cours de microscopie complementaire des études medicales in fact contained no actual photographs.8 Notwithstanding the rhapsodic encomia to the daguerreotype’s fidelity to nature and its resistance to the preconceptions of the draftsman in Donné and Foucault’s introduction, the irreproducibility of that process meant that the student was presented with engravings that had been based upon drawings of the daguerreotype, which had itself been created

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in alliance with the microscope.9 The insistence upon nonintervention was evidently a pliable one, in which the practical considerations of how visual knowledge could be disseminated with available technology vied with the ideals attributed to the nearness of object and representation. Whatever currency nonintervention had, it seems to have been readily eclipsed by the networks of visual education set up by experts, the quality of whose visual judgment, at least to the novice, more than compensated for the student’s remoteness from whatever he or she was meant to observe. Episodes like this suggest that the relationship of the observer to the substance or phenomenon of his or her regard was conceived in relative terms, along a continuum of more or less direct kinds of visual encounter. A lurking complication with the category of nonintervention is, then, that it is infinitely divisible into ever-​thinner slices of remoteness, none of which decisively marks a meaningful epistemological frontier.10 This problem is evident in what one philosopher of science describes as “a continuous series beginning with looking through a vacuum and containing these as members: looking through a window-​pane, looking through glasses, looking through binoculars, looking through a low-​power microscope, looking through a high-​power microscope, etc., in the order given.”11 At which of these intervals does our contiguity with the object become severed? This series of intermediaries is potentially without end, and historical episodes could likely be adduced at each interval. And yet, they would all comprise slivers of an ever-​widening zone of permissible distance between observer and phenomenon, and a broader berth for the introduction of varying social practices of expertise and interpretation. This arrangement did not simply denigrate the indispensability of “firsthand” observation. It also suggested that there was a more penetrating truth to be adduced by means other than observation. More pointedly, it proposed that such truth might be the exclusive province of the unobservable world. In his groundbreaking recent book, the historian of photography Josh Ellenbogen has demonstrated how, by the final years of the century, the estrangement of photography’s evidentiary standards from those of human vision had become nearly complete.12 In the wake of this schism, the camera’s association with the eye was replaced by a new alliance with the mind. The producers and users of photographic images increasingly privileged reason over perception, developing new criteria by which the reliability of these images could be judged once the referential benchmark of human vision was abandoned. Ellenbogen’s extraordinary study examines three key figures—​Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Étienne-​Jules Marey—​whose work jointly constituted a shared milieu. Yet we can see that moment of fin-de-​siècle culture as the culmination of a process well under way surprisingly early in photography’s history. Even by the later 1860s and early 1870s, photography could be implicated in a stridently antiempirical notion of justifiability that emerged logically from the waning of the camera’s corporeal metaphor. In its pronounced divergence from the human capacities for perceptual observation and the sureties these once provided, photography was increasingly located within a cosmology organized by the archetypes of institutional expertise rather than the idiosyncrasies of individual discovery. This surprising migration played itself out in two critical, though superficially rather disparate, visual preoccupations in this period: the abortive application of photography to criminal imaging and

control, and the search for a standard unit of measurement that might further the imperial ambitions of Britain’s rapacious economy. What these sets of concerns share is an indication of a shifting relation between photography’s referentiality and the historically specific requirements of knowledge at this juncture, for in this realm of the typological and the standardized, photography proved an increasingly unreliable ally.

“a v a i l a b l e t o n o o n e o f t h e se n s e s ”

Writing in a manner representative of the social criticism of the 1870s, one British commentator asserted, with respect to a paramount concern of the era, that “we possess the power, and can remove the foul blot of habitual criminality, which to our discredit attaches to this country more than to any civilised state, by an improved administration which should no longer be delayed. For the time may arrive, when, having lost the thread of control through our laxity, any attempt at amendment may be found to be too late for its object.”13 Indeed, the desire to hold tightly to this thread dominated the social and political discourse of an epoch in which new modes of control were sought to manage an increasingly volatile amalgam of marginal urban groups. This project, expressed most definitively by Foucault in his Discipline and Punish, consisted of “methods for administering the accumulation of men [which] made possible a political take-​off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.”14 Some of the most engaging work in the previous generation of the history of photography has identified the participation of the medium in the implementation of these technologies of power.15 Yet what has been effaced in this appealing dominant account is the story of photography’s incompatibility with this reconfiguration of power, of the ways in which the epistemological regimes attached to photographic practice compromised its instrumentalization in broader political agendas. This discordancy is attested by the emergence of highly codified techniques of investigative imaging that purposely dispensed with photography. Beginning in the 1870s, the use of police artists became a staple of the investigative repertoire of most metropolitan police departments in Europe and in North America.16 This technique operated within the context of a very different set of beliefs about the image and its relationship to the “improved administration” of the criminal, the most dangerous among the many groups of concern to the state. By examining the emergence of this alternative approach, we will be able to restore a central way in which the photograph was seen to be a far more problematical incarnation of the objectives of social control than prevailing critical notions suggest. The association of photography with empiricist methods of observation was, as I shall describe, often at odds with the larger social project in whose service photography was to be deployed. The presumption of the transparency of the medium was, in the arsenal of an increasingly intrusive state apparatus, a double-​edged sword: while its unmediated status might be made to secure the evidentiary demands of power, the newly vital articulation of particularity invested in the photograph often precluded an appropriately expansive project of surveillance. In order to conduct our own investigation,

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we need to locate these moments of ambivalence within an intellectual framework that underlies the very particular limitations attributed to observation by the 1870s. Certain episodes in the history of photography’s engagement with scientific enterprises betray the incompatibility of the presumed specificity of the medium with the strategies of control in whose service it was ostensibly enlisted. When Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the intellectual father of eugenics, sought to demonstrate the efficacy of rationalized breeding, he turned to photography as a direct visual analogue for his undertaking. Galton’s composite portraits of the 1870s photographed several images of individuals—​criminals, Jews, and members of other putatively threatening and marginal groups—​onto the same plate with a short exposure time, with the aim of extracting the typical physiognomic features common to the group.17 Implicit in Galton’s blending was the belief that underlying each of these groups were certain common facets that could only be rendered visible by removing—​breeding out—​the specificity associated with the single portraits. The photograph, in this project, was imagined to offer too much particularity for the objectives at hand, for it was only through aggressive intervention upon these seemingly unmediated records of reality that they could be made to serve a biological and social program whose demands were fundamentally typological. The mitigation of the particular in Galton’s work is fairly well known, and his composite portrait of the criminal has been widely reproduced. The recipient of less attention, however, is another composite portrait that appeared in the same initial publication of Galton’s results in 1879. On the same page as the composites that purported to derive the essential criminal type was a series of the “likenesses of six different Roman ladies and the composite of them in the centre.” The rather odd feature to be noted here is that these are photographs of coins that depict these women of antiquity, and not photographs of actual women. What was Galton’s aim in including this array, and why was it juxtaposed with the criminal portraits whose support of the eugenics agenda seems so much clearer? In order to grasp fully what is at work here, it seems essential to point out that this very unusual juxtaposition makes reference to a particular trope of nineteenth-​century art theory that would have been very accessible to the initial viewers of Galton’s work and to consider the set of debates into which this allusion introduces these images. The women of classical antiquity who were blended together to create one central composite image would have been evocative, in 1879, of the activity of another—ancient—​artist, the Greek painter Zeuxis, one of whose signal achievements was to have combined the features of five beautiful women to create his iconic portrait of Helen of Troy, as related in Pliny’s Natural History. This particular parable was, by the moment of Galton’s images, already an established site of contention, for it embodied ably the conviction of many theorists that the great artistic genius would never simply represent that which could be apprehended by his senses, but rather that his invention would derive from an expansive field of sources.18 Among the most influential theorists of nineteenth-​century fine arts, Quatremère de Quincy, asserted, not uniquely, that works of art “are not the images of any object that can be called real, since it is formed by the study of the artist, and is manifested in his productions, by the aid of an aggregate of ideas, forms, relations, and perfections, that no

reality could furnish united in a single being,—​a single subject.”19 Crucially, this operation is nearly invariably proposed as an action antithetical to observation, since “whatever comes within the scope of the understanding, of sentiment, and of genius, does not really exist any where, has neither substance nor place, and is subjected to no one of the senses;20 he who finds it is unable to point out where he has seen the model of it.”21 Quatremère’s unempirical truth, of “a verisimilitude found nowhere in nature,” might be said to resemble Galton’s approach in both its commitment to a composite notion of truth and its rejection of the visual observation of a single entity as providing the most veridical access to this truth. That Galton would have reiterated photographically the project of Zeuxis indicates the theoretical account upon which his “breeding” seems predicated: that only by selectively refining and subsuming the particularities of the observed world to a nonempirical schema can any kind of meaningful accuracy be achieved. Although a far less technologically advanced medium than the photograph, the police sketch had a distinct advantage in a crucial respect: the generation of an image of a criminal of unknown identity expanded the subject of investigative image-​making to encompass the entire marginal population announced in the above anthropologist’s lament. In a way that the photograph’s presumed specificity precluded, the fact that the police sketch could only be refined to a certain level of particularity implicated a far vaster range of suspects in the crime in question. All those who matched the general description of the sketch were questionable, implicitly placing under suspicion and concomitant surveillance an entirely new group of individuals, all of whom had nothing to do with the crime—​all but one, of course. This shift in procedure, which has been poorly served by the voluminous bibliography of the history of surveillance photography, is a crucial moment in the relationship of images to political authoritarianism. The image-​aided search for an identified, known, and previously convicted criminal was replaced by a far more expansive hunt not for an individual per se, but for all those who satisfied typologically the account provided by the police sketch. Indeed, with the aid of the police sketch, the “usual suspects” could be rounded up with markedly increased justification. The presumed efficacy of this kind of typological inquiry was unquestionably nurtured by the same climate in which Galton’s project flourished. His efforts served as an exemplification of the tension between the specificity conferred by photography and the broader aim of the eugenics movement. The development of physiognomy, which sought to demonstrate correlations between interior dispositions and characteristic physical manifestations, had been developed by the Swiss Johann Kaspar Lavater in the later eighteenth century. In his influential study, Lavater proposed physiognomy as “the Science of discovering the relation between the exterior and the interior—​between the visible surface and the invisible spirit which it covers,” and was predicated upon the “Harmony between Moral Beauty and Physical Beauty.”22 Within the context of Victorian Britain, this historically embedded tradition intersected with the visual representations of urban criminal and social investigation, as in the case of Henry Mayhew’s seminal London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew created a typological panorama, in which everyone from bird-​sellers to juvenile street urchins was represented as conforming to the categories of their type. There is little question nowadays that many of Mayhew’s “interviews”

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FIGURE 61

After Richard Beard, The London Scavenger, 1851. Engraving for Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Wellcome Library, London.

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were mostly hybrids of testimony and tradition that effaced the markers of particularity in favor of assimilating London’s impoverished to an encyclopedic entry. Mayhew’s text was accompanied by line drawings based upon photographs by Richard Beard, that pioneer of photography at the Royal Polytechnic, that obliterated the individuality of the figures and rendered them generically (fig. 61). The physiognomic influence is evident, as Mayhew’s representations of criminal types are physically distinct from the more honorable members of his microcosm. Criminals, in the tradition of which both Lavater and Mayhew are a part, can be identified by their corporeal manifestations of “criminal” physical traits. Like the police sketch, the typological nature of this study expanded the demographic of those who could be reasonably monitored—​and thus scrutinized as possible criminals—​and perpetuated the correlations that Lavater proposed. What was unique about the introduction of the police sketch was the way in which it reified this entire typological tradition of surveillance into a set of practices that overtly imposed a political will upon the perceptual realm. In these portraits—​for that is the genre to which they bear the most affinities—​the police artist, as an extension of the state apparatus of criminal investigation, mediates between what is seen and what is represented. The agency of the process of representation is ceded, by proxy, to the skilled hand of this hyphenated hybrid. The desire to manage the unwieldy urban populace, which operated under the authority of physiognomy and related flights of pseudoscientific fancy, was inculcated into the process by which vision is translated into a figurative image. The surrender of this operation to an image-​maker whose ultimate task was to render a representation that would grant the greatest license to the apparatus of which he was a part is consistent with the larger denigration of perception and its apprehension of the particular that I noted

in the Zeuxis metaphor. By the 1870s, the assimilation of the recollection of a witness to a typological template mandated the removal of the particular, but in a far more insidious way than in Galton’s project. Now this entire enterprise was exercised upon the body of that witness, upon his agency in the expression of that which was apprehended by his sensorium: by the substitution of the state’s apparatus of looking for his own. The offer of the autonomy of visual judgment that governed much photographic practice of the 1850s and 1860s, which carried with it the specter of the photograph’s constructedness, had been rescinded. For now discernment—​picking one figure rather than another from a lineup—​was precisely the capacity that was inimical to the objectives of the politically desired representational system. The imposition of the political directly upon the perceptual, and its mediation between vision and representation, ultimately helped to codify and instrumentalize the unwieldy morass of typological theory into a kind of cognitive schema, invalidating observation of the individualized person to further an ordered system. Indeed, these schemata, and their objective of getting hold of the flux of experience, are central to the maintenance of such a system, whether perceptual or political. In the influential account of Ernst Gombrich, pictorial representation is always filtered through templates that are formed by cultural traditions and that act as “a selective screen which admits only the features for which schemata exist.”23 The formation of these schemata is dependent upon the visual and cultural context from which they derive and, consequently, the departures they compel in representation relate specifically to the incongruities between these contexts and the subject of representation. In Gombrich’s account, representation is bound inextricably to the conventions of the artist’s moment, as “the familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar.” When Gombrich sought, in the concluding sections of Art and Illusion, to locate a metaphor for his conception of the psychology of pictorial representation, he found it in what will be by now a familiar site: Police sometimes employ draftsmen to aid witnesses in the identification of criminals. They may draw any vague figure, a random schema, and let witnesses guide their modifications of selected features simply by saying “yes,” or “no” to various suggested standard alterations. . . . [T]his account of portrait drawing by remote control may well be over-​tidy, but as a parable it may serve its purpose. It reminds us that the starting point of a visual record is not knowledge but a guess conditioned by habit and tradition.24 The police sketch was thus figured as a venue in which the inescapability of preexisting representational manifestations of a political power exerted its force, for in such a medium the observation of the “real” criminal would always be overpowered by the typological account that served to sustain the power of the investigative authority. For Gombrich, the tool both metaphorizes the cognitive process that produces representation and serves as a metonymic reminder of an analogous system through which the schemata of his own culture are erected.

