RETHINKING EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY
16 and 17 June 2015
University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
PRE-CONFERENCE EVENTS*
Monday 15 June
Photographer Michael Schaaf http://www.collodion.de will offer a hands-on wet plate
collodion (ambrotype) workshop. This will run approximately 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fee: £80.
Max. eight attendees. Please book through the conference website. This will take place in
the Art, Architecture and Design Building (Number 12 on map).
4.00
Public lecture
EMMTEC Lecture Theatre (Number 3 on map)
Larry J. Schaaf (Oxford)—‘The Damned Leaf: Musings on History, Hysteria, and
Historiography’
Chair: Owen Clayton (Lincoln)
6.00
*
Joint book launch for Photography and Its Origins, ed. by Tanya Sheehan and
Andres Zervigon (Routledge), and Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–
1915, by Owen Clayton (Palgrave Macmillan). This will take place in the Lincoln
Performing Arts Centre (LPAC – number 14 on map).
While these events are not officially part of the conference, delegates are invited to attend. The public
lecture and book launch are free.
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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Tuesday 16 June
9.00
Registration and coffee
Minerva Building, Atrium (MB – number 1 on map)
9.20
Opening remarks: Owen Clayton (Lincoln)
9.30
Plenary 1
MB0312
MB0312
Kate Flint (Southern California)—‘The Biography of the Flash Gun’
Chair: Adam O’Meara (Lincoln)
(N.B: All panels take place in the Minerva Building.)
10.45
Panel 1a
Theory and Photography
MB1008
Chair: Daniel A. Novak (Mississippi)
Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood (Lincoln)—‘A Causeway around Picture:
Muybridge’s Solar Darkness’
Paul Fung (Hang Seng Management College)—‘Dostoevsky, epilepsy and the
photographic image’
Mark Hall (Derby)—‘A Light in the Darkness: Parallelist Theory in the Work of
Jacob Riis’
Panel 1b
Photography and/as Art History
MB1012
Chair: Jacqueline Butler (Manchester School of Art)
Joanne Lukitsh (Massachusetts College of Art and Design)—‘How Julia Margaret
Cameron Became an “Old Master” of Photography’
Sara Stevenson (Glasgow/National Museums Scotland)—‘Accident in Early
Photography: The Uncontrolled Art’
Annalea Tunesi (Leeds)—‘Stefano Bardini’s Photographs: From a Network
Instrument to a Reinterpretation and Objectification of Works of Art’
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Panel 1c
Early Photography Now
MB1013
Chair: Colin Reiners (Lincoln)
Anastasia Fjodorova (Richmond)—‘Expired, Unstable, and Obsolete: Establishing
Parallels between “Early” Nineteenth-Century and “Industrially Produced”
Twentieth-Century Photographic Processes, as Embodied by Contemporary
Practitioners’
Peter McCallion (UWE)—‘An Exploration of Low Relief Structure Printing
through the Development of a Novel Digital Colour Plastographic Printing
Method’
12.15
Lunch
‘The Swan’ pub (formerly known as ‘The Shed’ – number 4 on map)
13.00
Panel 2a
Business, Portraits, Celebrity
MB1008
Chair: Joanne Lukitsh (Massachusetts College of Art and Design)
Juliet Hacking (Sotheby’s Institute of Art)—‘Studio & Street: The
Photographically Illustrated Press in Britain, 1891–1914’
Gilles Massot (Lasalle College of the Arts)—‘Jules Itier, an Amateur
Daguerreotypist on a Groundbreaking Journey’
Jürg Schneider (Centre for African Studies, University of Basel)—‘Rethinking
Early African Photography: Business Strategies and Social Networks’
Panel 2b
Early Contributors: Hippolyte Bayard and Robert Hunt MB1012
Chair: Larry J. Schaaf (Oxford)
Tania Passafiume (Library and Archives Canada)—‘Bayard Was There:
Hippolyte and His Letters’
Carolyn Peter (Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount)—‘Hippolyte Bayard—A
Connector’
James R. Ryan (Exeter)—‘Placing Early Photography: The World and Work of
Robert Hunt in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England’
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Panel 2c
Photography, Theatre, Spectacle
MB1013
Chair: Hannah Field (Lincoln)
Daniel A. Novak (Mississippi)—‘Strike a Pose: Photography on the Victorian
Stage’
Treena Warren (Sussex)—‘Animal Magic: The Photograph and NineteenthCentury Narratives of Enfreakment’
Marta Ziętkiewicz (Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences)—‘The Making
of New Stars: Staged Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Actors’
2.30
Coffee
MB Atrium
2.45
Visit to Tennyson Research Centre. (Free but with limited availability; please
indicate your interest via email to the conference organisers. Information about
the TRC is available here: http://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/residents/leisureculture-and-learning/heritage/tennyson-research-centre/.)
or
Wet-plate collodion demonstration by Michael Schaaf in MB0312. (Also free.)
4.15
Panel 3a
Photography, Labour, Class
MB1008
Chair: Brian Winston (Lincoln)
Margaret Denny (independent)—‘Inside/Out—Re-Examining NineteenthCentury Photography Studios’
Sheila Masson (independent)—‘An Appropriate History: Redefining the British
Tintype’
Shelagh Mary Ward (Leeds Trinity)—‘Capturing Careers—Female Employment
in Photography in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’
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Panel 3b
Alternatives to Art History
MB1012
Chair: Laura Saltz (Colby)
Jim Cheshire (Lincoln)—‘Tennyson, Photographic Mediation and Literary
Celebrity’
Matt Kerr (Oxford)—‘Breathless: The Look of Drowning in Early Underwater
Photography’
Shannon Perich (Smithsonian)—‘Peeling Back the Historical Layers of
Ambrotypes’
Panel 3c
Space and Place
MB1013
Chair: Adam O’Meara (Lincoln)
Rachel Miller (Michigan)—‘“Many Profitable Reflections”: Early Photography
and the African-American Reading Public’
Rotem Rozental (Binghamton)—‘Pioneering the Body: The Formation of the
Zionist Photographic Archive’ [via Skype]
Erin Waters (independent)—‘Interior Life: Photography’s Place in the Home’
5.45
Plenary 2
MB0312
Kelley Wilder (De Montfort)—‘Not One but Many: Photographic Trajectories
and the Making of History’
Chair: Hannah Field (Lincoln)
7.00
Pre-dinner drinks (cost included in the conference ticket)
MB Atrium
8.00
Conference dinner (please book separately through the conference website). The
dinner is uphill in The White Hart Hotel.
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Wednesday 17 June
9.00
Registration (single-day attendees) and coffee
9.30
Plenary 3
Minerva Building Atrium
MB0312
Lindsay Smith (Sussex)—‘Memories of Stone: Nineteenth-Century Photography,
Locomotion, Antiquity’
Chair: Jim Cheshire (Lincoln)
10.45
Panel 4a
Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice
MB1008
Chair: Kate Flint (Southern California)
Jacqueline Butler (Manchester School of Art)—‘On White Island Kvitøya:
Shadowplay’
Kati Leinonen (Lapland)—‘Tintype in Exploration of Contemporary Portrait’
Panel 4b
Rethinking Origins MB1012
Chair: Mirjam Brusius (Oxford)
Ada Coghen (Cambridge)—‘The Problem of “Fixing” an Image: Literary
Portrayals of the Camera Obscura in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth
Centuries’
Chitra Ramalingam (Yale)—‘Histories of photography as invention and science in
Victorian Britain’
Joan M. Schwartz (Queen’s, Canada)—‘Rethinking Discursive Origins: Alexander
von Humboldt, Photography, and the Geographical Imagination’
Panel 4c
Realism(s)
MB1013
Chair: Jim Cheshire (Lincoln)
Sarah Allen (independent) – ‘Darwin’s Daguerreotypes: On the Origin of
Treatments’
Wiebke Leister (London College of Communication)—‘Duchenne’s Frontispiece
and the Photographic Double-Portrait’
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Josephine Minhinnett (independent)—‘The Megalethoscope: A Performance of
Photography through Optical Magic’
12.15
Lunch (in The Swan), followed by group photo of delegates by Michael Schaaf (at
approx. 12.45)
1.15
Panel 5a
Early Photographic Discourses
MB1008
Chair: Matt Kerr (Oxford)
Sheona Beaumont (Gloucestershire)—‘Let There Be Light: Theology and
Spirituality in Early Photography’
Joanna Madloch (Montclair State)—‘This Ridiculous Photographer: The Portrait
of the Photographer in Nineteenth-Century Satire’
Laura Saltz (Colby)—‘Made By Light? Actinism and the Discourses of Early
Photography’
Panel 5b
Writers and Photography
MB1012
Chair: Lindsay Smith (Sussex)
Owen Clayton (Lincoln)—‘Intimate Strangers: Photographic Exchange in Fin-deSiècle Fiction’
Emily Ennis (Leeds)—‘Photographic Conception and Literary Pregnancies: Mass
Media, Technology, and Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman” (1894)’
Jessica Sage (Reading)—‘The Photograph and What It Doesn’t Show: Alice Liddell
as the Beggar Maid’
Panel 5c
Photography and Other Visual Media
MB1013
Chair: Christine Grandy (Lincoln)
Eleanor Dobson (Birmingham)—‘Photography as Hieroglyph: From Fox Talbot to
the Unlucky Mummy’
Martyn Jolly (ANU)—‘Who and What Is an Australian Colonial Photographer?’