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The “starting point” and subsequent modification of both perceptual and representational convention in Gombrich’s account reminds us of the articulation of painterly principles that cast a long shadow over the nineteenth century: Reynolds’s Discourses, in which “an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form” of an object, from which all subsequent representations must derive. Indeed, Gombrich asserted that, in the human face, “there is some general dominant expression of which the individual expressions are merely modifications.”25 This central form was certainly in the most important sense a dominant one in the construction of the typological regime, in which modification displaced innovation. In his study of the history of clinical medicine, The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem argued that a reconceptualization of disease under the aegis of Auguste Comte in the first half of the nineteenth century cast the pathological—​the deviation—​as being “merely a quantitative modification of the normal state.” The vast realm of disturbances to which the human body was subjected were no longer qualitatively distinct from the normal but simply a diminution or augmentation of the normal itself. “By stating in a general way that diseases do not change vital phenomena,” Canguilhem brilliantly asserts, “Comte is justified in stating that the cure for political crises consists in bringing societies back to their essential and permanent structure, and tolerating progress only within limits of variation of the natural order defined by social statics.”26 The homeostatic mechanisms of social order that Comte expressed were in the middle of the century part of a pervasive association between statistics and political stability. As Ian Hacking has noted, this accord was wonderfully articulated in the opening speech to the fourth International Statistical Congress in London in 1860: The statistical discoveries of one nation are the lights of all nations. Despite the accidents of conflagrations, the unstableness of winds, the uncertainties of life and the variations in men’s minds and circumstances, on which fires, wrecks, and deaths depend, they are subject to laws as invariable as gravitation and fluctuate to within certain limits, which the calculus of probabilities can determine beforehand. This holds of crimes, and other acts of the will, so that violation itself is subject to law.27

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The promise that those acts that most boldly transgressed the forces of order—crimes—​would themselves be governed by an underlying regularity and predictability was a comforting benefit to those who, in increasing numbers, employed statistics as a tool of antirevolutionary politics. Yet criminal statistics, the product of an aggregate set of dispersed incidents, were fundamentally an abstraction, eschewing the particularities of any single event or perpetrator. When Adolphe Quetelet introduced his social statistics in the early 1830s, he proposed an appropriately abstract figure that might embody its investigative principles: the average man (l’homme moyen). As Quetelet memorably remarked of his creation, “If one seeks to establish the basis of a social physics, it is he whom one should consider, without disturbing oneself with particular cases or anomalies.”28 It is not difficult to see how profoundly the possibility of l’homme moyen helped to modernize typological thinking for the age of social science, for this figure proposed that the rejection of local,

idiosyncratic instances long championed by Reynolds was invested with a new authority and urgency. What was required was, to paraphrase Quatremère de Quincy, a man “seen nowhere in nature.” To activate the pacific potential of social statistics, the individual was simply the wrong unit of measure. It is thus particularly curious to note that the photographer whose work would, more than any other, bring photography’s fraught metrical capacities to a head launched his nascent career with a rumination on painting that might have crossed the lips of the average man himself, had he only existed.

me a s u r ing t h e i d e al

The object of painting, Charles Piazzi Smyth wrote in 1839, is to “present something more perfect than that which is commonly seen; to give a local name and habitation to those abstract images and perfect beauty which, though derived from nature herself, are never to be seen entire in any one of her forms.”29 The durability of the Grand Style into the middle of the century is evinced here by the comments of the young Astronomer Royal for Scotland. One cannot fail to be reminded of Reynolds’s nearly identical admonition to young painters: He corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.30 The epoch of social science furnished Smyth with an especially politically charged mission to locate this abstract representational form, to peel back the deficiencies of specificity. Particularity, which was aesthetically undesirable for Reynolds’s notion of painterly truth, had, by the era of photography’s flowering, become politically incommensurate with the ideology of social control. Where, then, might one locate the proper unit of measure, one that was both visually abstract but politically resonant, one that was invested with the authority of being natural and with the capacity for legitimating the politics to which social science aspired? The reply comes from Smyth himself, recounting the journey that took him to a remote corner of the British Empire, in which he aimed to “set forth, therefore, before the public, what are the real powers for accuracy still existing in that grandest of all primeval monuments, the absolutely unique Great Pyramid . . . as well as to demonstrate the service that good and faithful photography in the future may be of there.”31 What Smyth had not understood was that the subject and the medium of his ambitious program articulated in this aspirational preface were deeply irreconcilable in the context of photography’s conception by the 1870s. We find in Smyth’s work a fundamental tension of photographic objectivity in this moment. For while the rise of social statistics and its turn to the abstracted figure of the average man as the basis for investigation seemed to reenergize a mode of representation hostile to the universal applicability of singular observations, the visual technologies that were coming

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to dominate this (and virtually every other) pursuit were ideally suited to fostering an antithetical ethos of minute specificity. The unedited vision of the photograph, its supposed lack of selectivity, made the assessment of the particular a vital task, and, as one scholar has put it, “variation and singularity became a mark of authenticity, and interpretation of a collection of singularities became the central activity of scientific judgement.”32 In the Great Pyramid, Smyth believed he had found that central metrical abstraction of which the average man was a social manifestation; yet to represent the epitome of abstraction with the medium that seemed essentially incapable of escaping the particular was an impossible project, and one that would constitute a forum for the untidily evolving status of photographic objectivity at this critical juncture. The Great Pyramid’s coronation as the fundamental unit of human measure was one that Smyth and his many lucid detractors invested with extraordinary political consequences. Smyth’s rather unorthodox conviction derived from two remarkable notions, as an engaging recent study has expressed: First, that the Great Pyramid of Egypt at Gizeh was not built as a tomb for the pharaohs but as a storehouse for a divinely-​inspired metrological system, and second, that the modern British people, indeed the whole “Anglo-​Saxon race,” had inherited these same standards, virtually unaltered for thousands of years, as a racial patrimony in their own system of weights and measures. Great Pyramid metrologists contended that the base unit used to construct the monument was the Hebrew “sacred cubit” composed of twenty-​five so-​called “pyramid inches.” The pyramid inch, they went on, was virtually identical (save 1/1000th part) to the modern British inch. Britain had therefore inherited a system of weights and measures far older, far more sacred, and, emanating as it did from the mind of God, far more scientific than any other metrological system on earth.33 The authority that Smyth and his fellow “pyramidiots” (as they were disparagingly referred to by many skeptics) attributed to the structure was one with clear political and religious correlates. As the Suez Canal was coming to completion, Britain’s hegemony in the region was soon to be challenged by the commercial advantage furnished by this massive feat of French engineering. With the rise of the metric system and the possibility that it might become the measure of global trade, conservative voices in Britain articulated a doomsday scenario, explicitly linking the French system of measure with the inevitable subjugation of the world to a godless and revolutionary regime. Smyth’s contribution to this hyperbolic dialogue is revealing: 142 d is i llu s i o ned

Always endeavouring to throw the net of her metrical system of weights and measures over other nations as well as her own people; and though not without some Imperial ambition to chain many conquered nations to the chariot wheels of France, yet with the far deeper communistic feeling of converting all the nations of the earth into one great people, speaking one language and using but one weight and one measure, and that of human, as directly opposed to Divine, inspiration.34

Smyth’s opposition seems not to be to Imperial ambition and a concomitant regime of measurement per se, but rather to those that are particular to the French. Metrication, which had been legalized for use in British contracts in 1864, was a system derived not from God, but through the ratiocination of scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats in the wake of the Revolution. If, as we see in these descriptions of an embryonic global economy, the triumphant nation’s measure were to become the denomination of international exchange, it would be essential to produce the most compelling rationale for the superiority of the British inch. The immutable connection to the world of the ancients that Smyth claimed would have provided a general degree of legitimacy to English measure, but the fact that this continuity was manifested in the central monument of the very space at the crossroads of Imperial contestation indicates the rather specific stakes of the Pyramid as a unit of measure. Yet for Smyth, the battle of the standards was not merely another permutation of the Anglo-​French skirmishes for global dominion; rather, it was a kind of proxy for the battle between capital and labor. Smyth became convinced, and confided in his notebook, that the meter was a conspiracy hatched by communists that aimed, as Larry Schaaf has put it, “to unify the workers of the world by destroying each country’s unique system of measures.”35 When Smyth at long last arrived with his wife Jessica at Giza in 1864, the space in which he located the Pyramid’s central unit of measure was one that seemed a direct riposte to the revolutionary sources of the metric system: the so-​called King’s Chamber and the sarcophagus that presumably housed the royal personage. An engraving that Smyth had prepared for his opus of eccentricity, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, when juxtaposed with its photographic counterpart, suggests something of the conceptual quagmire that he faced when attempting to represent the abstraction of a unit of measure with a medium whose supposed transparency seemed to preclude such an undertaking. The engraving, which consists of a vertical section of the King’s Chamber, shows the sarcophagus or coffin flanked by two torch-​bearing Egyptians, their compatriots wriggling supinely through a passageway behind them (fig. 62). At the foot of the page, we see that the entire scene is calibrated in terms of the scale of British inches, translating into the idiom of measurement this ostensible scene of rediscovery. Curiously, the chamber is divided into five equal horizontal bands within which the two intrepid locals are themselves placed into a strangely metrical position (one Egyptian with torch seems to equal approximately two horizontal bands.) Here both the sarcophagus and the humans who have surrounded it have been subsumed to a regime of measurement. The undifferentiated men’s typological standardization becomes especially clear in another engraving, in which a retinue of the modern inhabitants of Egypt mount the Pyramid, as indistinct from one another as the group of bats who make the same journey in an accompanying image (fig. 63). This medium was relatively congenial to depicting both the sacred source of the abstraction of measurement and the deployment of that abstraction in the realm of typological depiction, to representing the average (Egyptian) man and the immutable, ancient basis that authorized such a representation. When Smyth himself illuminated the King’s Chamber, not with the primitive torches of the natives but with the brilliance of a magnesium flare, the

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FIGURE 62

Alex Ritchie, Vertical Section (Looking West) or King’s Chamber, 1874. Plate xi, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: W. Isbister, 1874). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

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picture produced was a rather different one. Perhaps the most startling of all the photographs that Smyth produced in Egypt is the one in which his wife dutifully stands beside the sarcophagus, which has been enframed by four adjustable measuring rods (fig. 64). Here the British inches are not relegated to the margins but have encased the coffer completely, providing Smyth with a record of the object’s dimensions and its susceptibility to measurement in Smyth’s terms. Mrs. Smyth’s presence is quite puzzling: surely she is not there to provide a sense of scale, for the measuring sticks aspire to show in absolute, quantitative terms the size of the sarcophagus; nor does it appear that she is holding the rods in place. Perhaps, as most critics of Smyth’s work have argued, he was simply inattentive to any aesthetic concerns, merely wishing to record as much data as

FIGURE 63

Alex Ritchie, Vertical Transverse Section with Arabs Ascending the Grand Gallery, 1874. Plate xii, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: W. Isbister, 1874). Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

accurately as possible. The effect of the photograph, however, is to underline the distinct degrees of utility of the medium for measurement. While the inanimate coffer is easily subjected to the metrical agenda of Smyth’s voyage, and is translated readily into terms against which another object might be favorably or unfavorably compared, Mrs. Smyth is not so effortlessly accommodated: she does not fit into the frame from which a general principle can be extrapolated. She is a particular woman, a fact that seems heightened in this juxtaposition, for the crudely typologized Egyptians in the engraving are as abstract as the coffer’s promoters imagined the object of measure to be. Even here, in the sanctuary of the central unit of humanity’s measure, the particularity of the photograph is insisting upon its inadequacy as a mode of universal measure.

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FIGURE 64

Charles Piazzi Smyth, Tomb in the central chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, 1865. Albumen print. © National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library. All rights reserved.

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Perhaps it was this kind of shortcoming that led Smyth to insist that the universal value of the coffer could ultimately be ascertained not through increasingly sophisticated comparative measurements, but rather by denying the validity of empirical measure and of human observation itself. He asserted that “the Pyramid has proved itself to have been built closer to the truth than the best and greatest of modern savants from all existing civilized countries have been able to measure it: and if we are obliged to draw rein in pushing on the severity of our inquiry to still further places of decimals, the reason is not that the Pyramid fails in accuracy, but that modern observations are not sufficiently good to bear more than has been already put upon them.”36 The coffer, which promised to constitute the fabled “central type” not merely of a particular object or scene, but of the world in its entirety, was, after all, quite like the central type of the criminal or the recalcitrant laborer, something beyond the visibility of any one instance of looking. One of Smyth’s most prominent antagonists, the noted physician Sir James Simpson, harangued the former’s presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, deriding the “marvelous metrological coffer” as “nothing more than an old dilapidated stone coffin.” Simpson went on to impugn what he saw as the central folly of Smyth’s project: “It is pretended that in this base-​line there has been found a new mythical inch—one-​thousandth of an inch larger than the British standard inch; and Professor Smyth has attempted to show that the status of the nations of Europe in the general and moral world, may be measured in accordance with

their deviation or conformity to this mythical Pyramidal structure.”37 Simpson’s trenchant appraisal points out that what Smyth was ultimately pursuing was the master central type against which any deviations could be expressed in nationalistic and political terms, an endeavor compromised by the inaptitude of the photograph for representing such types. Smyth had never fully jettisoned the ideals he cultivated as a young painter in the 1830s, to seek an “abstract image . . . which, though derived from nature herself, [is] never to be seen entire in any one of her forms.”38 Yet, a quarter-​century later, his representational medium was one with a far more fraught relationship to the particular, in its imaging both of objects and, especially, human beings, who, like Mrs. Smyth, seemed to be located outside the ambivalent metrics of typology. The frame of measuring rods that Smyth hoped would encase a new unit of measure that would privilege Britain’s heritage to global primacy merely served as a reminder of the incompatibility of the photograph with a project whose object was not a particular instance, but an expansive abstraction beyond vision that would license the legitimacy of typological control. As Josh Ellenbogen has made clear, this need for abstraction is evident in the most ambitious photographic projects of the final decades of the century. It led to the creation of what he calls “reasoned” images, those that can be condensed or expanded by the informed user’s mind to provide accounts of laws larger than, and beyond the scope of, any single representation. Marey’s astonishing photographs do not simply reject the referentiality customarily achieved by analogy to observation. Rather, they partake of a “good physics [that] employs only abstract signs that belong to a single, mathematical order,” that might “articulate disparate events in a common language,” namely, the “méthode graphique” that was becoming the lingua franca of social and natural sciences.39 The most ambitious photographers of the fin-de-​siècle aimed to overcome the idiosyncrasies of individual visual experiences and to express them in terms of a shared idiom. These interventions depicted, and reiterated, the supplanting of individual visual discernment by that shared symbolic language, a usurpation that marks the final decades of the century as an epistemologically distinctive epoch in the history of photography.

o u t s i d e t h e fr am e

The utility of the frame as a metaphor for the ambivalent ambitions of photographic typology is articulated in an image of a striking—​if apparently inverted—​ accord with that of Mrs. Smyth and the enclosed coffer. The esteemed firm of Mayer and Pierson was responsible for hundreds of photographs of the infamous celebrity of Second Empire Paris, the Countess de Castiglione. The countess, known for her great beauty and for her agency in orchestrating her very public repertoire of elegant personae, is here pictured seated at a table, her visage enclosed entirely by a frame, yet with her left hand piercing the plane and resting despairingly on its outer edge (fig. 65). This strange situation of the countess, ambivalently negotiating the space and the metaphorics of being enframed, expresses the vexed pull between the presumably emancipatory individuality offered by the photograph and the imperatives of typological convention, heightened in this instance by the gender of the subject. As Abigail

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FIGURE 65

Pierre-​Louis Pierson, The Countess di Castiglione Weeping into Her Handkerchief, c. mid-1860s. Albumen print. ©  RMN-​Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

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Solomon-​Godeau’s pioneering work has noted, these images of the countess are so startling because of this tension, for “like the conventionalized femininity she was believed to incarnate, the edges of the photographic frame are a Procrustean bed to which body and soul must accommodate themselves. . . . [W]hat is the countess but a tabula rasa on whom is reflected a predetermined and delimited range of representations? And of what does her subjectivity consist if not her total absorption of them, her obedience to a scopic regime which inevitably undercuts her pretended authority as orchestrator of the look?”40 The singularity that the countess sought to fashion was always already cloaked in the iconography of a stereotyped femininity; the coded regulations of this system were paradoxically the only idiom available to the subjectivity of even a most remarkable woman. Perhaps it is this contradiction that is the source of the countess’s gesture of grief, for while her hand—​that index of agency and singularity of the human creator—​struggles to escape the frame, the pose by which it seeks to do so is burdened with the history of every lamentation scene, that most traditional and least singular expression of the woman in Western painting. And still, there is that wonderfully penetrating hand, uneasily exceeding all the typological limitations that the frame has come to stand for. If Mrs. Smyth was able to stand explicitly outside the frame of rods her husband had designed, and from which a standardized and nationally hegemonic unit of measure was to be extracted, the photographs of the countess’s position remind us of the deeply unresolved status of the individual

in this moment of the photograph’s history. Solomon-​Godeau rightly asserts that “historians of photography tend to divide the staggering number of images that constitute their object of study into two separate but hardly equal realms: that of the typical and that of the anomalous.” Such divisions were present too at the creation of these objects, yet the frontiers between the two were being policed far more ambivalently. The discordance between two fundamental projects of the visual from which this uneasy group of images emerged is clear: on the one hand, of a commitment to the political stability licensed by the expansive abstraction of the average man and the means of his representation and, on the other, a regime of observational expertise increasingly certified by judgment of the authenticity of the particular. The measure of the human might have been the photograph’s most promising political therapeutic, but it was one attended by an intractable set of side effects. If we are to consent to Foucault’s assertion that the panoptic was a central feature of what he variously calls the “techniques,” “mechanisms,” “procedures,” and “conditions of functioning” of power, it is vital to account for the fact that panopticism was, at least as early as the late 1860s, frequently seen as an impediment to the operation of these mechanisms. A vision unfettered by the boundaries of typologies and units of measure was incommensurate with the political project of administering the modern urban miasma of undesirables. The discerning subject fashioned out of such openness in the second and third decades of photography’s history was an increasingly obsolete embodiment of amateurism in an age newly enamored with the pacifying guarantees of expertise. Beginning afresh in the 1870s, we note a genuine desire to examine the possibility, indeed the occasional political necessity, of deriving knowledge from unobservable natural and social entities. It would be difficult to overstate the centrality of observability to the core of debates about the nature of empirical knowledge and, more broadly, the merits of constructivist positions at large. One scholar has, without too much hyperbole, staked the entirety of scientific epistemology on this distinction, asserting that “the differences between realism and antirealism are largely over the significance of the distinction between observable and unobservable events and entities.”41 These two positions effectively inquire whether the theoretical entities that constitute our understanding of the natural world actually exist or are mere fictions, constructions that help us to make sense of the world. The world beyond vision—​or at least beyond the historically s​ pecific discerning vision of the 1850s and 1860s—​was a realm in which the emerging debates of a new phase in the history of photography were to be carried out. The credentials required for admittance to this theater of dispute were very distinct from the mere pair of liberated eyes that had, for two decades, provided entry to a modern subject in the making. 149 t he l imit s of l ook ing

Conclusion “Normal” Photography: The Legacy of a History

what does it mean to assert, as the conclusion to an important recent anthology does, that “postmodernism is perhaps more Victorian than even the Victorians were”?1 Is it the case, as this author proposes, that these two epochs share a “commodity culture [that] created a world in which virtually anything spontaneous and natural about . . . life could be bought up and resold in a predictable commercial package that would in turn elicit only canned responses?”2 This book has argued that it is just these “canned responses” to photographic representations that need to be opened up, because these responses were places of significant negotiation for the Victorian subject. And yet, the affinities of the postmodern and the Victorian are particularly pronounced in the field of photography, whose recent conceptual and technical transformations have again foregrounded the instability of both meaning and response characteristic of the medium’s first decades. Indeed, an ostensibly constitutive feature of the digital era is our supposed inability to distinguish the world from the simulacrum and the original from the copy.3 Anxiety over this inability to discern was voiced broadly in the cultural milieu of hyperreality but also, in a particularized form, by many of the earliest critics of digital imagery. This preoccupation has positioned the task of visual discernment again at the center of the definition of subjectivity, often in surprising ways. The nonreferentiality of digital imaging has been adduced as the clearest indication yet of an alienation of observer from representation. Indeed, the notion that digital images seemed to have no referent in reality leads many commentators to announce the obsolescence of the observer entirely. Timothy Lenoir has succinctly described this tendency: “From the loss of reference in the production of images, another step in this line of reasoning directs concern

to a profound shift in the institutions constituting the subjectivity of the viewer, and indeed, even the dematerialization of the observer altogether.”4 It is not difficult to imagine that the anxiety voiced toward the obviation of the role of the human perceiver by digital imagery’s nonreferentiality is in fact symptomatic of a much broader fear of loss. In his historiography of posthumanism, Lenoir points out the intense concern about the abandonment of a figure who is by now quite familiar to us: “The liberal humanist subject was conceived as a rational, self-​regulating, free, and autonomous individual with clearly demarcated boundaries and a sense of agency linked with a belief in self-​interest.”5 This “liberal humanist subject” has much in common with the discerning subject whose origins in the nineteenth century I have been tracing. Indeed, what they might be said to share most acutely is their agency as judges of “the real” and bulwarks against the seemingly inevitable displacement of the human by technologies that aim to carry out the viewer’s assignments with increased precision and efficiency. And it is for this reason that the motif of discerning is offered as a criterion by which to judge the position of digital photography. Would the usurpation of human vision be arrested by the irreducibly human task of discernment through which agency and subjectivity had been formed for the previous century and a half? Or would, instead, the conquest of the autonomy of the observer by technological proxies be complete? With such queries freshly posed, it is little wonder that the disquiet about digital was expressed so noisily. While conceding the explanatory limits of etymology, it is nevertheless striking to consider how the term “digital” is itself implicated in the visibility of the human maker of an image and in a concomitant legibility to the human user of that image. In its first incarnation, in the sixteenth century, the adjective meant quite specifically “of or pertaining to a finger, or to the fingers or digits,” or, more apposite for our purposes, “resembling a digit or finger or the hollow impression made by one.” By the 1930s, it “applied to a computer which operates on data in the form of digits or similar discrete elements,” and by midcentury, more particularly to “a recording in which the original waveform is digitally encoded . . . making it less subject to degradation than a conventional analogue signal.”6 The metonymic presence or absence of the human hand has been an almost continuously active motif in discussions about photography since its debut, heightened dramatically in the period I have sought to investigate. But it is in the encounter with the digital that this hand returns in a bewilderingly ambivalent way. The evidence of re-​touching or manipulation of an image is regularly linked to the anxieties about the obliteration of the human in the production and use of photographic images, even as that very manual idiom is invoked to guarantee the reference of such images to something in the world. For, as Geoffrey Batchen has noted, “Ironically, given its association with new and intimidating technologies, digital imaging actually returns the production of photographic images to the whim of the creative human hand.”7 In her now-​classic and then-​radical book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Katherine Hayles proposed that “the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be

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seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. . . . [T]here are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”8 This inability to delineate the human from the machine—​ a characteristic anxiety of early writing on digital imaging—​is manifest in the contemporary preoccupation with discriminating the products of one from the other. The feature of digital that is most nervously and readily noted is the greater difficulty to the human eye of detecting manipulation in digital images relative to their analog forebears. A widely shared position held that “digital imaging allows a seamless interweaving of animation and altered fragments of photographs into an image visually identical to an un-​doctored photographic image,”9 and there existed an urgent concern that “computer operators can already produce printed images that are indistinguishable in look and quality from traditional photographs.”10 The work of differentiating the visual products of nature, man, and machine has its obvious antecedents in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, as this study has shown. The supposed radicality of a posthuman visuality is expressed as a lack of precisely that set of capacities that had characterized the discerning viewer of Victorian photographs. While the dismissal of the human perceiver from this critical position no doubt represents a dramatic shift, it is perhaps one of degree rather than kind. As the technologies of the 1870s seemed to surpass—​and obviate—​the human vision so carefully cultivated in the preceding decades, we find in the writing of the past twenty years an anxiety about the recurrence of this alternation. That such developments are with precedent should give pause to the prophets of a digital rupture and should temper the drama of their predictions. The durable figure of the discerning viewer, his fortunes waxing and waning, has consistently served as the unrivaled embodiment of the realist-​constructivist fissure—​of the two modes of knowing embodied in the definitions of “digital”—​that I have been exploring in the historiography of photography. Simultaneous with the reemergence into the spotlight of the discerning viewer has been an almost triumphant return from exile of two of the protagonists of this book. As one major museum catalogue proposed, photography has come “full circle: the practices of Robinson and Rejlander have now been transposed into the twenty-​first century.”11 For most of the preceding century, these two photographers had been ruthlessly marginalized from the orthodox histories of photography, their works included only as cautionary tales or eccentric curiosities. And now, they had been elevated into a special kind of pantheon, where they assume the aspect not only of steadfast martyrs, but of prophets whose prescience has formed the basis for an entire way of conceiving of photography’s current practice and of the vicissitudes of its histories. If a circle has been closed with the enthronement of Rejlander and Robinson, then the historical course of that circle needs urgently to be traced. We must examine closely their primary role in the repositioning of photography that has taken place in the historiographical interventions of postmodern theory as well as in the technological “revolution” of digital imaging. In exploring the fluctuations of the discerning relationship to photography throughout the modernist and postmodernist epochs, we will see how this category and its exemplars have been invoked to draw stark boundaries in the epistemology of the medium.

ca tch ing o r d e v i si n g t h e w o r l d ?

The first indications of Rejlander’s and Robinson’s return from the wilderness are difficult to assess since, like the lingering effects of a tropical fever, they were never fully expurgated from the corpus of photography. The combination-​ printed Self-​Portrait as Robinson and Rejlander (1964) by the American photographer Jerry Uelsmann is an arresting resurfacing, as much for its resurrection of these figures as for the location of its most prominent exhibition: as checklist item number one in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. John Szarkowski, then head of the museum’s photography department, drew the historical link explicitly: “Uelsmann’s pictures, which make frank and visible use of all manner of darkroom artifice, are not analytic but synthetic. Related in technique to the Victorian photomontages of Rejlander and Robinson, they are unmistakably contemporary in their surrealistic and ambiguous imagery.” More cautiously, Szarkowski asserted that “like all romantic art they must tread a narrow path between bathos and sentimentality. In traveling this difficult and recently unfrequented track, Uelsmann’s balance is remarkable.”12 Szarkowski evidently felt that something epochal was implied in the appearance of the Uelsmann exhibition, believing as he did that “between the photo-​Secession and Jerry Uelsmann,”13 it appeared that “the fundamental question had been answered once and for all. . . . The predetermined triumph of straight photography seemed a self-​evident truth.”14 That this track was so desolate was thanks in great measure to Szarkowski’s predecessor, the far less equanimitous Beaumont Newhall, under whose aegis the MoMA department had become the major institutional and ideological organ for the “straight” modern photography of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. The press release announcing Uelsmann’s show elided the museum’s role in fashioning what it called “the prevalent assumption that the photograph is defined in the artist’s eye at the moment the shutter is released,” to which the current exhibit was a “challenge.”15 When Beaumont Newhall arrived at MoMA in 1935 as librarian, his curriculum vitae already included a body of publications that signaled the particular narrative of photography to which he would marshal the museum’s growing cultural authority. A year earlier, in an article entitled “Photography and the Artist,” Newhall cast this history as one of a medium narrowly saved “from becoming a weak pastiche” of painting, foolishly aping the techniques of the elder art. In the four pages of this highly condensed chronicle, Newhall abandoned his brevity to dwell on the “minor talents” who “almost ruined photography by a false esthetic” by forgetting that “the camera is a comparatively inflexible instrument, that its miraculous ability to record limitless detail is its true, and unique, function.” Although this was a story populated with villains “whose names, alas, are legion,” Newhall narrowed his sights and provided the name of just one, furnishing Rejlander with almost as much space as Daguerre or Talbot.16 Evidently, Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life demanded sufficient disapprobation to feature as one of the scant three photographs with which Newhall illustrates his miniature polemic. Four years later, comfortably ensconced in his new perch as the world’s first designated curator of photography, Newhall took aim at Rejlander’s best-​known photograph from another angle. In a rapturous encomium to the photographs made by Henri Le Secq of Chartres Cathedral, he wrote:

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They are a direct record, not only of the carved stones, but of the photographer’s emotion in viewing them. And they represented only what actually stood in front of his camera on the day in 1852 when he exposed the negatives. Yet in producing them he himself created works of art, of a far more genuine character than such an elaborately self-​conscious photograph as Rejlander’s Two Paths of Life [sic], which was practically contemporary. Through the program of documenting medieval architecture and sculpture, Le Secq achieved an artistic result. This, I believe, is the chief esthetic function of documentary photography, and possibly even a basis for the most genuinely creative aspect of photography.17

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“Self-​conscious,” “pastiche,” “false”: these are the characteristics of Rejlander’s work that allow it to serve as a useful foil to the kinds of photography that Newhall takes—​like Le Secq’s—​to be “actual,” “direct,” and “genuine.” We can readily attend to a rhetoric of purity that Newhall is deploying here, one that derives from the sine qua non of Formalist criticism: the production of a mode of expression that accords with the irreducible uniqueness of each visual medium. Newhall announced this agenda openly in the catalogue for his survey exhibition at MoMA, which would subsequently form the basis for his standard history, Photography: 1839–1937: “We are seeking standards of criticism generic to photography.”18 As Douglas Nickel points out in his excellent historiographical overview of the field, “enunciations of this view in the 1920s and 1930s are legion and international.”19 The commingling of the “essentially” photographic with the painterly was an obsession of almost monomaniacal proportions, and the regularity of the rhetoric that emerged to disaggregate photography from its rival media makes it easier to understand the vituperative treatment of Rejlander and his contemporaries at the hands of Newhall’s expanding modernist empire.20 Nickel offers a sampling of the chorus that gathered from across the Atlantic to argue, as Albert Renger-​Patzsch did, representatively, that “photography has its own technique and its own means. Trying to use these means to achieve painterly effects brings the photographer into conflict with the truthfulness and unequivocalness of his medium.” Paul Strand, a member of Stieglitz’s stable and Newhall’s canon, put the point most baldly: “The full potential power of every medium is dependent upon the purity of its use. . . . [T]his objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation.”21 It is not difficult to imagine Newhall, or any of his like-​minded modernists, recoiling at the antithetical musings of Rejlander on the relations among visual media: “These points, which are essential in the production of a perfect picture, require the same operations of mind, the same artistic treatment and careful manipulation, whether it be executed in crayon, paint, or by photographic agency.”22 The criticisms of The Two Ways of Life, which uneasily linked doubts about Rejlander’s moral purity with too-​credulous belief in the purity of his representational means, reemerge in this modernist dogma in surprising ways. This haunting gave renewed emphasis to the central philosophical query that had underpinned the creation and reception of combination works nearly a century before: the degree of artistic intervention, its visibility, and its purposes. And these concerns were so newly germane because Newhall’s advocacy of

“straight” photography was of a very particular kind. He was not proposing the kind of objectivity that excluded the presence of the master artist, for it was precisely the aesthetic judgment of that artist and her ability to convey formally the emotional engagement with the scene. So while, as Newhall wrote in 1938, “the documentary photographer is a purist, . . . he will not photograph dispassionately; he will not simply illustrate his library notes. He will put into his camera studies something of the emotion which he feels toward the problem, for he realizes that this is the most effective way. . . . For this reason his pictures will have a different, and more vital, quality than those of a mere technician.” At the same time, “Needless to say retouching of any kind is strictly prohibited.”23 The course that remains open once these constraints are erected is a narrow one. To navigate it, the photographer must steer clear of that mode of intervention that is demoniacally inimical to photography’s purified essence, and toward another, which is a necessary precondition for the conferral of the modernist master’s agency upon a photograph. Through what means, precisely, was this pathway to be illuminated? The photographer is “first and foremost . . . a visualizer,” who prepares diligently for his encounter with his subject: “Before going on an assignment he carefully studies the situation which he is to visualize. He reads history and related subjects. He examines existing pictorial material for its negative and positive value. . . . Furthermore he is able to react to a given situation with amazing spontaneity.”24 To illustrate with exempla, Newhall turns to two of the photographers who would figure indispensably in his canon. The first was Edward Weston, the master of “straight” photography about whom Newhall wrote perhaps more frequently than any other. In a text that Newhall called an “admirable little booklet Photography in the ‘Enjoy Your Museum’ series,” Weston insisted: “In the application of camera principles, thought and action so nearly coincide that the conception of an idea and its execution can be almost simultaneous. The previsioned image, as seen through the camera, is perpetuated at the moment of clearest understanding, of most intense emotional response.”25 Similarly, Margaret Bourke-​White’s description of her working method among tenant farmers in the South emphasizes preparation and patience, and an ability to seize upon the moment in which formal expressivity and emotional resonance came into alignment. “Sometimes I would set up the camera in the corner of the room, sit some distance away from it,” Bourke-​White recounts, waiting perhaps “an hour before their faces or gestures gave us what we were trying to express, but the instant it occurred the scene was imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what happened.”26 These approaches, which Newhall cited favorably in his 1938 essay, define a mode of straight photography that concedes neither to an authorless automatism of the optical instrument nor to a disruptive presence of the maker. The result of this proper calibration is the completion of a “photogenic” photograph, a description that seems hopelessly tautological. But it is, crucially, a tautology that derives its appeal from its embodiment of the ideals of medium-​specificity, of the purity of a medium’s deployment of its own material conditions, which the international chorus of photographers had rhapsodized. In his final major work, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), Siegfried Kracauer examined the photographic medium in the greatest