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Margarida Medeiros (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)—‘The Chrysalides’
Awakening: Forgotten Archives, Stereoscopy’s Collections, and the Complexity of
the Photographic Image’
2.45
Coffee
MB Atrium
3.00
Roundtable
Rethinking First Photographs
MB0312
Chair: Tanya Sheehan (Colby)
Panel members: Mirjam Brusius (Oxford); Maki Fukuoka (Leeds); Carmen Pérez
González (Wuppertal); Chitra Ramalingam (Yale); Larry J. Schaaf (Oxford)
4.15
Closing remarks: Owen Clayton (Lincoln)
4.30
Conference ends
MB0312
POST-CONFERENCE EVENT
Thursday 18 June
Photographer Michael Schaaf (http://www.collodion.de) will offer a hands-on workshop
on early printing processes (salt, albumen, Vandyke, and cyanotypes). This will run
approximately 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fee: £80. Max. eight attendees. Please book through the
conference website. This will take place in the Art, Architecture and Design Building
(Number 12 on map).
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ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Public Lecture
Larry J. Schaaf
The Damned Leaf: Musings on History, Hysteria, and Historiography
In 1984, a Victorian family album was broken up, dividing its contents among specialist
departments at Sotheby’s in London. It had belonged to Henry Bright, initially confused with a
watercolourist by the same name, but soon identified as an East India Merchant. A related group
of six early photographs was split into individual lots acquired by several purchasers. In 2008,
Sotheby’s in New York prepared one of these photographs for sale. Traditionally identified as
being by the inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, it was an enigmatic contact
negative (photogram) of a single leaf. I knew right away it was not by Talbot—sadly—for it was
gorgeous, but this news came as a shock to the owner and to the auctioneers. ‘If not Talbot, then
who could it possibly be?’ came back the question, and I volunteered a one-page essay suggesting
possible dating and authorships. One bookend was Henry Bright himself in the 1860s, with
several figures in between, finally ranging back to Thomas Wedgwood around 1800.
A firestorm of verbiage followed, with the poor little leaf unexpectedly garnering enormous
attention, becoming front-page illustrated news in papers worldwide. Diverse members of the
community of photographic historians weighed in, often with strong reactions. Many were
intrigued by the possibilities and eager to learn more. But I was shocked by how many of my
colleagues threw imagination and fact out the window in an effort to protect a particular canon of
history as they knew it. Ideology and sometimes nationalism tinged many of the disapproving
responses. With the confusion and feelings running so high, the leaf was withdrawn from sale.
Weeks before the auction was the last time that I ever saw the leaf, but it continued to intrigue
me. In the ensuing months, the six ‘Brights’ were examined by several conservators, attempting
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to tease out physical clues as to their origin. My approach was the traditional archival one of
biography, seeking an explanation of the objects through the stories of the people who handled
them. With the extensive cooperation of members of the Bright family on two continents, I
believe that the dating and authorship of these can now be established and that the answer lies
within my original bookends. This talk will be the first time that I have aired my conclusions
publicly. Beyond that, however, I feel that there needs to be an examination of just what is
history, how do we approach constructing or re-constructing it, and how do we accommodate
evolving information and perspectives without destroying the historical record in the process?
Biography: Professor Larry J. Schaaf is the Director of the William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue
Raisonné, an online resource currently under development at the Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford. This is based on his four decades of work on Talbot, the Victorian polymath who was
the inventor of negative-positive photography; the progress of the project can followed on the blog
at http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. He is also a consultant on the Bodleian’s newlyacquired Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot. Schaaf was Oxford’s 2005 Slade
Professor of Fine Art. He is the founder and editor of the Correspondence of William Henry Fox
Talbot Project, which makes available fully searchable transcriptions of more than 10,000 Talbot
letters online: www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk. He has published numerous journal articles and books,
lectured widely, and been a consultant on computer applications in the humanities, archival
collections, and the history of photography.
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Keynote Speakers
Professor Kate Flint
The Biography of the Flash Gun
What does it mean to write photographic history not through images, nor through photographers,
but through the technologies that have been used to create photographs? My research on the
cultural history of flash photography has led me to consider the development not just of flash
powder and, later, flash bulbs, but to evaluate the role of an object that plays a bit part in this
history, the flash gun (and its relatives, the flash light and the flash lamp) of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Taking my cue from Lorraine Daston’s edited volume, Biographies
of Scientific Objects, I ask what we gain through focusing on this particular ancilliary item. More
broadly, I consider the kind of knowledge that technological biographies can produce, and the
challenges and advantages of this mode of material history.
Biography: Kate Flint, Provost Professor of English and Art History, joined the University of
Southern California in July 2011, where she is currently Chair of the Department of Art History.
Prior to this, she taught at Bristol and Oxford Universities before moving to Rutgers: The State
University of New Jersey, in 2001. Her research spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and
is both interdisciplinary and transatlantic. Her previous works include The Victorians and the
Visual Imagination (Cambridge, 2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993), both of
which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize. Professor Flint is completing a
book entitled ‘Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination’, and her new project is a
cultural history of the concept of ordinariness from 1850 to the present day.
Image at top: ‘The Late J. Traill Taylor at St Andrews’, Photographic Review, January 1896.
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Professor Lindsay Smith
Memories of Stone: Nineteenth-Century Photography, Locomotion, Antiquity
On a holiday to the Isle of Wight in the late 1960s Lindsay Smith visited Osborne House, the
residence that Queen Victoria had built between 1845 and 1848. Like all visitors she was struck by
the Italianate villa but, as a nine-year-old child, even more so by the visual presence of the Royal
children. What haunted her most, and continues to do so, were physical relics of the children
themselves: life-sized marble copies of their infant limbs arranged on velvet cushions. On leaving,
Lindsay retained these sculptural fragments in a black-and-white guidebook photograph.
This lecture explores the place of nineteenth-century photographs of sculpture in processes of
recollection. When petrified by photography, those sculptured limbs commissioned by Queen
Victoria bring to mind archaeological fragments from Greek antiquity. From the 1840s onwards,
as ancient Greek sculpture commanded the interest of photographers, it played a particular role in
individual and collective memory. Photographs of ancient sculptures depicting locomotion, such
as those of Athena Nike, from the Temple of that name on the Acropolis, especially facilitated
processes of remembering. In silencing a second time, as it were, dynamic bodies, early
photographs of Greek sculptural fragments engage memory in fascinating ways.
Biography: Lindsay Smith is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and Co-Director of
the Sussex Centre for the Visual. Working on the intersections between nineteenth-century
photography, literature, and painting, she has published widely in the field, including: Victorian
Photography, Painting and Poetry (Cambridge, 1995); The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and
Nineteenth Century Photography (Manchester, 1998); and, more recently, Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and
Painting (Northcote House, 2013) and ‘Roger Fenton’s Nature Morte: The Pull of Sculpture’,
History of Photography 37, no. 4 (2013). Her book Lewis Carroll: Photography on the Move is
forthcoming from Reaktion in 2015.
Image at top: Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, ‘Sculptural Relief of Victory from the Temple
of Athena Nike, the Acropolis, Athens’ (1842).
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Dr Kelley Wilder
Not One but Many: Photographic Trajectories and the Making of History
So much of photographic history has been dominated by the discovery of great photographers—
some women but more often men—and great photographs. While these stories are interesting,
even compelling, what would happen if we really took photography, in all its frustrating and
complex glory, as the starting point for photographic history? What stories would be told, what
names would arise, whose biographies would become important, if we shifted the lens through
which early photography is considered? In this talk, urns from St Andrews, instruments from
Naples, and a myriad of other mundane workaday photographs serve as a point of departure to
think about how the history of photography can be enriched and enlarged by considering the work
that photographs do, the way they travel, the practices in which they are involved, and finally the
way they are embedded in different histories.