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depth since his seminal essay of 1927,27 reserving the first chapter of the book for a rumination on photography. He describes the circularity of the photogenic with verbose aplomb: “Photographs in keeping with the photographic approach—​where misunderstanding is possible, they may just be called photographs—​show certain affinities which can be assumed to be as constant as the properties of the medium to which they belong.”28 And among these concords is, “First, photography has an outspoken affinity for unstaged reality.” Indeed, he argues, “Pictures which strike us as intrinsically photographic seem intended to render nature in the raw, nature as it exists independently of us.”29 Edgar Wind similarly draws this linkage between the inherently photographic and an independently existing world: “The term photogenic refers to an adventitious felicity which the photographer must catch in an object but not devise,” declaring that if “the photograph looks contrived . . . there is not enough genuine photography in it.”30 Perhaps by now we are unsurprised to see Kracauer offer up “Robinson, the early artist-​photographer” as archetypical of the “photographers with strong painterly inclinations,” whose images are like “old iron structures with their borrowing from Gothic stone architecture.”31 Nor are we likely ruffled by Wind’s assertion, citing Newhall, that “the Victorian aberrations of Rejlander are pseudo-​photographic,”32 and that on account of this impurity of media they are doomed to failure. But in fact these assertions ought to strike us as ripples in the wake of a reigning ideology. For as acute and skeptical a theorist of representation as Kracauer—​he, who authoritatively asserted in 1930 that “reality is a construction”33—​to have arrived thirty years later at this set of conclusions about photography attests to the extraordinary force of the straight modernist history. The photogenic is in this account a special case of nonintervention, for it preserves the sanctity of a given world that exists prior to representation, but accords an appropriate status to the photographer keen enough to, as Bourke-​ White would have it, “imprison” that world. The most crucial philosophical implication of the “purity” of the medium was its inseparability from epistemic realism, from a fundamentally positive attitude about the possibility of representing the world, of “catching,” not creating. The limitations of this cosmology were to become increasingly clear across a diversity of cultural and political zones by the 1960s, and it was only then that the history of photography would have to brook any serious rivalry on this fundamental, conceptual plane. As this vision of photographic representation endured the rise of heterodox dissidents, the hybrid, impure, and theatrical worldview for which Rejlander and Robinson had become utterly commonplace exemplars, would have a new audition before a vitally shifting audience. 156 d is i llu s i o ned

p r e -​p o st m o d e r n

pictures

“Art,” Michael Fried memorably insisted, “degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre.”34 In the art criticism of the second half of the twentieth century, this is perhaps the most consequential defense of the Formalist commitment to medium-​specificity that was vigorously espoused, in the context of photography, by Newhall and his acolytes. As a critique of minimalist

sculpture, Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” objected in particular to the way that the more “theatrical” among these works seemed brazenly to eschew the specific properties of their medium, aspiring to an intermedial condition that was an affront to Fried’s sensibility. That the range of metaphors that would emerge over the following decade of photographic practice would draw reliably upon theater suggests that Fried had grasped acutely a development already well under way. The artistic production of the following years would be characterized by what the critic A. D. Coleman branded the “directorial mode,” a set of coherent practices that would dramatically abandon the tenets of straight photography and its modernist ideology. Of course, as Coleman acknowledged in his signal 1976 essay, even the commitment of Newhall’s most treasured modernists to these values was flexible. When Alexander Gardner moved the corpse of a Confederate sniper, or Paul Strand “cast” the players for Un Paese, his photographic portrait of the Po River Valley, they too were working in a directorial manner. To a considerable extent, these examples simply reiterate the directorial or posed nature of all representation. But between these instances and the new representations emerging in the 1970s, Coleman identified an important difference: “The substantial distinction, then, is between treating the external world as a given, to be altered only through photographic means (point of view, framing, printing, etc.) en route to the final image, or rather as raw material, to be itself manipulated as much as desired prior to the exposure of the negative.”35 The “givenness” of the external world was the point from which the most significant of the directorial photographers would depart from the orthodoxy of their modernist predecessors. This work would not merely reject the sanctity of the traditional boundaries of the medium, but would aim to debunk the worldview for which those boundaries were inflexible markers of integrity. At their most ambitious, these practices would not simply deny the ostensive authenticity or realism of the camera; rather, they would strive to deny the validity of those categories as such. Yet, as Coleman incisively recognized, this was not a development without historical precedent, simply one without the recent benediction of the most influential critical institutions. Newhall’s bêtes noires were to be positioned as directorial photography’s prophets: The advent of directorial photography as an active mode as an acknowledged alternative to realism dates back to the same period—​the 1850s—​ and the work of two men: O.G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. Both staged events for the purpose of making images thereof—​mostly genre scenes and religious allegories; both used the process of combination printing, involving the superimposition of one negative on another, which fictionalized the resulting print even further. Their work was the subject of heated debate from all sources—​photographers, artists, art critics, and the public as well. Until recently, the sentimentality of the most of their images (Rejlander’s “Two Ways of Life” and Robinson’s “Fading Away”) was used by photo-​historians as a basis for dismissing their entire oeuvres and their way of working as well.36 Rejlander had been quickly recast, as the title of an article published in the same year as Coleman’s suggested, “from philistine to forerunner,” from a

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potent avatar of one cosmology of photography to that of a very different rival.37 Remarkably, his antipode in the canon of straight photography, Edward Weston, would come, in the most influential line of criticism to emerge in the later 1970s and early 1980s, to serve Rejlander’s erstwhile role. Weston reentered the stage in this new guise in 1979, when the artist Sherrie Levine rephotographed a group of six of Weston’s 1926 pictures of his son Neil’s nude torso, and exhibited the results under her own name. Douglas Crimp placed Levine at the forefront of “a group of young artists working with photography” who “have addressed photography’s claims to originality, showing those claims for the fiction they are, showing photography to be always a representation, always-already-​seen.”38 Weston became, again in rather short order, the standard-​bearer of a modernism that drew strength from its alleged originality, a myth that not only Levine but a generation of her critical proponents sought to unmask. Levine’s work made plain that although in the realm of copyright law the images were Weston’s property, the originality on which such claims were asserted could hardly be assigned to one photographer. Given Weston’s reliance upon a motif as ancient as representation, Crimp claimed, “To be fair, however, we might just as well give them to Praxiteles, for if it is the image that can be owned, then surely these belong to classical sculpture, which would put them in the public domain.”39 Evidently unburdened by any obligation to originality themselves, Abigail Solomon-Godeau identified Weston’s photograph as “the stylised perfection of Praxiteles’ or Phidias’ marble nudes,”40 while Rosalind Krauss notes that these “originals . . . are already taken from models provided by others; they are given in that long series of Greek kouroi by which the nude male torso has long ago been processed and manipulated in our own culture.”41 Weston embodied, then, a central problematic to which postmodern photo theory would address itself: the inevitable precession of images in contemporary culture and the impossibility of originality in visual representation. Levine and her contemporaries would not make art but, rather, pictures, a semi-​neologism whose creation Crimp described in his 1977 exhibition by that title: “In choosing the word pictures for this show, I hoped to convey not only the work’s most salient characteristic—​recognizable images—​but also and importantly the ambiguities it sustains. As is typical of what has come to be called postmodernism, this new work is not confined to any particular medium; instead, it makes use of photography, film, performance, as well as traditional modes of painting, drawing, and sculpture.”42 The work of this generation discarded the autonomy of visual media, that polestar of modernism, and embraced “recognizable images” as an antidote to the cult of originality through which that modernism had concealed the nature of its representational ideology, two features that, it need hardly be said, accord with the criticism launched at manipulated photography as early as the 1850s. The history of photography that is implied by the postmodern critics and practitioners is one in which the fortunes of Weston and, at least implicitly, Rejlander and Robinson, diverge sharply from those assigned by Beaumont Newhall and the Museum of Modern Art. Against the dominance of MoMA and its support for the “straight” photographers, a new interest arises in the previously marginalized practice of photographers who engaged with photography’s artificial capacities, for, unlike Weston, these artists evidently understood the inherently pastiched, manipulated quality of photographic representation

per se. Their claims to originality, such as they were, were predicated not upon the idea of innovation ex nihilo, but rather upon the intelligence with which they coaxed topical and self-​aware meaning from inevitably preexisting visual forms. The scandal of Rejlander’s and Robinson’s compositions was not, ultimately, their depictions of orgiastic or intrusive scenes, but rather the alibis they proffered to exculpate themselves from social and professional sanction. Their photographs existed only in the realm of epistemological antirealism, as representations that served as useful fictions about a world that was ultimately inaccessible to their lens. They assembled preexisting fragments to compose their scenes, scenes that were stridently nonreferential. Their finished photographs were always anticipated, not only by the lurking storehouse of Western representation from Raphael to the Romantics, but indeed by their own fragmentary images, by the precessional parts that would come together to make the whole. The antithesis that the work of both the composite photographers and many of the “Pictures Generation” represented to modernist formalism can be gleaned by the fact that they both comported with the two definitions of pastiche: “an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge” and “consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.” The incompatibility of various forms was clearly a means of rejecting the properties specific to distinct media, while the use of transparently nonoriginal material challenged modernism’s mythology of masters.43 Is it historiographically tenable to say that the salient, shared features of postmodern photographic theory and practice constituted a widespread social imperative that would reach its technological apotheosis in the arrival of digital photography in the late 1980s? Does the embrace by the so-​called Pictures Generation of a history and practice of photography that privileges its nonreferential, intermedial, or even constructivist past somehow predict the rise of a new mode of imaging that seems to consist, in its ontological “essence,” in precisely those qualities? The causal interaction between such imperatives and their possible technological concomitants is, as I have suggested in a previous chapter, a thorny issue. The purpose of posing these questions in this way is to indicate the startlingly central position occupied by the competing histories of photography crystallized in straight modernism and nonreferential postmodernism, respectively, and to suggest that this opposition and its exemplars continue to function metonymically for competing ways of seeing the world. And I emphasize that other favored metonym—​of “seeing” the world rather than simply gaining knowledge about it—​because it is in the debates about digital photography’s genealogy and its nature that the visually discerning subject’s indispensable role in the formulation of the historical enterprise since the 1960s comes into focus. The earliest debates among scholars of digital photography tended generally to turn on the question of whether these representations could even be considered photography at all. More specifically, the combatants wondered whether the developments that they were excitedly seeking to study in medias res formed a fundamental continuity with the logic of opto-​chemical photography, or whether the advent of digital was an unbridgeable rupture, like the naturalization of linear perspective in the Renaissance, or, indeed, the invention

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of the photographic medium itself in the nineteenth century. It is not within the compass of this study to attempt an ontological inquiry as to the essential nature of digital photography. Indeed, it should be evident by now that such discussions need largely to be reoriented to explore photography’s historical—​ not ontological—​status and variability. Rather, what must be recuperated is the context of these debates as artifacts themselves, as arguments that enlisted the aid of incongruent histories of photography in order to come to terms with the proper place of digital imaging. What is so arresting about the disparity of the histories onto which the arrival of digital photography was mapped is their investment in making use of the nineteenth-​century figures with whom this study has been concerned. The work of photographers who subverted, or at least interrogated, the referentiality of the medium, was a deep wellspring from which radically dissimilar interpretations of digital drew with regularity. The author of one of the earliest scholarly responses to the fate of photography after the introduction of digital imaging was, like Paul Delaroche a century and a half earlier, eager to declare a revolutionary rupture. In his Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-​Photographic Era (1992), William J. Mitchell proposed this break by relying upon a well-​established convention of photographic historiography: the myth of the medium’s uncompromised persuasiveness. In constructing an orthodox history with which the supposed nonreferentiality of digital constituted an epochal discontinuity, Mitchell was obliged to marginalize the very narrative that has been the subject of this study, and whose vitality was reiterated as recently as the previous decade. In analyzing the contribution of these protagonists, Mitchell marks their ostensible irrelevance by declining to furnish them even with their properly spelled surnames: “A few of these mavericks have succeeded in producing convincing composite images: Henry Peach Robinson’s and Oscar G. Reijlander’s [sic] nineteenth-​century ‘combination prints,’ John Heartfield’s photomontages, and Jerry Uelsmann’s haunting constructions of the surreal come to mind. But there is no doubt that extensive reworking of photographic images . . . [is] outside the mainstream of photographic practice.”44 What constitutes the “mainstream” in this account, as we have seen, is but a trickle. In his caustic rejoinder to this text, Lev Manovich seems to suggest as much, pointing out that Mitchell’s myopic view of the history of photography has resulted in his overestimation of the groundbreaking status of these images, asserting that “digital technology does not subvert ‘normal’ photography because ‘normal’ photography never existed.”45 That is, if photographs were never thought to be directly referential in the first place, how could digital “disrupt” or “undermine” such a belief? Manovich insists that the aberration of the constructed photograph was in fact a major alternative current throughout the history of visual representation. In Mitchell’s version, the photographs of “Weston and Ansel Adams, nineteenth- and twentieth-​century realist painting, and the painting of the Italian Renaissance become the essence of photography,” while “Robinson’s and Rejlander’s photo composites, constructivist montage, contemporary advertising imagery (based on constructivist design), and Dutch seventeenth-​ century painting (with its montage-​like emphasis on details over the coherent whole) become the essence of digital imaging.”46 Our protagonists have thus been proffered as the forebears of a counter-​discourse to the tightly circumscribed canon of Mitchell’s normative history. These figures have been brought

back to life by the threat of photography’s death, positioned anew at the beating heart of this critical debate. To assert the arrival of digital as a rupture is further to enthrone the history of modernist straight photography as the mainstream of photographic production. Conversely, to assert continuities between opto-​chemical photography and digital imaging is implicitly to reposition the nonreferential history of Robinson and Rejlander as a prescient predecessor of the digital apotheosis. What requires recognition here, however, is the fact that in spite of this supposed rupture of almost unprecedented proportions, the debate through which the rise of digital is refracted is a long-​standing one; in fact, it is one that we have been tracing throughout the course of this study. As Martin Lister noted in his early and insightful overview of the digital dispute, “In the current tendency to oppose photography and digital imagery we are actually witnessing a continuation of an old debate about photography. This is a debate between those who have stressed the photographic image’s privileged status as a trustworthy mechanical analogue of reality and those who have stressed its constructed, artifactual, and ideological character.”47 The efforts to situate digital imagery historically—​really, genealogically—​have brought new clarity to the fact that photography’s referentiality was, in its first decades, never as monolithic as it would become in later years, when the aesthetic and ideological needs of institutions required a more consolidated vision of what a photograph had to be. Most crucially, the proponents of the stark radicality of the digital image were required to adopt a parochial view of the history of visual discernment. Mitchell avers, against the evidence of the historical tendencies that we have seen to be so plentiful and influential, that “when we look at photographs we presume, unless we have some clear indications to the contrary, that they have not been reworked. Here photography and digital imaging diverge strikingly.”48 In response, Lister exclaims that “almost overnight, it seems, the photographic image and other analogue visual media . . . became realist images viewed by passive dupes. Simple mirrors held up to mundane realities at which we passively gaze.”49 Indeed, it is precisely an active mode of looking that was invited by much of the most powerful photography of the nineteenth century. As the indispensability of this discerning activity of the viewer makes clear, any “presumption” about the nonintervention of the photographer was far weaker than the imperative to view and to judge, to make up one’s own mind about the nature of the representation. This judgment was called upon to adjudicate photographs that thematized the status of the individual in relation to labor, commerce, gender, the law, and science, as well as in the domain of art. In the second and third decades of photography’s development, this imperative served a function that was important enough to merit surrendering the potential amenities of an “objective” visual representation of the world. As a liberty granted to forestall demands for more radical freedoms, visual discernment furnished a preeminent vehicle for negotiating the form and the boundaries of a genuinely modern liberal subject. This was a figure whose contours were delineated by the fantasies of agency, the realities of social structure, and the dynamic interplay between the two. The ability to discern the relationship of photographic representations to reality and the manifold forms of uncertainty that licensed that discernment

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were critical means of implementing the ideology of laissez-​faire capitalism that dominated this era. But it was simultaneously a capacity that foregrounded the limitations of that ideology by clarifying the kinds of irregularities, inconsistencies, and indeterminacies that characterized the fundamentally social and communal basis of knowledge production. Historicizing the category of visual discernment allows us to see how the supposed neutrality of the photograph was often sacrificed to enshrine the supposed neutrality of modern society. Acknowledging this transformation helps us not only to excavate the foundational tensions of photography but also to make us aware of the structure of the tools with which we exhume the past.

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i nt roducti on

1. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 5. 2. For the preconditions of these changes, see John Rule, The Laboring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1986). 3. John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4. Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (London: Longman, 1996), 270–72. 5. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), 31. 6. Lynne Oats and Pauline Sadler, “The Abolition of the Taxes on Knowledge,” Studies in the History of Tax Law 2 (2007): 287–306. 7. William C. Lake, “Leisure Time,” in The Use and Abuse of the World, ed. John E. Kempe (London: S.P.C.K., 1873), 39–56, quoted in Peter Bailey, “ ‘A Mingled Mass of Perfectly Legitimate Pleasures’: The Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure,” Victorian Studies 21, no. 1 (1977): 17. 8. Bailey, “ ‘A Mingled Mass of Perfectly Legitimate Pleasures,’ ” 17. 9. Matthew Browne, Views and Opinions (London: Strahan, 1866), 280, quoted in Bailey, “ ‘A Mingled Mass of Perfectly Legitimate Pleasures,’ ” 17. 10. Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew, Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68. 11. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 569.