Biography: Kelley Wilder is Reader in Photographic History and Programme Leader of the MA
Photographic History at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University,
Leicester, United Kingdom. She is currently co-editing a book with Gregg Mitman called
Documenting the World: Photography, Film and the Scientific Record (Chicago, forthcoming 2015), and
working on a project entitled ‘Practicing Photography in the Sciences’. Kelley Wilder is the
author of Photography and Science (Chicago, 2009) and continues to research photographic practices
of making, collecting, circulating, and re-circulating.
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Panellists and Organisers
Allen, Sarah (independent conservator), ‘Darwin’s Daguerreotypes: on the Origin of
Treatments’
Since the mid nineteenth century the life and work of Charles Darwin have been
scrutinised closely and his controversial ideas discussed widely. Less well known is his
private life with his wife and ten children, which is captured in a series of photographic
images taken from the 1840s onwards at Down House, Darwin’s home for forty years.
The most significant part of this collection is a group of six daguerreotype portraits of
some of the Darwin children, including the only known image of Darwin himself with
another person – his son William – taken at Claudet’s studio in 1842. As a group these are
arguably some of the most important photographic portraits in existence due to the
identities of the sitters, the artist-manufacturer and their early date.
However, these daguerreotypes have been recognised as being in an unstable condition
and as such are currently the subject of a multi-disciplinary conservation research project.
Using analytical techniques such as SEM-EDX, FTIR, XRF and OCT, a detailed picture
of the conservation issues with the daguerreotypes is being built up in order to inform
interventive treatment, as well as future preventive measures. The paper discusses the
ethics of the proposed conservation treatments and how they can be aligned with
retaining the original integrity of the daguerreotypes, whilst ensuring the long term
preservation of these unique objects.
Biography: Sarah Allen has run a busy Photographic Conservation Studio since 2010,
based at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock. She graduated with an MA in the
Conservation of Historic Objects from Lincoln University in 2006, after which she
worked for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, the National Trust and English
Heritage, specialising in the conservation of photographic materials. Sarah received the
ICON Collections Care Award for her work raising the profile of photographic
conservation in the South West in 2010, and is currently the National Trust Advisor on
Photographic Materials Conservation.
Beaumont, Sheona, ‘Let There Be Light: Theology and Spirituality in Early Photography’
Largely absent from discourses on the development and context of early photography is an
examination of the religious and theological backgrounds of its pioneers. This paper will
consider the evidence for a Christian spiritual hermeneutic both in the plates/prints and
through the backgrounds of Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot; further, it will discuss the
surviving work of Johann Carl Enslen (1759–1848), a largely neglected figure in
conventional histories of photography. Enslen’s fifteen extant salt prints, including ‘Face
of Christ Superimposed on an Oak Leaf’ (1839–40) will be shown to explore a concept of
divine immanence through highly experimental collage techniques. Of critical importance
is the argument that the birth of photography was pervaded by a Christian spirituality
that manifested itself in both the culture at large (in the popular press and in the
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background of empirical scientific endeavour) and in the individuals’ inclusion of biblical
or theological reference in their images. The manner of such references will be examined,
ranging from textual quote to conceptual collage to the reproduction of religious
paintings/prints.
Historical discussion of such evidence of spirituality must also challenge the discourses
pertaining to photography’s ontology, so this paper further argues that the so-called
hegemony of photographic realism is somewhat complicated by its religious affiliation.
Considered as a misplaced ideology of the Victorian era from which we have an
enlightened critical distance, it will be suggested that such notions of objective realism are
helpfully resisted by an understanding of Christian spirituality (rather than vice versa).
The tools of contemporary photography criticism are all the richer and sharper for the
heritage of theological terminology and concepts, and this paper attempts to bring such a
heritage to light with particular reference to the term index and its ongoing usage in this
field.
Biography: Sheona Beaumont is the Bible Society’s sponsored doctoral candidate at the
University of Gloucestershire. Within the context of the International Centre for Biblical
Interpretation, Sheona is exploring photographic representations of biblical imagery and
the means by which such photographs express a contemporary spirituality. Sheona is also
a professional artist, and is currently Artist-in-Residence at Trinity College, Bristol.
Sheona graduated from the University of the Creative Arts in 2001 (BFA), and completed
her MA in Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham in 2004. She has had
numerous successful exhibitions with her digitally-created photographic work on subjects
relating to faith and our perception of the natural world.
Brusius, Mirjam, (rountable, see Sheehan)
Biography: Dr Mirjam Brusius (MA History of Art, Berlin; PhD, History and Philosophy
of Science, Cantab.) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Photography at
Oxford University. Her doctoral thesis, forthcoming monograph (The University of
Chicago Press/De Gruyter) and recent articles concerned the scholarly archive of the
British inventor of photography, gentleman of science and antiquarian W.H.F. Talbot,
whose notebooks she catalogued at the British Library as an AHRC collaborative doctoral
award holder. She is co-editor of W.H.F. Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University
Press 2013). She also writes on early photography in Iran and more widely in the Middle
East.
Butler, Jacqueline, ‘On White Island Kvitøya: Shadowplay’
The endeavour to understand and articulate what photography is in a post-analogue era
has stimulated artists and photographers to explore the materiality of photography. Much
of the current research on materiality focuses on an investigation of nineteenth-century
photographic processes. As an artist my interest is in combining pre-photography
principles with traditional and new print technologies through practical application, as a
contribution to contemporary debates about what constitutes photography in the twentyfirst century.
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Inspired by Marina Warner’s writings on phantasmagoria productions, an early
nineteenth-century magic lantern show crystallised my thoughts on photography’s
relationship to the fantastical and the tragic. Encountering Robert Macfarlane’s writing on
Mallory’s failed expedition to Mount Everest, and Herbert Ponting’s photographs of the
Scott expedition to the South Pole, I began a search through photographic archives for
early images of polar expeditions.
I was particularly struck by a small collection of correspondence and news clippings from
what is known as the Andrée expedition. The Andrée expedition, led by the Swedish
balloonist S. A. Andrée in 1897, aimed to be the first to reach the North Pole by hydrogen
balloon. The expedition failed, with all three members of the team lost. In 1930 the bodies
and effects of the men were discovered. Amongst diaries and journals there were also rolls
of photographic film. Sets of prints were made and sent to museums across the world.
Along with the prints each museum received a report detailing the process undertaken to
develop and preserve the film. By working with this collection, my intention has been to
develop irreal landscapes utilising technologies associated with photography. In this paper
I describe the background to this art project, titled ‘White Island’, reflecting on my
developing philosophy of the consolidation of old and new photographic technologies
with pre-photography materiality and intellectual thinking.
Biography: Jacqueline Butler works with photography, digital video, the artist book, and
writing, and has a particular fascination with archives and collections (both public and
private). Her interests are in exploring visual narrative and contemplating the material
qualities of photography in both analogue and digital forms. Butler is currently
undertaking a PhD at the Glasgow School of Art, where her research considers what
constitutes photography in the twenty-first century. She is also Principal Lecturer and
Director of Studies at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan
University.
Cheshire, Jim (organiser), ‘Alfred Tennyson and Photographic Mediation’
The career of Alfred Tennyson was profoundly influenced by photography, both directly
and indirectly. While the Poet Laureate's relationship with Julia Margaret Cameron is
well known, the way that the perception of the poet and the reception of his poetry was
mediated through photography remains relatively unexplored. Photography played an
important role in both popularising and creating Tennyson's public image. Publishers,
sculptors and illustrators used photography as a mediating process that facilitated
commercial strategies, and although a photograph was often not the end product,
photographic technology was a crucial element in creating Tennyson's unprecedented
literary celebrity. This paper will analyse sculptural portraits and engravings of Tennyson
in order to illustrate the mediating role of photography, it will then discuss how the
illustrated edition of Idylls of the King created an uncertain boundary between 'original'
artwork and its reproduction.
Biography: Jim Cheshire is Reader in Cultural History at the University of Lincoln. His
research examines the literary and visual culture of the nineteenth century and
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thematically is centred on Victorian medievalism. He has recently been working on the
relationship between the literary and material culture surrounding the career of Alfred
Tennyson. Several related publications discuss the importance of the physical form and
visual appearance of Tennyson’s poetry and how this might have influenced the way that
his poetry was read. He is currently writing a monograph about Edward Moxon
(Tennyson’s publisher) and his impact on Victorian poetry. Jim works with colleagues in
the Conservation subject area on object analysis and interpretation and acts as Historical
Consultant to Crick Smith Conservation.
Clayton, Owen (organiser), ‘Intimate Strangers: Photographic Exchange in Fin-De-Siècle
Fiction’
In William Dean Howells’ short story ‘The Magic of a Voice’ (1899), a young man and
woman engage in a flirtatious correspondence even though they have never met. Their
exchange of letters soon leads to an exchange of photographs. The images give the pair a
degree of intimacy unusual among strangers in the nineteenth century. When they do
eventually meet, the couple find themselves unable to speak, an awkwardness that is
blamed on ‘the anomaly of their having been intimates without being acquaintances’.
Howells positions the exchange of images among strangers as a kind of one-night stand,
while constructing photography as a form of social media.
This paper will argue that British and American writers represented photography as the
herald of a new society, one in which technology would overcome previous boundaries of
propriety. In addition to Howells’ ‘Magic of a Voice’, I will focus on Henry James’ novel
The Awkward Age (1899). For James, Howells and other writers, photographs were objects
of suspicion because of what they suggest about the changing relations between
strangers—between potential lovers, as in Howells’ story, or between celebrities and their
fans. Photography comes to construct, as Ariella Azouley argues, an unspoken ‘civil
contract’ that anyone might take or possess images of anyone else. As well as examining
texts in which images are obtained with the consent of both parties, however, this paper
will also look at instances in which such consent is absent. These latter instances evoke
the potential horror of photographic ubiquity. I will argue that photography is in tension
in fin-de-siècle fiction: stuck between a type of social relation that is dead or dying, and
another that is (as yet) powerless to be born.
Biography: Owen Clayton is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Lincoln.
His first monograph, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915, has recently been
published with Palgrave Macmillan. Owen writes occasional articles for the New
Statesman. He founded ‘International Poetry Month’ for the No Glory in War campaign.
Coghen, Ada, ‘The Problem of “Fixing” an Image: Literary Portrayals of the Camera
Obscura in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’
The camera obscura is usually seen as one of the earliest ancestors of photography: the
classic history of photography by Alison and Helmut Gernsheim is entitled The History of
Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914
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(1955). The aim of this paper is to examine the literary representation of the camera
obscura at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, just before the camera
obscura image was about to be ‘fixed’ to form the photograph. Various accounts of the
camera obscura proliferated, ranging from a street-hawker’s hoax to comparisons to the
human mind. The references that Locke, Sterne, Reynolds, Hazlitt, and Coleridge made to
the camera obscura serve to create an important cultural context for the birth of
photography proper. Jonathan Crary suggests the transition from the realism of the early
photographic image to the sophistication of late nineteenth-century accounts of
photography. However, I will argue that the different descriptions of the camera obscura
image attest that much of the controversy that was later to surround photography was
already present in its ancestor. The possibility of mass reproduction of the camera obscura
image spoke to the anxieties about the easily reproduced and increasingly present print
images spread by the press. The mechanical nature of the produced image created a
discussion about the nature of artistic creation. To complicate matters, the impermanence
of the camera obscura image was regarded as one of its essential qualities (not necessarily
a fault to be corrected), which differentiates it from modern notions of the photographic.
Biography: Ada Coghen is currently an MA student in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic
Studies at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She completed her BA in English
Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. She hopes to do her PhD on Browning and
photography. She is interested in the history of photography, and has practiced DSLR
photography as a hobby for five years.
Coley, Rob, and Dean Lockwood, ‘A Causeway around Picture: Muybridge’s Solar
Darkness’
We commend an idea of photography as dark medium, negative mediation, and, in this
sense, never early, never late:
To talk about the medium’s past or future…makes no sense, since these categories
belong to the linear timescale of Enlightenment. But we’re talking endarkenment
here; unshaped plasma in which pixels drift, collide and separate in pre-historic or
pre-figurative frenzy; noxious fluid mulch where pasts, futures and presents, all
composted, lurk as potentiality and immanence – that is, as fiction. (Tom
McCarthy)
A second photography, a paraphotography, lies alongside or interstitially within the
history of photography. The Society for Ontofabulatory Research at the University of
Lincoln (represented on this occasion by Dr Coley and Dr Lockwood) proposes a
fabulatory exploration inspired by Brian Catling’s The Vorrh, in which Eadweard
Muybridge lives a secret life in pursuit of the ‘real burn of art’. In Catling’s fiction,
Muybridge’s near-fatal stagecoach accident activates in him a vital mythopoeic power by
which he reinvents himself as the Titan, Helios, commanding the force of the Sun. It is a
matter of finding a ‘causeway around picture’, of magnifying an ‘atmosphere’, cutting
light to coalesce movement. The optico-affective capacities here imagined speak to a
specification of seeing as exceeding the actual. Muybridge spins light as a form of
affective hack, an optical exploit accessing the unliveable void of the Seer, the Idiot
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perched on the precipice of infinity just as Muybridge gazes down into Yosemite Valley
from the perilous brink. Paraphotography is this spinning-voiding. The Titan’s studies in
motion are barbarous evocations of forces which sidestep the rational and the conscious.
The numbered gridding of humans and animals, frozen in time and space, gives way to a
subtler web, spun to detain and harness forces more profound, more mutative and
acrobatical than the arithmetic powers of mere calculation and accumulation. Muybridge’s
legacy is an exploded view of the world. It is an illustration of components, a fabulation of
celebrity, an authentic grimoire designed to conjure time and space, to tip them off their
rails and catch and ride them as they propel all things into unknown infinity. This is a
Book of Vectors that gives the world a different origin and a different cause. Behind the
sensory affordances made possible by industrialised nature, industrialised time and space,
is another realm, born of another nature, time and space in triplicate. Here are
inconspicuous powers brewing in the spaces between the things ordinarily seen.
Biographies: Rob Coley has taught media theory and practice on the Lincoln School of
Film and Media’s undergraduate and postgraduate programmes since 2009. Dean
Lockwood is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory (also in the Lincoln School of Film and
Media). Rob and Dean have collaborated on the book Cloud Time (Zero Books, 2012), a
polemical theory-fiction on the culture and politics of cloud computing concerned with
new corporate and governmental strategies for harnessing the creative power of digitality.
With Adam O’Meara, Rob and Dean are currently contracted to research and write a book
for Punctum on the ‘fabulatory function’ of photography in a media ecological era.
Denny, Margaret, ‘Inside/Out—Re-Examining Nineteenth-Century Photography
Studios’
In The Romance of a Shop, Amy Levy’s Victorian narrative sets the scene of a photography
studio in London. Not a grandiose establishment, but a more modest endeavour is
portrayed: ‘Beyond the passage was a little room, designed, no doubt, for a waiting or
dressing-room; and beyond this, divided by an aperture, evidently intended for curtains,
came the studio itself’. The author goes on: ‘Several cameras each of a different size, stood
about the room. In one corner was a great screen of white-painted canvas; there were
blinds to the roof adapted for admitting or excluding the light; and paste-pots, bottles,
printing-frames, photographs in various stages of finish’. Although this gives us a sense of
the spatial configuration one might find in a photography studio, it lacks information of
the workers and work activity that transpired throughout these spaces.
This paper investigates nineteenth-century photography studios inside/out to argue that
although studios may have been the vision of a singular photographer, the success of a
photography business depended on the collaborative efforts of a number of individual
assistants. In the name of profitability studios operated more like factories where each
worker performed a specific task. Following a hierarchy—from camera operator, printer,
and/or retoucher to receptionist and in between—the majority of the positions fell along
gender lines with women assuming the lowest paying. Photographic processing was
completed by many workers in production areas unseen by the public.
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The study considers the physical location, the décor and room layout both public and
private, and the activities performed within these spaces. From its public reception room
parlours to business offices where one might review proofs, photographic studios had the
power to persuade and provide cultural guidance, entertainment, and nurturance. The
ambient interiors of some reportedly offered a moral uplift and induced a more pleasant
portrait outcome. As institutions, nineteenth-century photo studios functioned in a
number of ways as places of fashionable presentations, identity building, and social
interaction. Examples derive primarily from women-run studios in America with
comparisons made to those operated by male and female practitioners in Britain’s
photographic community as well.