12. William C. Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth: Early Victorian Attitudes Toward State Intervention, 1833–1848 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971). 13. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 563. 14. John Stuart Mill, “Civilization” (1836), reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions Political, Philosophical, and Historical (London: Longmans, 1869), 180. 15. For a much more thorough account of the optical metaphor for ideology in Marx, see Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 16. Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 72. 17. Karl Marx, “Machinery and Modern Industry,” in Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 262. Here he echoes Fourier’s Passions of the Human Soul, which was deemed of sufficient topicality to English readers to warrant a translation in 1851, by John Reynell Morell (London: H. Balliere). 18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology, trans. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 47. 19. Among few exceptions is Lara Perry, “The Carte de Visite in the 1860s and the Serial Dynamic of Photographic Likeness,” Art History 35, no. 4 (2012): 728–49. 20. Bernard Berenson, Three Essays in Method, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). 21. For the use of photographs in the development of connoisseurship and the discipline of art history, see Anthony Hamber, A Higher Branch of the Art: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839–1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996). 22. Michele Lamont, “Symbolic Boundaries,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and

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n o te s to p a g es 9 – 1 8 Paul B. Baltes (London: Pergamon Press, 2001), 15341. 23. Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 238. 24. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-​ Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6. 25. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 62. 26. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Postscript—1969,” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 193. 27. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 111.

chapter o n e

1. Bibliometric studies have confirmed the more than doubling of the number of articles on the subject since the 1980s, as well as the increasing breadth of the journals in which such publications regularly appear. See Anne L. Buchanan and Jean-​Pierre V. M. Hérubel, “Clio’s Other Photographic Literature: Searching the Historical Journal Literature Using America: History and Life to Explore the History of Photography,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 31, no. 2 (2012). 2. Jennifer Green-​Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 19. 3. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 4. Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5. For a specific account of this problem in the American context, see Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 6. J. A. Smith, preface to Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), iii–iv. 7. For the full complexities of this endeavor and its impact on modern visual culture, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

8. Lorraine Daston, “Can Scientific Objectivity Have a History?” Mitteilungen der Alexander-von-Humboldt-​Stiftung 75 (2000): 31–40. 9. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 147. 10. Ibid., 138. 11. Ibid. 12. Jutta Schickore, “Misperception, Illusion, and Epistemological Optimism: Vision Studies in Early Nineteenth-​Century Britain and Germany,” British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 383. 13. Stuart Walker Strickland, “The Ideology of Self-​Knowledge and the Practice of Self-​ Experimentation,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 31, no. 4 (1998): 453–71. 14. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128. This analysis was amplified by Daston and Galison in their recent Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 15. Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 120. 16. J. A. Paris, Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest: Being an Attempt to Illustrate the First Principles of Natural Philosophy by the Aid of the Popular Toys and Sports of Youth (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1847), 10–11. 17. On the thaumatrope, see Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (2012): 495–516; and Gerard L’E. Turner, “Scientific Toys,” British Journal for the History of Science 20, no. 4 (1987): 377–98. 18. Parlour Magic: a manual of amusing experiments, transmutations sleights and subtleties, legerdemain, &c. for the instruction of youth (London: Bogue, 1853), v–vi. 19. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001). 20. Paris, Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest, 305. 21. This and several of the other games to which I refer are in the Rare Book Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, and are briefly surveyed in The Cottage of Content: or, Toys, Games, and Amusements of Nineteenth-​Century England (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1977). 22. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968).

not e s t o p a ge s 19–22 23. On the persistence of this tendency in the eighteenth century, see Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-​Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). For its continued relevance in the next century, see Mark M. Hennelly, “Victorian Carnivalesque,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 1 (2002): 365–81. 24. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), 4. 25. Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism: with Personal Recollections (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 48. 26. The Lancet, January 9, 1830, p. 506. 27. “The English at Home,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 57 (1862): 263. 28. See the brilliant account of the United States as a center of contested credulity in Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 29. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1886), 747. 30. Herbert Broom, A Selection of Legal Maxims, Classified and Illustrated (Philadelphia: Johnson, 1845), 227. 31. Ibid. 32. “On the Sale and Warranty of Horses,” The Law Magazine, Or, Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence 3 (London: Saunders and Benning, 1830), 325. 33. Ibid. 34. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 35. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 57. More recent interventions on Barnum include two outstanding works: James W. Cook, Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), and the relevant sections of Leja, Looking Askance. 36. For a sampling of this rich stew, see R. A. Davenport, Sketches of Imposture, Deception and Credulity (London: T. Tegg and Son, 1837); Humbug: A Look at Some Popular Impositions (New York: S. F. French, 1859); as well Barnum’s own Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits, and Deceivers Generally, in all Ages (London: John Camden Hotten, 1866).

37. Etymologically, there is little question that “a humbug” was conceived of, in this moment, as a deception of an exclusively visual nature. “Er ham b’oog; q.e a taking hold of by the eye . . . implying an appearance and nothing more . . . he was taken in by appearances, in the sense of, he was deceived by his eyes.” J. B. Kerr, An Essay on the Archaeology of Our Popular Phrases, and Nursery Rhymes (London: Longman, 1837), 111. 38. On the historical relation of life to machinery, see Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 599–633; and Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 39. Benjamin Silliman, A Visit to Europe in 1851, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), 431. On the implications of the widespread trope of the sleeping, corpse-​like woman in Victorian culture, see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), chapter 2. 40. For a charming, if only occasionally accurate, history, see John Theodore Tussaud, The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s (London: Doran, 1920). On the illusionism of Tussaud’s wax figures, see Allison Goudine, “The Wax Portrait Bust as Trompe-​l’oeil? A Case Study of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples,” Oxford Art Journal 36, no. 1 (2013): 55–74. 41. For the automaton in the Napoleonic context, see John Tresch, “The Machine Awakens: The Science and Politics of the Fantastic Automaton,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 87–123. 42. Unsigned review in G.S., Exhibitions of Mechanical and Other Works of Ingenuity (Peckham, 1840), British Library General Reference Collection 1269.h.38., p. 130. The hand-​lettered frontispiece of this greatest treasury of primary material on the exhibitionary cultures of London in the first half of the century, now ensconced in the British Library, begins with apt musing: “The Public Exhibitions of a Nation principally form and establish that peculiar character, which the rest of mankind agree in annexing to their general ideas concerning them.—​Look around you, in this extraordinary Country, and contemplate the various Shows and Diversions of the People, and then say, whether their temper of mind at various periods of our history may not be collected from them?”

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n o te s to p a g es 2 2 – 3 0 43. An 1826 issue of The Theatrical Observer noted in its “Fashionable Exhibitions” section that the Prosopographus “draws Likenesses with more certainty than is in the power of any living hand to execute.” The pervasiveness of this pursuit, and its commingling of the mechanical and the organic, is suggested by the item listed directly before the Prosopographus: a new view, of Roslyn Chapel, painted by M. Daguerre debuting at his Diorama in Regent’s Park. See The Theatrical Observer 1412 (June 15, 1826): 3. 44. “Mr. Herve’s Automaton Artist, Prosopographus!” Clipping, G.S., Exhibitions of Mechanical and Other Works of Ingenuity, 158. 45. Ibid. 46. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 112–20; Victor Burgin, “Photography, Fantasy, Function,” in Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982). 47. Among a very rich literature on this subject are Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ruth Barton, “Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularization in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s,” Annals of Science 55, no. 1 (1998): 1–33; and Ed Block, “T. H. Huxley’s Rhetoric and the Popularization of Victorian Scientific Ideas: 1854–1874,” Victorian Studies 29, no. 3 (1986): 363–86. 48. Peter Pels, “Spirits of Modernity: Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Fact,” in Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, ed. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 244–45; for Wallace’s “cardinal maxim,” see 252. 49. Edward Royle, “Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860,” Historical Journal 14, no. 2 (1971): 305–21. 50. Shoji Katoh, “Mechanics’ Institutes in Great Britain to the 1850s,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 21, no. 2 (1989): 1–7. 51. For a brief history of the Royal Polytechnic Institution within the context of Victorian illusion, see Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 142–65. More generally, see Brenda Weeden, The Education of the Eye: History of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, 1838–1881 (London: Granta Editions, 2008). 52. Prospectus, Polytechnic Institution of London (1837), University of Westminster Archive, R9.

53. Ibid. 54. Jeremy Brooker, “The Polytechnic Ghost: Pepper’s Ghost, Metempsychosis, and the Magic Lantern at the Royal Polytechnic Institution,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (July 2007): 189–206. 55. Charles Dickens, “Mr. Whelks Combining Instruction with Amusement,” All the Year Round, July 7, 1866, 610–13. 56. Ibid., 612. 57. Ibid., 613. 58. Agreement between William Henry Fox Talbot and W. M. Nurse on behalf of himself and the directors of the Incorporated Society Called the Polytechnic Society (1841), University of Westminster Archive, R4/a. 59. Royal Polytechnic Institution, for the advancement of the arts and practical science; especially in connexion with agriculture, mining machinery, manufactures, and other branches of industry, 309 Regent Street, and 5 Cavendish Square. Catalogue for 1840 (London: Printed by Charles Reynell at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, 1840). 60. Robert B. Fisher, “The Beard Photographic Franchise in England,” Daguerreian Annual, 1992, 73–95. 61. Richard Beard, Further Improvements in Photography (1843), quoted in Michael G. Jacob, “A Visit to Mr. Beard’s,” Daguerreian Annual, 1994, 155. 62. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 11. 63. Among the many and disparate authors during this vibrant period in the historiography of photography who came under Foucault’s sway, see Dick Hebdige, “Posing . . . Threats, Striking . . . Poses: Youth, Surveillance, and Display,” Substance 11 (1982): 68–88; Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/ View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (1982): 311–19; David Green, “On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and Photography,” Camerawork 32 (1985): 6–9; and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64. For a spirited historiographical account of this tendency and its relationship to postmodernism, see Andrew Hersh­berger, “Krauss’s Foucault and the Foundations of Postmodern History of Photography,” History of Photography 30, no. 1 (2006): 55–67. 64. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 63.

not e s t o p a ge s 30–40 65. Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. 66. Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Victorian Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 258. 69. Here I refer to the work of Jonathan Crary and John Tagg, among others similarly situated with respect to Foucault’s account. 70. To a great extent, this is a local iteration of the structure-versus-​agency debate that is central to the human and social sciences. This would place my account very roughly in accord with those scholars who have sought to reconcile structure and agency by imagining them as processes rather than as outcomes, exemplified by Anthony Giddens, Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 71. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 237.

chapter t wo

1. The relevant scholarly monographs, which are primarily of a descriptive nature, are, on Rejlander, Edgar Y. Jones, Father of Art Photography: O.G. Rejlander, 1813–1875 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), and Stephanie Spencer, O.G. Rejlander: Photography as Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985); and on Robinson, Margaret Harker, Henry Peach Robinson: Master of Photographic Art, 1830–1901 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 2. On the relationship of Rejlander’s photography to the problem of Victorian literary realism, see Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3. A. H. Wall, “Rejlander’s Photographic Art Studies—​Their Teachings and Suggestions,” Photographic News, September 24, 1886. 4. G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 5. 5. Malcolm Daniel, “Darkroom vs. Greenroom: Victorian Art Photography and Popular Theatrical Entertainment,” Image 33, nos. 1–2 (Fall 1990): 13–19. 6. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, remains an indispensible study of

the political and social history of European industrialization. 7. William Lovett, Cabinet-​Maker and John Collins, Tool-​Maker, Chartism: A New Organization of the People, Embracing a Plan for the Education and Improvement of the People, Politically and Socially . . . (London: J. Watson, 1840), v. 8. Act 5 Geo. IV, c. 95 (1824). 9. George Howell, Labor Legislation, Labor Movements, and Labor Leaders (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), 117. 10. Karl Marx, “Crisis in England” (1857), in Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary, ed. Robert J. Antonio (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 185. 11. “Art Treasures Exhibition,” Journal of the Society of Arts 5, no. 244 (July 24, 1857): 505. 12. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, or an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: C. Knight, 1835). 13. Anthony Burton, “Art and Science Applied to Industry: Prince Albert’s Plans for South Kensington,” in Art in Britain and Germany in the Age of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, ed. Franz Bosbach and Frank Buttner (Munich: G. K. Saur, 1998), 169–86. 14. Wolverhampton Chronicle, April 15, 1857. 15. Francis Diamond and Roger Taylor, Crown and Camera: The Royal Family and Photography, 1842–1910 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). 16. The Cottage of Content: or, Right Roads and Wrong Ways. A Humorous Game (London: Wm. Spooner, 1848). 17. “The Cottage of Content,” in John T. Barr, Chapters for the Young (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1851), 44. 18. Ibid., 45–46. 19. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 1, Bubbles (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2011), 483, with quotation from the Odyssey. 20. Quoted in a fascinating article by John M. Picker, “The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 3 (2000): 427–53. 21. W. Blanchard Jerrold, Jerrold’s Guide to the Exhibition. How to See the Art Treasures Exhibition, to enable visitors to take a view, at once rapid and complete, of the Art Treasures Palace (Manchester: A. Ireland, 1857), 5. 22. What to see, and where to see it! Or, the operative’s guide to the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester (Manchester: T. Dinham and Co., 1857), preface.

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n o te s to p a g es 4 1 – 5 3 23. Bobby Shuttle and His Woife Sayroh’s Visit to Manchester un-​th Greight Hert Treasures Palace (Manchester: John Heywood, 1857). 24. Samuel Smiles, Self-​Help (London: J. Murray, 1858). 25. Art Journal (1858). 26. Andrew Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain Investigated and Illustrated (London: C. Knight, 1836). 27. Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 200. 28. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes in England (New York: Penguin, 1987), 184. 29. Ibid., 182. 30. Ibid., 224–25. 31. For a recent history written in this vein, see Clifford D. Conner, A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechanicks” (New York: Nation Books, 2005). 32. Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 33. Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “On Photographic Composition: with a Description of Two Ways of Life,” The Photographic Journal 4 (April 21, 1858): 196. 34. Notes and Queries 4 (July 18, 1857). 35. “Photographic Secrets,” The Photographic News 13, no. 543 (January 29, 1869): 49. 36. Wall, “Rejlander’s Photographic Art Studies.” 37. Ibid. 38. Jean-​Eugène Robert-​Houdin, Memoirs, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (New York: Dover, 1964), 238. 39. Ibid., 230. 40. Rejlander, “On Photographic Composition,” 47. 41. George Oliver, The Book of the Lodge and Officer’s Manual (London: R. Spencer, 1856), 24. 42. “A Museum of Photography,” The Photographic News 15, no. 692 (December 8, 1871): 577. 43. Albert Pionke, Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 44. J. Ward, Workmen and Wages at Home and Abroad; or the Effects of Strikes, Combinations, and Trades’ Unions (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 196. 45. Ibid., 197. 46. Pionke, Plots of Opportunity. 47. Ibid., 27. Emphases mine.

48. Thomas De Quincey, “Secret Societies,” in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Black, 1890), 173. 49. Abbé Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme (London: T. Burton, 1797–98.) 50. De Quincey, “Secret Societies,” 174. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 181. 53. Ibid., 174. 54. Suzanne Fagence Cooper, “The Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, 1857,” The Magazine Antiques 159, no. 6 (June 2001): 932. 55. J. B. Atkinson, quoted in Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-​Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 159. 56. Exhibition of the art treasures of the United Kingdom. Manchester, 1857. Supplemental catalogue. Drawings and sketches of old masters, engravings, photographs (Manchester: Bradbury and Evans, 1857). 57. Hugh Stowell, A Word in Season, in Relation to the Art Treasures Exhibition (Manchester), Preached in Christ Church, Salford, on Sunday Morning, May 3rd, 1857 (Manchester: W. Bremner, 1857), 5. 58. Ibid., 11, 14. 59. Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, “Science, Nature, and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutions,” Social Studies of Science 7, no. 1 (February 1977): 46. 60. Ibid., 36. 61. Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: Appleton, 1860), 107. 62. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 20. 63. Michael Polanyi, “Knowing and Being,” Mind 70, no. 280 (1961): 459. 64. Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing: Its Bearing on Some Problems of Philosophy,” Reviews of Modern Physics 34, no. 4 (1962): 616. 65. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 122. 66. Ibid., 181.

chapter three

1. George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or, the Hours of the Day and the Night in London (London: Houlston and Wright, 1859),

not e s t o p a ge s 53–65 155, quoted in David Webb, “The Photographic Studios of Regent Street, 1850–1875,” London Topographical Record 28 (2001): 120. 2. For the early history of the Photographic Society of London (later the Royal Photographic Society), see Pam Roberts, “ ‘The Exertions of Mr. Fenton’: Roger Fenton and the Founding of the Photographic Society,” in All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852– 1860, ed. Gordon Baldwin, Malcolm Daniel, and Sarah Greenough (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 211–20. 3. “Photographic Exhibition,” Art-​Journal 5 (February 1, 1859): 46. 4. Grace Seiberling, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-​Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 73. 5. Alfred H. Wall, “A Few Thoughts about Photographic Societies,” British Journal of Photography 10, no. 200 (1863): 408. 6. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 61. 7. The significance of this invention can be gleaned by the subtitular position it receives in a major survey of the period, Helmut Gernsheim, The Rise of Photography, 1850–1880: The Age of Collodion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988). 8. For an engaging account of the very distinct class associations of photographs from paper negatives and those from glass, see Roger Taylor, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 9. On the rhetorical linkages between photographic obscenity and other forms of urban ills, see Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 10. “Immoral Photographs,” Photographic News (August 3, 1860): 168, quoted in Simon Popple, “Photography, Vice, and the Moral Dilemma in Victorian Britain,” Early Popular Visual Culture 3, no. 2 (September 2005): 116. 11. Popple, “Photography, Vice, and the Moral Dilemma in Victorian Britain,” 125. 12. “Photographic Exhibition,” Art-​Journal 5 (February 1, 1859): 45. 13. Wall, “A Few Thoughts about Photographic Societies,” 409. 14. Alfred H. Wall, “Backgrounds: Their Abuse, Their Use, Their Principles, and the Modes of Painting Them,” British Journal of Photography 9, no. 179 (1862): 450.