Biography: Dr Margaret Denny received a PhD in Art History from the University of
Illinois at Chicago with her dissertation ‘From Commerce to Art: American Women
Photographers 1850–1900’. She has taught the survey of photography history at colleges
and universities in Chicago. Her area of specialisation is nineteenth-century photo history
with a research concentration in nineteenth-century women photographers. She has
presented papers at national and international conferences, most recently at the
‘Exchanging Photographs, Making Knowledge 1890–1970’ conference at the Photographic
History Research Centre at De Montfort University in 2014, with her paper ‘Magic
Projections: Engaging and Enlightening Lantern Slides’. Her publications include articles
in History of Photography and Women’s History Review.
Dobson, Eleanor, ‘Photography as Hieroglyph: From Fox Talbot to the Unlucky
Mummy’
This paper draws its title from Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in which Benjamin popularised the French
film director Abel Gance’s comparison between film and ancient Egyptian writing. As
‘pictoral language’, both film and ancient Egyptian script can be seen to function
simultaneously as image and word, as external representation and as fundamental
representations of the inner truths of human experience and meaning. There is perhaps
more to this archaeological metaphor, however. Although hieroglyphs had been wrested
under Western control by the master decoders Jean-François Champollion and Thomas
Young in the 1820s, throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, these mysterious
symbols were often seen to have supernatural meanings that slipped under translators’
radar undetected.
Beginning with an analysis of works by pioneering photographer Henry Fox Talbot in the
mid-nineteenth century, and extending to early twentieth-century moving pictures
created by such innovators as Georges Méliès, this paper traces ancient Egypt’s uncanny
supernaturalism through the very medium which was supposed to render it inert.
Rumours surrounding photographs of the British Museum’s Unlucky Mummy reveal that
there remained something undecipherable about ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphs, perpetuated
by photographic technologies themselves. Where hieroglyphs appeared, the mechanically
reproduced image did not lose its aura, as Benjamin might expect; instead, the image’s
power is duplicated, and the magic inherent in the ancient symbols revived. In
considering the appearance of the hieroglyph across visual culture in this way, we can
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trace how photographic technologies made images of ancient Egyptian writing available to
wider audiences than ever before, and speculate as to how and why these audiences
responded to these pictorial symbols with both wonderment and fear.
Biography: Eleanor Dobson is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham
researching the relationship between Egyptology and late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury literature and culture.
Ennis, Emily, ‘Photographic Conception and Literary Pregnancies: Mass Media,
Technology, and Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman” (1894)’
Recent critics of Thomas Hardy’s relationship with photography have suggested that his
ambivalent attitude towards the new technology is part of his increasingly complicated
task of defining ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’. Hardy struggled with the degrees of
verisimilitude that realism demanded in a post-photographic world of fiction, terming it
‘copyism’ and arguing that ‘[t]he most devoted apostle of realism, the sheerest naturalist
[…] transforms himself into a technicist at a move.’ Truth and the real are called directly
into question by photography, and François Brunet has noted that for authors such as
Hardy, the ubiquity of photography in popular press and fiction offered an ‘excess’ of
truth.
However, I want to go one step further and suggest that photography not only called into
question the style of realism, but actively challenged ideas on writing, printing, and
publishing. In short, the ability to directly reproduce photographs altered cultural
perception of written texts.
To articulate this I turn to Hardy’s short story ‘An Imaginative Woman’ (1894), which
uses the trope of pregnancy to interrogate the concept of literary reproduction. The female
protagonist, after falling in love with the photograph of a famous poet, produces a child
that is the image of the photograph. Raising issues of the celebrity author and technical
reproduction, this responds to Hardy’s idea of the ‘technicist’; in short, the role of the
author and the role of the mother are elliptically compounded together. Responding to
Elissa Marder’s recent book, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (Fordham, 2012), I suggest that Hardy’s opinions
on the ‘technicist’ of realism, the publication of fiction, and the production of photographs
can all be compounded in the uncanny figure of the mother in this short story.
Biography: Emily Ennis is a final-year AHRC PhD student at the University of Leeds.
Her research interests primarily lie in the field of critical and cultural theory, with a
special interest in literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She
stumbled upon her thesis topic through her interests in aesthetics, medical humanities,
and the emergence of Modernism, all of which she uses to interrogate the relationship
between photography and the process of writing between 1880 and 1920.
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Field, Hannah (organiser)
Biography: Hannah Field is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Lincoln.
Her research centres on nineteenth-century literature, visual arts, and material culture;
children’s literature; and the history of the book. She is currently preparing the book based
on her DPhil thesis (completed as a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford in 2014), which
examines what Victorian novelty publishing for children—pop-ups, fold-out panoramas,
mechanical books, dissolving-view books—can tell us not just about childhood, but also
about the history of books and reading, in the period. While her interest in Victorian
visual culture begins with illustration, she has also written about the relationship between
the pop-up book and stereoscopic photography.
Fjodorova, Anastasia, ‘Expired, Unstable, and Obsolete: Establishing Parallels between
“Early” Nineteenth-Century and “Industrially Produced” Twentieth-Century
Photographic Processes, as Embodied by Contemporary Practitioners’
How does the continuous technological development of photographic image-making
shape our perception and understanding of the medium, both as it exists now, and as it
had existed previously? Namely, in what ways do we define the limits of what makes ‘a
photograph’, and which of its aspects do we deem to hold greater significance at particular
times in history? Discussions of contemporary photographers re-examining alternative
forms of photography preference what are termed ‘early’ or ‘historic’ processes, cyanotype
for example. Less frequently included in these discussions are contemporary practitioners
working with commercially developed films, papers, or chemicals that, despite being the
industry standard for a significant portion of the twentieth century, have now either
ceased to be manufactured or are produced in marginal quantities. My particular focus, as
both practitioner and researcher, is on Ciba/Ilfochrome printing, ortho-litho film, and
work with expired out-of-production photographic papers and film. Such processes,
developed from the mid-twentieth century onwards, by the photographic ‘big names’ of
Kodak, Ilford, and Agfa, would not generally fall under the category of ‘early’ or ‘historic’,
and, having lost commercial viability, are frequently considered experimental
indulgences. I propose, however, to draw parallels between current practitioners working
with these materials and methods, and the development of ‘early’ photographic processes
by nineteenth-century experimenters. Approaching this as a practitioner, I am aware that
this sort of process-based work requires a substantial amount of technical research, mostly
found by searching available online archives of ‘Data Sheets’ for various out-ofproduction films and papers. A considerable portion of the research also comes from
online photography forums, creating, as it were, a network of ‘amateur researchers’
possessing and sharing valuable ‘tacit’ knowledge. Despite differences in materials and
working methods, deconstructing such processes permits one to emulate early
photographic experimenters, allowing for a greater understanding of the nature of the
medium, as well as its history.
Biography: Anastasia Fjodorova is a current postgraduate student, progressing towards an
MA in Art History and Visual Culture at Richmond, the American International
University in London, from which she had also earned her BA Hons in Art, Design, and
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Media. As a practitioner working within the scope of fine-art photography, she focuses
primarily on analogue, alternative, and experimental photographic processes. Research
interests including feminist theory, semiotics, phenomenology, and posthumanism, as
well as the body in contemporary art and photography, further underpin her practice.
Fukuoka, Maki, see Sheehan (roundtable)
Fung, Paul, ‘Dostoevsky, epilepsy and the photographic image’
In the convolute entitled ‘Photography’ in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes:
‘What makes the first photographs so incomparable is perhaps this: that they present the
earliest image of the encounter of machine and man’. For the German literary critic, the
invention of photography revolutionises the experience of perceiving image. In a
photograph, the past is no longer something that is stable or fixed to which the viewer
contemplates to gain a comfortable and self-sufficient subjectivity. There is ‘something
that cannot be silenced’ (‘A Little History of Photography’) in the photograph which
allures the viewers to reflect on what happened before and after the content was captured
by the camera.
With the capturing of an instant, photography is particularly apt as an art form that opens
up a constellation of time. By constellation I mean that the past represented in the photo
is only legible when it is read at the moment of the now. In other words, the past does not
exist independently but it forms a figural relation with the now through which the viewer
perceives the image.
The early photography Benjamin discusses illustrates the above theory by capturing what
is unnoticed and forgotten. For instance, long exposure time allows certain details to stand
out in the photo, for example, creases on the face. Early photography allows the subject
‘grows’ in the photo. But photography changed its dialectical function when it became
fashionable: the subject is ‘reified’, decorated with arty props, in order to make the
photograph look ‘artistic’. Contemporary photography sacrifices the historical functions at
the price of artistic juxtapositions inside the camera frames.
The paper investigates the above by looking into Benjamin’s examples, some early
photography produced in Victorian Hong Kong, Henry James’ short stories, and
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
Biography: Paul Fung is Assistant Professor in English Studies at Hang Seng
Management College, Hong Kong. His book, Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being,
published by Legenda, came out in 2015.
Hacking, Juliet, ‘Studio & Street: The Photographically Illustrated Press in Britain, 1891–
1914’
In terms of photography’s aesthetic historiography, the turn of the century is identified
with Pictorialism; in terms of its social history, it is identified with the rise of popular
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photography. Although it is well-known that a photographically illustrated press emerged
(in Europe and the United States) in this period, its origins are less well-studied than its
heyday in 1920s Europe. In this paper I will make Britain my case study for the
intersection of studio portraiture, celebrity, the early photographically illustrated press,
and the photojournalism that the latter engendered. The image of celebrity as it appeared
in the new society journals such as The Sketch (1893) and Tatler (1901) was generally the
flattering, overblown image of the high-class portrait studio and was often many years out
of date. With the launching of the Daily Illustrated Mirror, priced at a halfpenny, in 1904
the social gap between the celebrity subject and the intended readership widened. In time
the accelerated rhythms of modernity would begin to impose themselves and to intersect
with the use of photography to bait celebrity that we generally associate with modern
celebrity magazines. It was only when the market for photographically illustrated
newspapers and periodicals had been secured that dedicated press photography emerged.
The economic rivalry between the new picture agencies stimulated the desire for current
photographs of those in the news. The contrast presented by the candid image to the
studio portrait, made the latter emblematic of the distinguished sitter’s attempt to control
their image and spoke of their declining social and political power. Both through the
creative use of studio portraiture and the development of candid press photography, the
photographically illustrated press established early on the role that photographic imagery
could play in flexing the power of the media, in the name of the people, over the socially
privileged.
Biography: Dr Juliet Hacking is the Programme Director of the MA in Photography
(Historical and Contemporary) at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. From 2000 to
2006, she was a specialist at Sotheby’s auction house. She is the general editor of
Photography: The Whole Story (Thames & Hudson, 2012), and is the author of Princes of
Victorian Bohemia: Photographs by David Wilkie Wynfield (Prestel/NPG, 2000) and Lives of
the Great Photographers (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming September 2015). She is
currently working on a book on photography and the art market for Lund Humphries.
Hall, Mark, ‘A Light in the Darkness: Parallelist Theory in the Work of Jacob Riis’
At a time when changes in photography and associated technology and media are rapidly
taking place, it is important that the theoretical framework surrounding photography
adjusts to those changes. In this paper I examine the use of technology by the social
reformer turned photographer Jacob Riis and propose what I have termed a ‘parallelist’
theory (using the Greek sense of para meaning beside, beyond, past, as well as to one
side), which blurs the distinction between theories of art history, technological/scientific
theory, and ontology, acknowledging each and identifying a fracture or separation
between them. I acknowledge too that parallelist theory may suggest a temporal
dimension and that each may be coiled and overlap with each other; however, this will be
part of a longer discourse.
Embedded within Riis’ appropriation of photography and the assimilation of technological
advances in lighting, was his belief in religion and a reformist agenda which not only used
light in its technical form, to create an exposure, but in its ideological form to shed the
light of salvation. His focus on the poor follows precedents set earlier in the century by
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redemptionist artists such Gustave Doré, whose use of light followed traditional Christian
doctrines. His images, shown publicly in lantern shows, satisfied another desire, to satisfy
the fetishistic tendencies of a middle class who were afraid to set foot in tenements, seen
by Riis himself as a place ‘prolific of untold depravities’.
By using the work and practices of Riis I will demonstrate how parallelist theory can be
used to show there exists a fractured coherence between the science and technologies of
photography: in particular, Riis’s use of flash, the rhetoric of art history, and the
hegemonic ideologies of the twenty-first century. Far from being a battleground of
competing theories I will show that by examining the porous boundaries that exist
between different theories, one can develop a greater sense of their interdependence.
Biography: Mark Hall has been a commercial advertising photographer for nearly thirty
years. In that time he has travelled extensively and been commissioned by many
advertising agencies and editorial clients across the world. He began teaching in 2000 and
has more recently been working on a PhD thesis on the use and control of light in
photography. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Derby. His research
interests include the technical language of photography, the implied structures of power
inherent in technical manuals, and the critical theory of commercial photography.
Jolly, Martyn, ‘Who and What Is an Australian Colonial Photographer?’
Recent scholarship in Australian photography has questioned the usefulness of the
category of ‘Australia’ to describe photography in the various nineteenth-century colonies.
For instance, every history of Australian photography has discussed J. W. Newland who
opened a ‘Daguerrean Gallery’ in Sydney in early 1848. More recent histories emphasise
that Newland was an itinerant English photographer who only spent a couple of years in
the colonies before opening a more permanent studio in Calcutta and eventually returning
to England. But what is less explored is the fact that at the same time as he was a
daguerreotypist, Newland was also a magic lanternist. He began to hold elaborate magic
lantern exhibitions—‘as shown at [London’s] Polytechnic [and] Adelaide Gallery’—at
Sydney’s Royal Victoria Theatre. Sometimes the performances were even supported by a
minstrel show. Both his daguerreotype and his lantern apparatus accompanied him around
the colonies. Similarly, Nicholas Caire is celebrated as one of the nineteenth century’s
most important landscape photographers and aesthetically formative to Australia’s
landscape tradition. But he too was a lanternist. In 1868 he produced a religious magic
lantern show Dark Deeds of the Middle Ages by photographically copying book engravings.
His subsequent ‘polytechnical’ tour included the administering of electric shocks to
audience members from a galvanic battery. These examples amongst others indicate that
we need to continue to broaden our understanding of the photographer in this period.
Photographers were not only geographically itinerant, but for many of them photography
was not the totality of their professional identity. It was a process embedded in a web of
other emerging scientific and entertainment technologies and practices. Because of
ingrained historiographic agendas to affirm photography as an autonomous art form,
related technologies or practices are either completely ignored, or discounted as peripheral
to the photographer’s central ‘calling’. Using original archival and newspaper research into
Caire, Newland, and other photographers I will argue that by bringing these back into the
26
frame we have much to learn about visual culture in general, and photography in
particular.
Biography: Dr Martyn Jolly is an artist and a writer. He is Head of Photography and
Media Arts at the Australian National University School of Art. He completed his PhD
on fake photographs and photographic affect at the University of Sydney in 2003. In 2006
his book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography was published by the
British Library, as well as in the United States and Australia. His work is in the
collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the
Canberra Museum and Gallery. In 2006 he was one of three artists commissioned to
design and build the ACT Bushfire Memorial. In 2011 he undertook a Harold White
Fellowship at the National Library of Australia and a Collection Scholar Artist-inResidence Fellowship at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive. In 2014 he
received an Australian Research Council Discovery grant along with Dr Daniel Palmer, to
research the impact of new technology on the curating of Australian art photography. He
is also researching Australiana photobooks and Australia’s Projected Image Heritage,
particularly its magic lantern culture.
Kerr, Matt, ‘Breathless: The Look of Drowning in the Nineteenth Century’
This paper investigates the imaginative links between photography and drowning in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If photography can be thought of as an art of
surfaces, photographs of drowning are distinguished by their relationship to immersion—
to depth. I begin with Hippolyte Bayard’s protest self-portrait as a drowned man, which
showed Bayard, shirtless, in a darkened room, with closed eyes and somewhat blurred
hands. The accompanying caption punningly explained the sitter’s ‘decayed’ state in
terms of his obscurity: ‘He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has
recognised or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of
offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman
are beginning to decay.’ Why does Bayard adopt the figure of the drowned man to
symbolise his plight as a neglected pioneer of photography? What might the relationship
be between Bayard’s self-portrait, and aspects of photographic technique that recall
drowning (including exposure and immersion)? And how does Bayard’s image reproduce
or revise other visions of drowning in the long nineteenth century? This paper considers
these questions, among others. I will range broadly over literary and visual texts including
Thomas De Quincey’s ruminations on drowning, the early underwater photography of
Louis Boutan, Dickens’s contemplation of drowned bodies in The Uncommercial Traveller,
representations of L’Inconnue de la Seine, and the scenes of drowning (and drowned bodies
in the Paris morgue) in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.
Biography: Matt Kerr is presently a departmental lecturer in English at the University of
Oxford. His research centres on nineteenth-century literature and culture, and he is
currently preparing his first monograph, Boundless: The Language of the Sea and the
Nineteenth-Century Novel. New research includes an essay concerning Gustave Le Gray’s
marine photography, and a larger book-length project on the feeling of contentment in the
Victorian period. He completed his DPhil and MSt at Oxford, and his undergraduate
27
degree at Mount Allison University in Canada. In September he will join the University
of Southampton as Lecturer in British Literature (1837–1939).