15. Wall, “Backgrounds.” 16. “Practical Art Hints,” British Journal of Photography 12, no. 287 (1865). 17. “Manchester Photographic Society,” Liverpool and Manchester Photographic Journal 1, no. 4 (February 15, 1857): 37. 18. Henry Peach Robinson, Picture-​Making by Photography (London: Hazel, Watson, and Viney, 1895), 53. 19. Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 101–4. 20. Ibid., 103. 21. David Coleman, “Pleasant Fictions: Henry Peach Robinson’s Composite Photographs” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 2005). 22. Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (London: Piper and Carter, 1869), 109. 23. British Journal of Photography 283, no. 12 (1865). 24. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography, 53. 25. Henry Peach Robinson, “Autobiographical Sketches,” The Practical Photographer 9, no. 98 (February 1898): 30. 26. George Shadbolt, “Liverpool and Manchester Photographic Journal,” n.s., 2 no. 19 (October 1, 1858): 237, quoted in Katherine DiGiulio, “Narrative Photography Exhibited in Great Britain, 1855–1863” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986), 120. 27. Kitty Hauser, “Coming Apart at the Seams: Taxidermy and Contemporary Photography,” Make, the Magazine of Women’s Art, no. 82, (December 1998–January 1999): 8. 28. Captain Thomas Brown, The Taxidermist’s Manual; or, the Art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History (London: A. Fullarton, 1851), 3. 29. Ibid. 30. Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 251–52, quoted in Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 487. 31. Robinson, Picture-​Making by Photography, 52. 32. On Janssen, see Françoise Launay and Peter Hingley, “Jules Janssen’s ‘Revolver Photographique’ and Its British Derivative, ‘the Janssen Slide,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 36, no. 1 (2005): 57–79, and Jimena Canales, “Photogenic Venus,” Isis 93, no. 4 (2002): 585–613. On Marey, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time:

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n o te s to p a g es 6 6 – 8 1 The Work of Etienne-​Jules Marey, 1830–1904 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 33. Albert A. Hopkins, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography (New York: Munn and Company, 1897), 475. 34. Andrew Wynter, “Photographic Portraiture,” in Subtle Brains and Lissom Fingers (London: Hardwicke, 1863), 310, quoted in Webb, “The Photographic Studios of Regent Street,” 129. 35. “Fire at M. Silvy’s,” British Journal of Photography 9, no. 176 (1862): 395, describes the logistical setup of Silvy’s operation. 36. Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1938). 37. Henning Schmidgen, “Of Frogs and Men: The Origins of Psychophysiological Time Experiments, 1850–1865,” Endeavour 26, no. 4 (2002): 142–48. 38. Quoted in Philip Prodger, Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 53. 39. Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte-de-​Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 40. William Hazlitt, “The Indian Jugglers,” in Table Talk: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (New York: Putnam, 1845), 87. 41. Hopkins, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, 139–40. 42. Alexander Reid, Dictionary of the English Language (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1846), 235. 43. Silvanus Phillips Thompson, “Optical Illusions of Motion,” Brain 3 (1880): 289–98. 44. J. A. Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 35–48. 45. Henri Cartier-​Bresson, The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952). 46. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); and, more recently, Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 47. Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37–39. 48. Arwen Mohun, “On the Frontier of The Empire of Chance: Statistics, Accidents, and Risk in Industrializing America,” Science in Context 18, no. 3 (2005): 337–57.

49. There is an enormously rich literature on the industrial mechanization of the human body. The rewarding classics of this genre include Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), and Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 50. Roland Barthes, “The Scandal of Horror Photography,” in Creative Camera, ed. David Brittain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 33. 51. Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 5. 52. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11. 53. James Lastra, “From the Captured Moment to the Cinematic Image: A Transformation in Pictorial Order,” in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 271. 54. Prodger, Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 43. 55. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1988), 131–37. 56. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7–24. 57. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-​ Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97. 58. William Temple, quoted in ibid., 84. 59. John Venn, The Logic of Chance (1866), reprinted in Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Laura Otis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28.

chapter four

1. Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House,” in Violet Hamilton, Annals of My Glass House: Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 12. 2. See the brilliant account of such disappearances in the context of magic and early cinema in Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women:

not e s t o p a ge s 81–89 Magic, Film, and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 3. On the public and private politics of women’s photographic pursuits in this era, see Patrizia Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers, and Flirts (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007). On Cameron’s authorship in the context of a different project, see the excellent Joanne Lukitsh, “ ‘Simply Pictures of Peasants’: Artistry, Authorship, and Ideology in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography in Sri Lanka, 1875–1879,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 283–308. 4. April Watson, For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1994), 20. 5. Victoria Olsen, From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 138–39. 6. P. H. Emerson, “Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron,” in Sun Artists, ed. W. Arthur Boord (London: Kegan Paul, 1891), 35. 7. It has been suggested by Joanne Lukitsh, in Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), that this image, now in the Library of Congress, was produced by Rejlander “possibly in collaboration with Julia Margaret Cameron,” dating it to “about 1862.” While this is plausible, it is of secondary importance to the nature of the definite collaboration in the later version, discussed above. 8. There is, however, within an album sold at auction in 2013 a portrait by Cameron of her neighbor Sir Henry Taylor, which appears partially to employ a floral frame. Now in private hands, this object warrants further study. I am most grateful to Joanne Lukitsh for drawing my attention to this late-breaking discovery. 9. On Atkins, see Carol M. Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Larry Schaaf, “Anna Atkins’s Cyanotypes: An Experiment in Photographic Publishing,” History of Photography 6, no. 2 (1982): 151–72. 10. Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 187. 11. On these limitations, see Paul Duro, “The ‘Demoiselles à Copier’ in the Second Empire,” Woman’s Art Journal 7, no. 1 (1986): 1–7. 12. Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and

Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 209. 13. Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995). For a fertile interpretation of this idiom later in the century, see Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-​Siècle Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 14. Llewelyn himself made a number of important essays in instantaneous photography. See Christopher Titterington, “John Dillwyn Llewelyn: Instantaneity and Transience,” in British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition, ed. Mike Weaver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 65–78, and Richard Morris, “John Dillwyn Llewelyn (1810–1887),” History of Photography 1, no. 3 (1977): 221–33. 15. Much of the biographical information on Thereza Llewelyn is contained in Suzanne LeMay Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds: Three Victorian Women Naturalists (Abingdon: Psychology Press, 2001). The field in which she participated is perceptively investigated in Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 16. Richard Morris, “Thoughts on the Mary Dillwyn Album,” National Library of Wales Journal 32, no. 4 (2002): 471–78. 17. Ann Thomas, Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chapter 7. 18. Daniel Norman, “The Development of Astronomical Photography,” Osiris 5 (1938): 560–94. 19. Quoted in Mary Brück, Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy: Stars and Satellites (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 118. 20. Ibid. 21. Mrs. [Sarah] Ellis, Education of the Heart: Woman’s Best Work (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1869), 149. 22. “Treatment of Women,” Eliza Cook’s Journal, August 9, 1851, 225. 23. John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also the same author’s “Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-​visite,” Journal of Victorian Culture 8, no. 1 (2003): 55–79. 24. As in G. H. L. LeMay, “Prince Albert and the British Constitution,” History Today 3, no. 6 (June 1953): 411–16.

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n o te s to p a g es 8 9 – 1 0 1 25. Margaret Homans, “To the Queen’s Private Apartments: Royal Family Portraiture and the Construction of Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience,” Victorian Studies 37, no. 1 (1993): 1–41. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Winslow Ames, “Prince Albert’s Taste,” History Today 18, no. 1 (January 1968): 22–29. 28. Nancy Armstrong, “Monarchy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Nineteenth-​ Century Contexts 22, no. 4 (2001): 495–536. 29. Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People (New York Pantheon, 1990), 139. 30. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 159. 31. Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children, and Nineteenth-​Century Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 32. Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (New York: Aperture, 1975). 33. The myth of photography’s origins in painterly discoveries has received considerable critical attention. See especially the excellent account of the problematic nature of this historiography in Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), and his critique of Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981). 34. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938–63), 371. 35. Lori Pauli, “The First Negative,” in Oscar Gustave Rejlander, 1813 (?)–1875 (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998), 27. 36. Michael Fried, “Severed Representations in Caravaggio,” in Pathos, Affekt, Gefühl: Die Emotionen in den Künsten, ed. Klaus Herding and Bernhard Stumpfhaus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 323–24. 37. James Elwick, “The Philosophy of Decapitation: Analysis, Biomedical Reform, and Devolution in London’s Body Politics, 1830– 1850,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 174–87. 38. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Medical Mediations: Mind, Body, and the Guillotine,” History Workshop Journal 28 (Autumn 1989): 39–52. 39. Peter Galison, “Judgment Against Objectivity,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Peter Galison and Caroline Jones (New York: Routledge, 1998), 329. 40. Lorraine Daston, “Can Scientific Objectivity Have a History?” Mitteilungen der Alexander-von-Humboldt-​Stiftung 75 (2000): 31–40.

41. Ibid., 39. 42. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Osgood, 1877), 229. 43. George Levine, Dying to Know (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2. 44. Ibid. 45. I borrow this term from Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 46. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 586. 47. On Hawarden’s relationship to Robinson, see Linda M. Shires, Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-​Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). See also Virginia Dodier, “Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden: Studies from Life,” in Weaver, ed., British Photography in the Nineteenth Century. 48. On Rejlander’s reuse of Raphael, see Graham Smith, “Rejlander, Raphael, and Fuseli,” History of Photography 27, no. 1 (2003): 74–81, and Stephanie Spencer, “Art and Photography: Two Studies by O. G. Rejlander,” History of Photography 9, no. 1 (1985): 47–52. 49. Virginia Dodier, “Haden, Photography, and Salmon Fishing,” Print Quarterly 3 (1986): 34–50. 50. Carol Armstrong, “From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the ‘Lady Amateur,’ ” October 91 (2000): 114. 51. Ibid., 114. 52. Carol Armstrong, “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” October 76 (Spring 1996): 131. 53. Julia Margaret Cameron to Anne Thack­ eray, June 17, 1872, quoted in Cox and Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron, 69–70. 54. Amanda Anderson, Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. 55. Ibid., 17. 56. George K. Behlmer, “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 2 (April 2003): 206–35. 57. See Sara Claire Raymond, “Aftermath: The Trope of the Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2001).

not e s t o p a ge s 102–114 58. Diana Fuss, “Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2003): 1–28. 59. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 51. 60. Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House” (1874), reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 180.

chapter f i ve

1. Francis Frith, Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described (London: J. S. Virtue, 1858–60). 2. Wendy Hillman, “Travel Authenticated? Postcards, Tourist Brochures, and Travel Photography,” Tourism Analysis 12, no. 3 (May 1, 2007): 135–48. 3. The essays in Joan Schwartz and James Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2003), offer a diverse and stimulating set of perspectives on photography and travel. See also the splendid article by Joan M. Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 1 (1996): 16–45. 4. Paddy Ireland, “Capitalism Without the Capitalist: The Joint Stock Company Share and the Emergence of the Modern Doctrine of Separate Corporate Personality,” Journal of Legal History 17, no. 1 (1996): 47. 5. Paddy Ireland, Ian Grigg-​Spall, and Dave Kelly, “The Conceptual Foundations of Modern Company Law,” Journal of Law and Society 14, no. 1 (1987): 150. 6. F. Frith & Co, Catalogue of the Principal Series of Photo-​Pictures (Reigate, Surrey: Frith, 1892). 7. Douglas R. Nickel, Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 15. This work combines indefatigable archival excavation with a sophisticated methodology. Since it is the finest work on Frith to date, one only wishes it had capitalized on its insights by extending its chronological sweep. 8. Valerie Lloyd, “The Files of Francis Frith,” V&A Album 2 (1983): 344. 9. Rachel S. Buurma, “Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive: The Production

of Authorship in Late-​Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 1 (2008): 15–42. 10. Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 11. Quoted in Dallas Liddle, “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-​ Victorian Theories of Journalism,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 1 (1997): 54–55. 12. Francis Frith, “The Art of Photography,” The Art Journal 11 (1859): 71–72. 13. Lloyd, “The Files of Francis Frith,” 342. 14. Frith, “The Art of Photography,” 72. 15. Leah Price, “From Ghostwriter to Typewriter: Delegating Authority at Fin de Siècle,” in The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert John Griffin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 213. 16. Edwin Hodder, Cities of the World (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1882). 17. Lee Fontanella, Photography in Spain in the Nineteenth Century (Dallas: Delahunty Gallery, 1983), 34. 18. Robert P. Napper, advertisement for Views in Andalusia, quoted in Martin Barnes, “This Romantic Land: Robert Napper, Francis Frith & Company, and the Victoria and Albert Museum,” in Napper i Frith: Un viatge fotogràfic per la Ibèria del segle xix, 16 novembre 2007– 10 febrer 2008 (Barcelona: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, 2007), 212. 19. Charles Mann, “Francis Frith: A Catalog of Photo-​Pictures of Germany,” in Shadow and Substance: Essays on the History of Photography in Honor of Heinz K. Henisch, ed. Kathleen Collins (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 181. 20. Lee Fontanella, “Landscape in the Photography of Spain,” in Visualizing Spanish Modernity, ed. Susan Larson and Eva Woods (New York: Berg, 2005), 165–66. 21. Barnes, “This Romantic Land,” 214. 22. Joel Smith, More Than One: Photographs in Sequence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 14. 23. Joanna Talbot, Francis Frith (London: Macdonald, 1985), n.p. 24. Bill Jay, Victorian Cameraman: Francis Frith’s Views of Rural England, 1850–1898 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973), 29. 25. Richard Salmon, “ ‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism,” Victorian Periodicals Review 30, no. 1 (1997): 43.

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n o te s to p a g es 1 1 4 – 1 2 5 26. For some particularly sensitive accounts of this discomfort, see the essays in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 27. James Elkins, “Style,” in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove, 1996). 28. Heinrich Wölfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, trans. Peter Murray and Linda Murray (London: Phaidon, 1952). 29. Anne McCauley, “ ‘Merely Mechanical’: On the Origins of Photographic Copyright in France and Great Britain,” Art History 31, no. 1 (2008): 63. 30. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Copyright Bill H.I. and the Copyright (artistic) Bill H.I.: Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. Session 1899 . . . (London: Printed for H.M. Stationery off., by Wyman and Sons, 1899), 218. 31. A. T. Carter, “Curiosities of Copyright Law,” LQ Rev. 4 (1888): 172. 32. “Alleged Infringement of Copyright,” The British Journal of Photography, August 10, 1883, 407. 33. “Copyright in Photographs,” Irish Law Times and Solicitors’ Journal 17 (December 1, 1883): 613. 34. “Remarks on Recent English Cases,” Journal of Jurisprudence 27 (1883): 543–46. 35. “The Recent Decision on Copyright in Photographs,” The British Journal of Photography, July 13, 1883, 400. 36. “The Recent Copyright Case,” The British Journal of Photography, September 21, 1883, 565. 37. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 237. 38. Ibid., 218. 39. F. Frith & Co., Catalogue. 40. Judith Adler, “Origins of Sightseeing,” Annals of Tourism Research 16, no. 1 (1989): 7–29. 41. Peter Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

chapter si x

1. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 36.

2. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery,” Science, n.s., 136, no. 3518 (June 1, 1962): 762. 3. Ibid., 761. 4. François Arago, Historical Eloge of James Watt, trans. J. P. Muirhead (London: J. Murray, 1839), 32. 5. Ibid., 78. 6. The Photographic Journal, no. 139 (November 16, 1863): 385. 7. Ibid., 396. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 397. 10. These objects are thoroughly discussed in E. Robinson and K. R. Thompson, “Matthew Boulton’s Mechanical Paintings,” Burlington Magazine 112, no. 809 (1970): 497–507, and B. Fogarty, “Matthew Boulton and Francis Eginton’s Mechanical Paintings: Production and Consumption, 1777 to 1781,” (thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011). 11. Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially chapter 9. 12. Jean-​Etienne Reenen de Villiers, The History of the Legislation Concerning Real and Personal Property in England During the Reign of Queen Victoria (London: Clay, 1901). 13. Samuel Smiles, Men of Invention and Industry (London: J. Murray, 1884), 71. 14. James Nicol, Who Invented the Screw Propeller?: Were the Patented Propellers of Francis Pettit Smith . . . in Every Respect Direct Plagiarisms?: Being a Statement of Facts . . . (London: R. Griffin, 1858), 11. 15. Anne Secord, “ ‘Be What You Would Seem to Be’: Samuel Smiles, Thomas Edward, and the Making of a Working-​Class Scientific Hero,” Science in Context 16, nos. 1–2 (2003): 147–73. 16. Smiles, Men of Invention and Industry, 59. 17. Ibid., chapter 2. 18. “A Lost Art,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 81 (September 1873): 364. 19. Brad Sherman, and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: The British Experience, 1760–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. 20. Harold G. Fox, “Copyright and Patent Protection: A Study in Contrasts,” University of Toronto Law Journal 12 (1957): 28.

not e s t o p a ge s 125–134 21. Beaumont Newhall, “William Henry Fox Talbot,” Image 8, no. 2 (June 1959): 73. 22. D. P. Miller, “Puffing Jamie: The Commercial and Ideological Importance of Being a ‘Philosopher’ in the Case of the Reputation of James Watt (1736–1819),” History of Science 38, no. 119 (2000): 1–24. 23. Thomas Hodgskin and London Mechanics’ Institution, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Printed for C. Tait, 1827), 87–88. 24. Ibid., 89. 25. R. G. W. Anderson, “ ‘What Is Technology?’ Education Through Museums in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 2 (1992): 169–84. 26. See, inter alia, “Museum and Library of Patents,” in Thomas C. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report : . . . Session of the . . . Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1864): 706–8. 27. London Quarterly Review 105, no. 209 (January 1859): 76. 28. Bennet Woodcroft, Brief Biographies of Inventors of Machines for the Manufacture of Textile Fabrics (London: Longman, Green, 1863), vii. 29. “The Patent Office.—​Observations,” in Hansard, Parliamentary Debates (1864). 30. R. G. W. Anderson, “Connoisseurship, Pedagogy, or Antiquarianism? What Were Instruments Doing in the Nineteenth-​Century National Collections in Great Britain?” Journal of the History of Collections 7, no. 2 (1995): 211–25. 31. “Surprising Discovery of Photographs Produced in the Last Century,” British Journal of Photography 10, no. 189 (1863): 183. 32. Joseph Sidebotham, “On the Supposed Photographs by Boulton and Watt (read at Photographical Section Meeting, February 8, 1866),” Chemical News and Journal of Industrial Science 13–14 (April 13, 1866): 178. 33. “Proceedings of Societies. London Photographic Society,” The Photographic News: A Weekly Record of the Progress of Photography 7, no. 248 (June 5, 1863): 273. 34. The Photographic News: A Weekly Record of the Progress of Photography 7, no. 242 (April 24, 1863): 194. 35. Charles Dickens [Jr.], Dickens’s Dictionary of London, 1879: An Unconventional Handbook (London: Charles Dickens, “All the Year Round” Office, 1879), 215.

36. Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 273. 37. Kuhn, “Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery,” 760.

c h a p t e r se v e n

1. Jean-​Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 122. For “the triumph and the grave,” see 122. 2. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-​Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 150. 3. Jennifer Tucker, “The Social Photographic Eye,” in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, ed. Corey Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 37–50. 4. Quoted in Graeme Gooday, “ ‘Nature’ in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian Life Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 24, no. 3 (1991): 307. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 339. 7. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128, and, more recently and comprehensively, their Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 8. Alfred Donné and Léon Foucault, Cours de microscopie complémentaire des études médicales, anatomie microscopique et physiologie des fluides de l’économie (Paris: Baillière, 1844). 9. William Tobin, “Alfred Donné and Jean Bernard Leon Foucault: The First Applications of Electricity and Photography to Medical Illustration,” Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine 29, no. 1 (March 2006): 6–13. 10. See Baz C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 11. Grover Maxwell, “The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 3, ed. H. Feigel and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 7. 12. Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon,

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n o te s to p a g es 1 3 5 – 1 5 0 Galton, and Marey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 13. Walter Crofton, “Supervision of Habitual Criminals,” Good Words 16 (1875): 637. 14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 200–201. 15. See the excellent study by Jennifer L. Mnookin, “Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy,” Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 10 (1998): 1–74. For a recent overview of the history of criminal identification, see Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 16. Karen T. Taylor, Forensic Art and Illustration (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2001), 12–15. 17. David Green, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics,” Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1985): 11. 18. This history is admirably analyzed in Elizabeth Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 19. Quatremère de Quincy, “On the End of Imitation in the Fine Arts” (1823), reprinted and trans. Joshua C. Taylor, Nineteenth-​Century Theories of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 99. 20. Emphasis mine. 21. Quatremère de Quincy, “On the End of Imitation in the Fine Arts,” 98. 22. Johann Casper Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London: Robinson, 1789), 16–17. 23. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 82. 24. Ibid., 88–89. 25. Ernst Gombrich, “The Mask and the Face: Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art,” in Art, Perception, and Reality, ed. Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 8. 26. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 64. 27. William Farr, quoted in Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 115. 28. Adolphe Quetelet, quoted in Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 41. 29. Quoted in Brian Warner, Charles Piazzi Smyth: Astronomer-Artist: His Cape Years,

1835–1845 (Cape Town: Published for the University of Cape Town by A.A. Balkema, 1983), 111. 30. George W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London [1844–45] (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 46. 31. Charles Piazzi Smyth, A Poor Man’s Photography at the Great Pyramid in the Year 1865 (London: Henry Greenwood, 1870), preface. 32. Katharine Anderson, “Looking at the Sky: The Visual Context of Victorian Meteorology,” British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 3 (2003): 304. 33. Eric Michael Reisenauer, “ ‘The Battle of the Standards’: Great Pyramid Metrology and British Identity, 1859–1890,” Historian 65, no. 4 (2003): 931–78. 34. Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: W. Isbister, 1874), 447. 35. Larry Schaaf, “Charles Piazzi Smyth’s 1865 Conquest of the Great Pyramid,” History of Photography 2, no. 3 (1979): 331–54. 36. Charles Piazzi Smyth, “On the Reputed Metrological System of the Great Pyramid,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 23, no. 3 (1864): 667–706. 37. Sir James Y. Simpson, quoted in Charles Piazzi Smyth, On the Antiquity of Intellectual Man (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), 426. 38. Quoted in Brian Warner, Charles Piazzi Smyth: Astronomer-Artist: His Cape Years, 1835–1845, 111. 39. See Robert M. Brain and M. Norton Wise, “Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods,” in Universalgenie Helmholtz: Rückblick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 124–45, and M. Norton Wise, “Making Visible,” Isis 97, no. 1 (2006): 75–82. 40. Abigail Solomon-​Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (1986): 105. 41. Peter Kosso, Reading the Book of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 102.

c o n c l u si o n

1. Nancy Armstrong, “Contemporary Culturalism: How Victorian Is It?” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and Diane F. Sadoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 319. 2. Ibid., 315.

not e s t o p a ge s 150–158 3. This feature is imagined as fundamental to postmodernity by thinkers with an extraordinarily broad range of politics and disciplinary orientations, from Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84, to Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-​Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1961). 4. Timothy Lenoir, “Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape: Part One: Embracing the Posthuman,” Configurations 10, no. 2 (2002): 215. 5. Ibid., 210. 6. See the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (OED Online), s.v. “digital.” 7. Batchen, “Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography,” Aperture 136 (1994): 48. 8. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. 9. Jonathan Friday, “Digital Imaging, Photographic Representation, and Aesthetics,” Ends and Means 1 (1997): 7–11. 10. Batchen, “Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography,” 47. 11. Lori Pauli, Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; New York: Merrell, 2006), 44. 12. John Szarkowski, “Jerry N. Uelsmann, February 15–April 16, 1967,” Museum of Modern Art, press release, no. 18, February 15, 1967. 13. Patricia Leighten, “Critical Attitudes Toward Overtly Manipulated Photography in the 20th Century,” Art Journal 37, no. 2 (1977): 138. 14. John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Bulfinch, 1999), 198. 15. Szarkowski, “Jerry N. Uelsmann, February 15–April 16, 1967.” 16. Beaumont Newhall, “Photography and the Artist,” Parnassus 6, no. 5 (1934): 24–29. 17. Beaumont Newhall, “Documentary Approach to Photography,” Parnassus 10, no. 3 (1938): 3–6. 18. Beaumont Newhall, Photography, 1839–1937 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 41. 19. Douglas Nickel, “History of Photography: The State of Research,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 3 (2001): 552. 20. For a critique of MoMA’s institutional role in the fashioning of photographic hierarchies, see Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment

Seat of Photography,” October 22 (1982): 27–63. A more sympathetic account is found in Christine Y. Hahn, “Exhibition as Archive: Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937, and the Museum of Modern Art,” Visual Resources 18, no. 2 (2002): 145–52. 21. Albert Renger-Patzsch, “Aims” (1927), and Paul Strand, “Photography and the New God” (1922), both quoted in Nickel, “History of Photography,” 552. 22. O. G. Rejlander, The Photographic Journal 4 (April 21, 1858): 192. 23. Newhall, “Documentary Approach to Photography,” 5. 24. Ibid. 25. Quoted in ibid., reprinted in Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: Fifty Years (New York: Aperture, 1973). 26. Margaret Bourke-White, “Notes on Photographs,” in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937), 52. 27. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 28. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 18. 29. Ibid. (emphasis mine). 30. Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 139 (emphasis mine). 31. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 12. 32. Wind, Art and Anarchy, 139. 33. Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten (1930), republished as The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (New York: Verso, 1998). 34. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 164. 35. A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition,” Artforum, September 1976, reprinted in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 480–91. 36. Ibid., 487. 37. John Fuller, “ ‘O.G. Rejlander: From Philistine to Forerunner,” Exposure 14, no. 4 (1976): 32–36. 38. Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (1980): 91–101.

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n o te s to p a g es 1 5 8 – 1 6 1 39. Crimp, “Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 98. 40. Abigail Solomon-​Godeau, “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism,” Screen 25, no. 6 (1984): 88–103. 41. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-​Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” October 18 (1981): 47–66. 42. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (1979): 75–88. 43. An excellent exhibition helped to renew current interest in these developments. Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984

(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 44. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-​Photographic Era (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 7. 45. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 245. 46. Ibid., 244–45. 47. Martin Lister, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 9. 48. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 6. 49. Lister, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 8.

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i n d e x

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adeline Grace Clogstoun (Cameron), 100 Adorno, Theodor W., 77 agency of Cameron in postmortem photographs, 102–3 exercise of, among liberal state, 2 gender and production of photographic, 80–81, 83–90 Mill on diminution of visual, 3 negotiated through photography, 30–31 of photographic firm, 116–17 political role of visual, 46–47 posthumous, 101 scholarly attention to, of viewers, 27–28 shift in, 131 and taste of photographers, 55–58 technical procedure and gendered, of Cameron, 98 visual discernment and, 23 of women in collaboration, 90–93 Albert, Prince, 37, 88–90, 128 Alcázar Gardens, Seville (Frith & Co.), 112 Altick, Richard, 21 Ames, Winslow, 89 Anderson, Amanda, 99–101 Arago, François, 120–21 Armstrong, Carol, 83, 97, 98 Armstrong, Nancy, 11, 89 Art Treasures exhibition guidebooks to, 39–41 revelation of unseen bonds as tenet of, 49–50 L’Assommoir (Zola), 69–70 Atkins, Anna, 83–84 authorial identity and case of author versus operator, 116–18 and incorporation of Frith, 105–8 and metamorphosis of Frith, 104–5 authority, linkage of style with, 114

authorship corporate assimilation and, 108–13 evolution of, 105 house style and rejection of individual, 115 and incorporation of Frith, 105–8 automata, 21–23 automation, 41–42 Automaton Exhibition (Lane), 22 average man, 140–41 Bagehot, Walter, 90 Bailey, Peter, 3 Bain, Alexander, 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18 Barnes, Barry, 50 Barnes, Martin, 113 Barnum, P. T., 21 Barruel, Abbé, 49 Barthes, Roland, 76, 102 Batchen, Geoffrey, 22, 119, 151 Baudrillard, Jean, 78 Beard, Richard, 27, 29, 138 Bermingham, Ann, 84, 90–91 Bertillon, Alphonse, 134 birds, photographing, 66 Blackstone, Sir William, 21 Bobby Shuttle and his Woife Sayroh’s Visit to Manchester un-​th Greight Hert Treasures Palace (Staton), 40–41 Bonaparte, Napoleon, thaumatrope depicting, 16–18 Boulton, Matthew, 121–23 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 31 bourgeoisie, emergence of, as self-​aware stratum, 2 Bourke-​White, Margaret, 155 Brewster, Sir David, 12–13 Bringing Home the May (Robinson), 59 Browne, Matthew, 3 Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Tagg), 30

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in d e x Burgin, Victor, 22 Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Batchen), 119 Butcher’s Visit, The (Cameron), 81, 82 “Caleidoscope-​Mania; or, the Natives Astonished,” 13 calotype, Frith’s opposition to, 108 Cameron, Julia Margaret collaboration of Herschel and, 91 collaboration of Rejlander and, 6–7, 80–81 Kate Dore with Frame of Plant Forms, 82–83, 85 postmortem photographs and, 99–103 and split self, 95–96 technique and gendered agency of, 98–99 Canguilhem, Georges, 140 capitalism and instrumentalization of photography, 31 Kracauer on commercialization of photography and, 54 liberation of senses and destruction of, 4 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 93–94 Carnival, 18–19 cartes-de-​visite, 70–71, 88 Cartier-​Bresson, Henri, 73–75 Castiglione, Countess de, 147–48 Catalogue of the principal series of photo-​pictures printed and published by F. Frith & Co. (1892), 107, 111, 112, 118 caveat emptor, 21 central form, 140 Chartist demonstration, 2 Chevreul, Michel Eugène, 14 children, and visual discernment, 16–18 Child Study After Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (Rejlander), 96, 98 chronoscope, 70 “Civilization” (Mill), 3, 20 Clementina, Lady Hawarden, 96–97 Clogstoun, Adeline Grace, 99–101 Coleman, A. D., 157 Coleman, David, 58 collaboration gendered nature of, 85–87 of Herschel and Cameron, 91 marriage and, 87–90 of Rejlander and Cameron, 6–7, 80–81 of Thereza and John Dillwyn Llewelyn, 85–87 women’s role in, 90–94 Collins, John, 36 “combination” photography. See composite photography commercial deception, 20–24 commercial photography. See also Frith, Francis and agency and taste of photographers, 55–58

beginning of, 27 cartes-de-​visite and, 70–71 index-​books and, 68–70 spread of, 53–54 and visual discrimination in Robinson works, 58–59 Comolli, Jean-​Louis, 131 Companies Act (1862), 105 composite photography. See also Rejlander, Oscar Gustave; Robinson, Henry Peach defined, 5 digital imaging and, 160 Galton and, 136 innovation and effects of, 32–33 Judith and Holofernes as, 92–93 and organization of labor, 35–36, 51–52 Comte, Auguste, 140 Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels), 42 connoisseurship, rise of, 6 consumption, time and, 78 contingency, 76–77 Cooper, J. T., 27 copying, 90–91 copyright law, 116–18. See also intellectual property; patents and patent law Corinthian Maid, 22–24, 91, 95 corporate photographic authorship and case of author versus operator, 116–18 corporate assimilation and, 7, 108–13 and incorporation of Frith, 105–8 “corpse poem,” 101–2 Cottage of Content: or, Right Roads and Wrong Ways, The, 37–39 Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain (Ure), 41 cotton trade, automation in, 42 Countess di Castiglione Weeping into Her Handkerchief, The (Pierson), 147, 148 Cours de microscopie complementaire des études medicales (Donné and Foucault), 133–34 criminal imaging, 137–41 Crimp, Douglas, 158 Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (Atkins), 83–84, 85 Daniel, Malcolm, 33–35 Daston, Lorraine, 14, 15, 94, 133 David with the Head of Goliath (Caravaggio), 93–94 death postmortem photographs, 98–103 knowledge in, 95 Deathbed Study of Adeline Grace Clogstoun (Cameron), 100 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 102 decapitation, 93–94

inde x decisive moment, 73–76 Delacroix, Eugène, 70 Delaroche, Paul, 12 De Quincey, Thomas, 48–49 detachment, cultivation of, 99–101 Dickens, Charles, 20, 26 Dickens, Charles Jr., 129 Dickinson, Emily, 101 Did She? (Rejlander), 44–46 digital imaging, 150–52, 159–61 directorial mode, 157–58 discoveries, “troublesome class” of, 119–20 Disdéri, André-Adolphe-​Eugène, 70–71 Doane, Mary Ann, 76 Donné, Alfred, 133–34 Dore, Kate, 82–83, 85 Durkheim, Émile, 9 economic deception, 20–24 education dramatic changes in, 16–18 through visual experiences, 25–26 Edwards, Steve, 42, 57 Eginton, Francis, 122 Elkins, James, 115 Ellenbogen, Josh, 134, 147 Ellis, Mrs., 87 Emerson, P. H., 81 Engels, Friedrich, 42 Exhibitions of Mechanical and Other Works of Ingenuity (Peckham), 165 n. 42 expertise, photography’s affiliation with, 132 exposure time, and capturing natural world, 65–66 ferns, 83–84, 85, 86 financial crisis, 36 First Negative, The (Rejlander), 91, 92 Flint, Kate, 30 flower painting, 84 flowers, in postmortem photographs, 99 Fly Catcher, The (Rejlander), 63–64, 66 Foucault, Jean Bernard Leon, 133–34 Foucault, Michel, 135 Fountain of the Seraglio (Good), 109–10 frame, as metaphor for ambivalent ambitions of photographic typology, 147–49 Francis Frith & Co. and case of author versus operator, 116–18 corporate assimilation and, 108–13 and evolution of authorship and authorial identity, 104–5 house style of, 113–16, 118 metamorphosis of Frith to, 105–8 rapid growth of, 7 Freemasonry, 47

Fried, Michael, 93–94, 156–57 Frith, Eustace, 118 Frith, Francis. See also Francis Frith & Co. corporate assimilation and, 108–13 death of, 118 and evolution of authorship and authorial identity, 104–5 metamorphosis of, to Francis Frith & Co., 105–8 Fuss, Diana, 101–2 Fyfe, Aileen, 27 Galison, Peter, 14, 15, 94, 133 Galton, Francis, 134, 136–37 games and gaming, 18, 20, 78–79 Gardens at the Alcázar, Seville (Napper), 111 gender and gathering of knowledge, 95 marriage and, 87–88 and production of photographic agency, 80–81, 83–90 and women’s role in collaboration, 90–94 Gernsheim, Helmut, 91 glass-​plate negatives, Frith on, 108 Goddard, John Frederick, 27 Gombrich, Ernst, 139–40 Good, Frank Mason, 109–10 Gooday, Graeme, 133 Great Pyramid, 141, 143–47 Green-​Lewis, Jennifer, 11 Group of Smugglers, Gibraltar (Napper), 113 Habit Makes the Man, The (card game), 18, 19 Hacking, Ian, 140 Haden, Francis Seymour, 96 hand. See human hand Haraway, Donna, 95 Harris, Neil, 21 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 63 Hayles, Katherine, 151–52 Hazlitt, William, 71 Herschel, John, 91 Hobsbawm, Eric, 2 Hodgskin, Thomas, 126 Homans, Margaret, 89, 90 Homer, 39 l’homme moyen, 140–41 Hope, A. J. B. Beresford, 107 Horkheimer, Max, 77 house style, of Francis Frith & Co., 113–16, 118 Howell, George, 36 How to See the Art Treasures Exhibition, to enable visitors to take a view, at once rapid and complete, of the Art Treasures Palace (Jerrold), 39–40 human, delineation of machine from, 151–52

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in d e x human hand collaboration of machine and, 41–44 as motif in discussions about photography, 151 hunter-​photographer metaphor, 64–67 Hurdy-​Gurdy Man, The (Cameron), 81–82, 83 Huxley, T. H., 132–33 inch, British, 142–43, 146 index-​books, 68–70 individual experience objectivity and, 51 vision research and, 12–20 individual style, 114–15 industrial innovation, 123–24 industrialization, statistics and, 75–76 industrial time, 78–79 industry, ideal of, 41 innovation, 123–24, 140 institutional power, deployment of photography through, 30 intellectual property, 129, 130. See also copyright law; patents and patent law intersubjectivity, 9 invisibility, and Art Treasures exhibition, 49–50 Isabella Grace and Clementina Maude, 5 Princes Gardens (Clementina, Lady Hawarden), 96–97 Jackson, J. H., 116 Janssen, Jules, 65 Jay, Martin, 131 Jerrold, W. Blanchard, 39–40 Joint Stock Companies Act (1856), 105 joint stock company, 7. See also Francis Frith & Co. Jordanova, Ludmilla, 94 Judith and Holofernes (Rejlander), 91–93 Juggler, The (Rejlander), 71, 72 Juggler Manoel, The (Disdéri), 71 juggling, 71–73 Kate Dore (Rejlander), 84 Kate Dore with Frame of Plant Forms (Cameron), 82–83, 84, 85 King’s Chamber (Great Pyramid), 143–46 knowledge commodification of, 7 as creation of collective social processes, 8–9 desire for, 95 interdependence between social and individual, 51 objectivity and gathering of, 94–95 relationship between photography, vision, and, 131 sociology of reality and, 1–2

substitution of visual comprehension for, 9 taxes on, 2–3 through observational science, 133 from unobservable entities, 149 visual acquisition of, 51 Knutsford, Viscount, 117 Kracauer, Siegfried, 54, 155–56 Krauss, Rosalind, 158 Kuhn, Thomas, 10, 119–20, 130 labor, organization of. See trade unionism laborers. See also working classes equilibrium between technological apparatus and, 41–42 prestige accorded to, 41 large numbers, law of, 75 Lastra, James, 77 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 137 law of large numbers, 75 leisure, 3, 18–20 Lenoir, Timothy, 150–51 Le Secq, Henri, 153–54 Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (Brewster), 12 Levine, George, 95 Levine, Sherrie, 158 liberal humanist subject, 151 liberty, and skepticism of deception, 16–18 Lightman, Bernard, 27 Lister, Martin, 161 literature and capacity for visual discernment, 16–18 industrial pacesetters in, 124 on role of commercial deception, 21 Llewelyn, John Dillwyn, 85–87 Llewelyn, Thereza, 86–87 Lloyd, Valerie, 108 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew), 137–38 London Scavenger, The, 138 London Stereoscopic Company, 116 Lovely Remains of my Little Adeline (Cameron), 100 Lovett, William, 36 lunar photographs, 87 machinery collaboration of human hand and, 41–44 delineation of human from, 151–52 Man Aiming Rifle (Rejlander), 64–65, 67 Manovich, Lev, 160 Marey, Étienne-​Jules, 65, 134 marriage, 87–90 Martineau, Harriet, 95 Marx, Karl, 4, 9, 36, 75

inde x Masonry, 47 Mayall, John Jabez Edwin, 88–89 Mayhew, Henry, 137–38 McCauley, Anne, 115 measure, unit of, 141–47, 149 Mechanics’ Institutes, 24–27 mechanization, 41–42 medium-​specificity, 156–57 Merton, Robert, 130 metrication, 142–43 microscopy, 131–34 Mill, John Stuart, 3–4, 20, 101 Mitchell, William J., 160, 161 models, Robinson on, 57 modification, innovation displaced by, 140 motion and decisive moment, 73–76 illusion of, 69–73 “Mr. Whelks Combining Instruction with Amusement” (Dickens), 26 multilens camera, 70–71 Museum of Patents, 126–30 Mysteries of London (Reynolds), 33 Nadar, 69–70 Napper, Robert P., 111–13 Gardens at the Alcázar, Seville, 111 Group of Smugglers, Gibraltar, 113 Square of San Francisco, Seville, 114 Views in Adalusia photographed by R.P. Napper, 111–12 natural world capturing ephemerality of, 64–68 observational science and, 132–34 photograph as neutral document of, 132 visual deception and observation of, 60–64 Newhall, Beaumont, 153–55 Nickel, Douglas, 105, 154 Nicol, James, 123–24 nonintervention, 15, 133–34 Nottage v. Jackson, 116 Novak, Daniel A., 11 novel, photography and realism and, 11–12 objectivity in Cameron’s deathbed studies, 99 and composite photography, 32–33 corporate authorship and, 108 and interdependence between social and individual knowledge, 51 mutation of visual, 94–95 and persuasiveness of photography, 14–15 Victorian women’s relationship to, 95–96 observation and observational science, 24–26, 132–41

observer, alienation and dematerialization of, 150–51 Oliver, George, 47 operator, photographer as, 116–18 origins of photography, 7, 119–30 Otter, Chris, 30 oxygen, discovery of, 120 pain, as only visible to certain members of society, 3 panopticism, 149 paper negatives, Frith on, 108 Paris, John Ayrton, 16 Parlour Magic, 16 patents and patent law, 123–25. See also copyright law; intellectual property; Museum of Patents Pels, Peter, 24 Petit, Hélène, 69 Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest (Paris), 16 Philpot, Annie, 103 photogenic, 155–56 photogram, 82–83 photographers, social position of, 57 photographic gun, 65, 66, 68 Photographic Society of London, 53–54, 121–23 photography commercialization of, 27 emergence of, 14 as existent in mobilizing institutional forces, 30 instrumentalization of, 31 origins of, 7, 119–30 persuasiveness of, 14–15 Polanyi, Michael, 51 police sketches, 137–41 Polytechnic Institution of London, 25–27 poster listing offerings of, 28 pornography, 55 postmodernism, 150, 158–59 postmortem photographs, 98–103 power, visual deception and legitimacy of, 16–20 Price, Leah, 108 Prince Albert of Saxe-Cogburg-​Gotha and Queen Victoria (Mayall), 88, 89 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 3 production and agency and taste of photographers, 56–58 immorality of photography and, 55 reconceptualization of time and demands of capitalist, 75 sameness of photographs and mass, 55–56 single images and serial nature of mass, 68–71 visual discrimination and commercial, 59

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in d e x progress initiation of public culture of, 2 visual capacities and real, 4 Prosopographus, 22, 166 n. 43 prosopopoeia, 101 Quatremère de Quincy, 136–37, 141 Quetelet, Adolphe, 140 realism, conventional, of photography, 11–12 reality, sociology of knowledge and, 1–2 reasoned images, 147 Receiving the Post (Cameron), 81, 82 recreation, 3, 18–20 Red Riding Hood (Robinson), 60–63 reference and referentiality digital imaging and, 160–61 loss of, in production of images, 150–51 Rejlander, Oscar Gustave. See also Did She? (Rejlander); Two Ways of Life (Rejlander) Child Study After Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, 96, 98 collaboration of Cameron and, 6–7, 80–81 and commercialization of photography, 56 directorial photography and, 157–58 The First Negative, 91, 92 The Fly Catcher, 63–64, 66 as innovator of composite photography, 32 Judith and Holofernes, 91–93 The Juggler, 71, 72 Man Aiming Rifle, 64–65, 67 Mitchell on, 160 newfound interest in, 152–54 Prince Albert as patron of, 37 scandal of compositions of, 159 secrecy in work and social affairs of, 47–48 as subject of The Hurdy-​Gurdy Man, 81–82 Two Urchins Playing a Game, 73, 74, 78–79 Two Ways of Life, 6 works of, appeal to antithetical contingencies, 78 A Young Naturalist, 63–64, 65 representation alienation of observer from, 150–51 discernment of relationship of photographic, to reality, 161–62 Reynolds, G. W. M., 33, 141 Rigby, Edward, 94 Ritchie, Alex, 144, 145 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 13–14 Robert-​Houdin, Jean-​Eugène, 46–47 Robinson, Henry Peach and commercialization of photography, 56–58 and correlation of nature of visual acuity with organization of industrial society, 6 directorial photography and, 157



as innovator of composite photography, 32 Kracauer on, 156 Mitchell on, 160 newfound interest in, 152–53 Red Riding Hood, 60–63 scandal of compositions of, 159 on visual deception and nature, 64 visual discrimination and works of, 58–59 works of, appeal to antithetical contingencies, 78 Royal Polytechnic Institution of London, 25–27 poster listing offerings of, 28 sameness of photographs, 55–56 Schaaf, Larry, 143 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 75 science. See also observation and observational science experimental, 24–26 role of public, in Victorian era, 27–28 working classes’ interest in, 36–37 scientific photography, 131–32 scientific research. See also observation and observational science dramatic changes in, 12–14 and education through observation, 132–35 screw propeller, 123–24 Sculptures from the Outer Wall, Dendera (Frith), 106, 107 “Second Sight” (Robert-​Houdin), 46–47 secrecy in Rejlander’s work and social affairs, 47–48 in trade unionism, 48–49 secret societies, 48–49, 52 self-​abnegation, 93–95 self-​experimentation, Johann Wilhelm Ritter and, 14 Self-​Portrait as Robinson and Rejlander (Uelsmann), 153 senses, Marx and liberation of, 4 Shadbolt, George, 128–29 Shapin, Steven, 50 Sidebotham, Joseph, 128 Silliman, Benjamin, 20–24 Simpson, James, 146–47 Sims, Thomas, 125 Sloterdijk, Peter, 39 Smiles, Samuel, 41, 124 Smith, Francis Pettit, 121–24, 128–30 Smith, Joel, 113–14 Smyth, Charles Piazzi, 141–47 Smyth, Jessica, 143, 144–45 social class, visual discrimination and, 58–59. See also laborers; working classes social mobility, 18–20, 37

inde x social position, of photographers, 57 Solar Club, 47–48 Solomon-​Godeau, Abigail, 147–48, 149, 158 Spencer, Herbert, 51 split self, 95–96 Square of San Francisco, Seville (Frith & Co.), 115 Square of San Francisco, Seville (Napper), 114 standardization of Francis Frith & Co. images, 113–16 of measure, 141–47, 149 state, Brewster on historical nexus between visual deception and, 12–13 statistics, 75–76, 140–41 Staton, James Taylor, 40–41 Stowell, Hugh, 50 Strand, Paul, 154 subjectivity Otter on formation of, 30 visual discernment and, 150–51 visual nature of, 15 Suez Canal, 142 Szarkowski, John, 153 Tagg, John, 30 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 27, 42, 125 taste, and agency of photographers, 55–58 taxidermy, 61–63 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 81 thaumatrope, 16–18 theater, 156–57 Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn with Her Microscope (Llewelyn), 85–87 Thompson, Dorothy, 90 Thompson, E. P., 78 Thompson, Silvanus, 73 time commodification of, 77, 78–79 reconceptualization of, 75, 76 “time-​seer,” 70 Tomb in the central chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt (Smyth), 146 tracing, 90–91 trade unionism automation and, 41–42 composite photography and, 35–36, 51–52 science and, 36–37 secrecy in, 48–49 travel photography. See also Francis Frith & Co.; Frith, Francis and case of author versus operator, 117, 118 and evolution of authorship and authorial identity, 104–5 Tucker, Jennifer, 132 Two Urchins Playing a Game (Rejlander), 73, 74, 78–79

Two Ways of Life (Rejlander), 6, 34, 35 criticisms of, 153–55 description of, 33 exhibition of, 43–44 and political role of visual agency, 46 reactions to and analysis of, 33–35, 47 secrecy in, 47, 48 sonic distraction and visual agency in, 39 study for, 43, 44 and unity of man and machine, 41, 42–43 Uelsmann, Jerry, 153 unionism. See trade unionism Ure, Andrew, 41–42 Valencia (Cartier-​Bresson), 73–75 Venn, John, 79 Venus and Adonis (Eginton), 122 Vertical Section (Looking West) or King’s Chamber (Ritchie), 144 Vertical Transverse Section with Arabs Ascending the Grand Gallery (Ritchie), 145 Victoria, Queen, 88–90 Victorian Eye, The (Otter), 30 Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Flint), 30 Views in Adalusia photographed by R.P. Napper (Napper), 111–12 vision research, individual experience and, 12–20 visual comprehension, as metaphor for knowledge, 9 visual deception Brewster on historical nexus between state and, 12–13 economic, 20–24 and legitimacy of power, 16–20 and observation of natural world, 60–64 systematization of, 13 visual discernment/discrimination commercialized, 24–31 and creation of knowledge and social relations, 131 cultivation of, as space of leisure, 77–78 economic, 20–24 ethic of self-​interest through, 31 exercise of, 15–16 and illusion of motion, 71–73 of photographic representations, 161–62 subjectivity and, 150–51 and works of Henry Peach Robinson, 58–59 Wall, A. H. on mass production and sameness of photographs, 54, 55–56 on Rejlander’s Did She?, 44–45, 46 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 24

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in d e x Watt, James, 121–23, 125–26, 128–30 Weston, Edward, 155, 158 Wind, Edgar, 156 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 115 women, Galton’s composite image of, 136 Women of England, The (Ellis), 87 Woodcroft, Bennet, 127 working classes. See also laborers Art Treasures exhibition guidebooks for, 39–41 interest in scientific knowledge among, 24–26, 36–37

and organization of labor, 35–36 perception of, 50–51 wristwatches, 78 Young Naturalist, A (Rejlander), 63–64, 65 Zeno, 73 Zeuxis, 136–37 Zola, Émile, 69 Zoological Society, 63



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