Leinonen, Kati, ‘Tintype in exploration of contemporary portrait’
Whereas in the past a tintype was primarily an object of remembrance today it is used as a
medium in the context of contemporary art. In contemporary tintype, technical, aesthetic
and artistic values are intertwined. Today there are cameras everywhere and pictures are
taken all the time. In comparison, the slow and complex wet plate collodion process and
the whole photographing situation are somewhat different. The act of photographing is a
performance per se.
This paper introduces my plans for Encounters: Kinahmo tintype portrait mission and a
pilot phase of the project. The Encounters: Kinahmo -project will be the first artistic part
of my thesis and will consist of giant 20 x 20 inch tintype portraits taken on location with
a large field camera and a mobile darkroom build in an old horse trailer. I will focus on the
different kind of photographing situation that the process of making giant tintypes
demands. During the pilot phase of the project I became aware of a change in traditional
construction of the gaze, where solely the person being photographed is seen as the object
of the gaze in the photographing situation.
The whole process of photographing seems to me more meaningful when created by hand
on a piece of metal using a massive photographing apparatus to expose the metal plate.
The concrete black object coming out of the back of the camera resurrects a piece of the
magic I can only imagine photography used to carry in its early days. The making of the
tintype is a strongly physical act that creates intensity to the photographing situation.
This intensity will be visible in the portrait itself mirroring the relations between the
photographer and the person being photographed.
Biography: Kati Leinonen is a Finnish artist who works with digital and analogue
photography including the wet-plate collodion process. She studied photography in
London College of Printing (UK) and audio-visual media culture in the University of
Lapland (Finland). Her studies of wet-plate collodion process were conducted under
France Scully-Ostermann in Rochester (USA). She is currently a doctoral student in the
University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design.
Leister, Wiebke, ‘Duchenne’s Frontispiece and the Photographic Double-Portrait’
In the mid-nineteenth century, in the early days of photography, electricity, and
neurology, the French physician Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875) undertook some of
the first systematic experiments on facial muscle movement. His 1862 book The Mechanism
of Human Facial Expression used localised medical electrification to reproduce, analyse, and
decode faces, but also to construct, re-enact, and perform emotional expressions, situating
the purpose of his images somewhere between fine art and positivist record. In the context
of photographic portraiture his pseudo-realist mixing of documentary evidence with
stylised performance tells us a lot about the contemporary blending of studio conventions
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and scientific demonstration during which medicine and aesthetics mutually reinforced
each other to create an impression of objectivity. Taking Duchenne’s depiction of ‘false
laughter’ as a starting point, my paper takes the frontispiece of his book as a leitmotif to
raise questions about the complex politics between sitter and photographer: the doubleportrait of a power relationship between an expression-inflicting doctor and an emotionenacting patient, rather than the portrait of an equal partnership. While attempting an in
many ways impossible ‘theory’ of double-portraiture, my paper also aims to discuss
different prints of this image made by different printers, possibly emphasising different
aspects of Duchenne’s project. Duchenne’s photographic physiology therefore matters not
only because it mirrors a photographically-induced wishful thinking of nineteenthcentury society. It also stimulates a wider debate on the model-photographer-viewer
triangle in contemporary photographic practices that increasingly seem to evacuate the
individual sitter from the portrait in order to photo-theatrically demonstrate a visual
argument, arriving at different orders of simulation and reenactment.
Biography: Wiebke Leister is a German artist and writer living in London. She studied
photography at the University in Essen and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in
London. As well as being course leader for MA Photography at London College of
Communication, she has exhibited and published her work internationally, receiving
several awards. Her research investigates the conditions of photographic non-likeness by
focusing on representations of faciality and the photographic presentation of expressive
signs of the face in relation to its facial canvas. She is a co-organiser of the Photography
and the Contemporary Imaginary Research Hub and a core member of the Photography
and the Archive Research Centre at the University of the Arts London, and she has also
worked in different museum contexts, organizing conferences and exhibitions. Recent
publications include articles in About Performance, Journal of Photography and Culture,
Journal for Visual Communication, and Photographies.
Lockwood, Dean, see Coley and Lockwood
Lukitsh, Joanne, ‘How Julia Margaret Cameron Became an “Old Master” of Photography’
The current artistic identity of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is
founded upon the revival of her work in exhibitions, reviews, and reproductions produced
between 1889 and 1915. During this revival over a century ago, her art was freighted with
new historical meanings and her practice reinvented for new aesthetic priorities. The
Pictorialist search for the historical legitimacy of artistic photography coincides with
these years, from Peter Henry Emerson’s 1889 estimation of Cameron as one of only three
photographers since Daguerre to make works of artistic value, to Alvin Langdon Coburn’s
inclusion of Cameron in his 1915 exhibition of the ‘old masters’ of photography. In this
period, Cameron’s son, Henry Herschel Hay—himself a photographer practicing in
Pictorialist circles—made his mother’s photographs available for exhibition, sale, and
reproduction. Intending to establish a brand for his photographic studio, in 1889 he
published his mother’s now-canonical memoir, Annals of My Glass House, to accompany
the first joint exhibition of their work. The narratives of continuity argued by the
Pictorialists and activities of Henry Cameron discounted the extent to which Julia
Cameron’s photography had gone out of style in the 1880s. In the 1870s the Autotype
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Company publicised the sale of its carbon print reproductions of Cameron’s ‘Remarkable
Series of National Portraits; Studies of Beautiful Women; Historical and Poetical
Pictures’, but did not list her work in their catalogues in the 1880s. The source for the sale
of Cameron’s photographs in the 1890s was not her dealer, Colnaghi, but Henry. By
examining the history of the distribution and reception of Cameron’s work in the three
decades after her death, my paper evaluates how the historical production of the artistic
identity of photographs has, itself, been produced.
Biography: Dr Joanne Lukitsh is a professor of the History of Art at the Massachusetts
College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts. She has written extensively on the
work of Julia Margaret Cameron, and is working on a new monograph on the
photographer. Lukitsh has also written on photographic reproductions of the sculpture of
Thomas Woolner for the Henry Moore Institute (2005) and on the landscape photographs
of the contemporary American photographer Laura McPhee (2008).
Madloch, Joanna, ‘This Ridiculous Photographer: The Portrait of the Photographer in
Nineteenth Century Satire’
The paper explores some aspects of nineteenth-century satire aimed towards photography,
and especially towards the photographer. My analysis comprises the image of the
photographer displayed in literary works of well-recognized writers, such as Lewis Carroll
(“Hiawatha’s photographing” 1857) and Ernest William Hornung (“A Spoilt Negative”
1888), in photographic press and satirical magazines such as Punch, and in nineteenth
century books dedicated to photography, such as Photographic Pleasures Popularly Portrayed
with Pen and Pencil by Cuthbert Bede (1855).
The objective of this study is to demonstrate that the picture of the early photographer
evokes the notion of the mythological trickster as it was described by Lewis Hyde in his
book Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998). Alike the trickster
character, the early photographer is portrayed as an almost exclusively male character,
boundary crosser, and tireless experimenter and innovator. However, it is his predication
to failure what makes him a perfect object of satire. In addition, my paper demonstrates
how following the technical changes and fast advancement in the medium, humor
towards the photographer evolved from benevolent lampoon during the first fifty years of
the camera’s existence, to more vicious from of caricature after the introduction of dry
plate process and hand-held cameras, what in 1880s turned a respectable profession into an
easily accessible trade and popular hobby.
Biography: Joanna Madloch has a Doctorate in Humanities from the University of Silesia
(Poland). She teaches at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is an author of a
book dedicated to Joseph Brodsky’s poetry and over 25 scholarly articles published in the
US, Poland, and Russia. Recently her academic interests focus on the juncture of verbal
and pictorial arts with an emphasis on literature and photography. She has presented
numerous articles dedicated to this topic and organized sessions and chaired panels on
national and international conferences. She is working on a book about the portrait of a
photographer in fiction, a character that she interprets as an archetypal trickster and
monster. Joanna Madloch is an award-winning photographer, and her works have been
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exhibited in the US and in Europe. She also acts as a juror at photographic contests. Her
work can be seen at http://www.joannamadlochphoto.com/
Masson, Sheila, ‘An Appropriate History: Redefining the British Tintype’
Despite huge popularity across the social strata in the United States, Victorian tintype
photography never attained the same level of acceptance in Great Britain and as a result it
has been annexed to the periphery of photographic history. My paper examines how the
photographic establishment’s adherence to the inflexible structure of the British class
system created a hierarchy of respectability within photography and this negative
reputation for the tintype was nurtured in contemporary journals and publications,
including the British Journal of Photography in its various incarnations at that time. This
stigma continued into the twentieth century as Helmut Gernsheim and Alison
Gernsheim’s 1955 tome The History of Photography still derided tintypes as ‘these hideous,
cheap-looking pictures’ decades after they had become synonymous with lower-class
itinerant or seasonal portrait photographers or as spur-of-the-moment seaside novelties.
The often overlooked or misidentified presence of tintypes in British family albums and
the consistent availability from modern auctions and photographic dealers suggests that
tintype production was far more extensive and significant than previously acknowledged
or documented. Furthermore, my research of studio-bound tintype photographers reveals
a far greater number of practitioners than historically presumed. The branding on some of
these studio tintypes encouraged patrons to return for future portraiture and in a few cases
also reveals both the pricing of these images and the surprising variety of photographic
processes available to consumers. Visual examples of tintypes will examine issues of
working-class identity and show the mimicking of more expensive portraits and their
packaging. The tintype should be seen as an invaluable document of working-class people,
which in turn helps to expand our understanding of Victorian society as a whole.
Therefore the British tintype deserves re-examination and redefinition in order to
position it as a significant and worthy subject within photographic history.
Biography: Sheila Masson (MLitt History of Photography, University of St Andrews,
2013) is a photographer, photo historian, and picture editor, and has worked for numerous
commercial picture agencies for almost twenty years in the United States and the United
Kingdom. Now based in Edinburgh, her own photographs have been published in books,
newspapers, and magazines including America 24/7, Life: The Year in Pictures, Vanity Fair,
The Times, The Guardian, and The Independent. She is currently the Director of Research
and Photographic Collections for Writer Pictures, a specialised picture agency in
Edinburgh, and is writing a book on the history of the British tintype. Sheila is also
curating an exhibition in Edinburgh entitled ‘Victorian Britain and the Tintype
Photograph’, opening June 2015 as part of both the Retina Scottish International
Photography Festival and the ACTINIC Photography Festival.
Massot, Gilles, ‘Jules Itier, an Amateur Daguerreotypist on a Groundbreaking Journey’
The work of Jules Itier done around the China Sea between 1844 and 1845 is known to
incorporate some of the earliest existing photographs of several Asian countries. Beyond
its historical importance, my current research indicates that this work could also be read
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as a case study for a spontaneous early evolution of the medium, both from a practical and
conceptual point of view. In the process of documenting his Asian journey this self-taught
photographer developed approaches that seem to anticipate future practice. What makes
Itier’s body of work particularly invaluable is that the iconographic material is
contextualised by a journal in three volumes published in 1848. This document is now
complemented by the recent discovery of the journal of François-Edmond Pâris, captain of
the steamer Archimède, which provides a wealth of new information.
Itier’s outstanding work is a 360o panorama of Canton, an achievement with no known
contemporary equivalent, which can now be fully visualised with the help of digital
technology. His 1845 daguerreotype of the Vietnamese fort of Non Nay can be said to be
an early example of photojournalism from intention, to eventful shooting, to use of image
in relation to text, to distribution. His various street shots, in particular the use of the
profile pose in the Canton street shot, present an ethnographic purpose at a time when
other European photographers are barely beginning to adopt a similar approach on the
other side of the world. The exchange of daguerreotype and painted miniature with the
painter Lam Qua illustrate the evolution of the portraiture business worldwide. His
presence in Canton is roughly contemporary to the publication of a treatise by the
Chinese scientist Zou Boqi, a treaty that offers a possible history of photography different
from the familiar Eurocentric narrative. In conclusion, I propose that Itier’s photographs
of the country where Mozu is said to have formulated the first observation of the pinhole
phenomenon mark the closing of a cycle in the history of human fascination with the
representation of the world and the opening of a new era.
Biography: Gilles Massot is a French multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore who
came to academia with a book on the island of Bintan and the Malay world published in
2003. This evolution was formalised with an MFA dealing with the apparition of the
photographic idea in the eighteenth century in relation to the notion of ‘image’ as found in
the English garden. His artistic practice and academic research are now mostly concerned
with the theory of photography and the phenomenon of ‘recording’ it initiated. He is
currently working on Jules Itier, who did the first known daguerreotypes of China,
Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam between 1844 and 1845.
McCallion, Peter, ‘An Exploration of Low Relief Structure Printing through the
Development of a Novel Digital Colour Plastographic Printing Method’
In the mid-nineteenth century two photographic printing methods were developed to
address the problem of photographic fading. These processes were the carbon process and
a variation of it, the Woodburytype. The carbon process was strictly a photographic
process; however, the Woodburytype was a photomechanical process where an initial
photographic exposure was used to generate metal printing plates. These two imaging
processes fell into a category known as ‘continuous tone’ (contone) processes. They did
not contain the dot structure synonymous with the halftone screen prints, nor the
reticulation often associated other contone prints such as photogravure.
The carbon process and the Woodburytype fall into a sub-genre known as
photoplastography. These images are created as a physical image relief rendered by UV
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light and photosensitive gelatine. The prints were often of such high fidelity they were
considered by print and photography historians alike to be as close as possible to a
photograph without being actual photographs. The Woodburytype process reproduces
halftones by depositing transparent gelatinous ink in varying thicknesses. Highlights are
generated through shallow reliefs and shadows are represented as a higher, thicker reliefs
thus allowing for the tonal gradations contained within the image. As the image dries the
gelatine relief shrinks.
Whilst it was possible to develop the carbon process as a full polychromatic four-colour
print, a process which is still in use today, the Woodburytype was unable to make this
transition and remained monochromatic. This inability to become a full colour print was
one of the reasons for its rapid obsolescence.
By exploring and recreating the historical Woodburytype printing process both by
traditional and digital outputs my research into low relief structure printmaking has asked
the question, ‘What if the Woodburytype was able to become fully polychromatic?’ This
paper considers and explores digital methods to create mechanically printed continuous
tone photographic images through digital polychromatic plastography.
Biography: Peter McCallion re-joined the Centre for Fine Print Research at the
University of the West of England in October 2012 as a PhD researcher working on an
investigation of digitally printed reproductions that replicate the creative methods of an
artist. Peter is a graduate of the University of Ulster, where he was awarded a First-Class
Honours degree in Graphic Product and Interactive Design (GPI) and a University
Diploma in Industrial Studies with a commendation. Peter has over 14 years’ experience
working extensively as a creative graphic designer and large format print developer. His
portfolio covers all aspects of graphic design.
Medeiros, Margarida, ‘History and Stories: Forgotten Archives, Stereoscopy’s
Collections, and the Complexity of the Photographic Image’
Portuguese history of photography has always been very lacking in research: António
Sena published the first large-scope account only in 1998. However, more recently,
archival digging has shown how Portuguese photographers and collections are of huge
importance, but the challenge is now how to overcome the positivist and art history model
of narrating photographic findings.
One of these big archives is the stereoscopic collection left by Aurélio Paz dos Reis, a man
of Oporto who was also a Portuguese cinema pioneer. Although some research has already
been done to preserve the archives, and some historical accounts in a positivist model
(such as a big catalogue produced by the Portuguese Centre of Photography), no more
research has been done that can situate this collection within a cultural approach while at
the same time paying attention to its mode of production.
In this paper we will address the Portuguese stereoscopic collection of Aurélio Paz dos
Reis, looking to overcome the traditional ‘artistic’ or historicist narrative, taking a
historical and cultural approach, and trying to cross the cultural and political context of its
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production; we will try to analyse certain parts of the collection, not only putting the
collection within its context, but also analysing some of the images and sequences of
images to relate the stereoscope production of Paz dos Reis to the emergence of the cinema
of attractions (one-reel and sequenced movies), and, in this sense, taking the archive as
popular media and not necessarily as an artistic one.
Finally we will foster, with this analysis, the paradoxical and unstable nature of the
photography ‘thing’, exploring recent notions of the photographic image as something
that calls the investigation of its ‘exploratory movements’, in the sense recently pointed
out by Georges Didi-Huberman that there is no ‘image without imagination’.
Biography: Margarida Medeiros is Assistant Professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa
where she teaches photography and visual culture. She received her PhD in
Communication Studies from the same University with a thesis on photography and
truth. She has written extensively on photography and has published four books between
2000 and 2014. She is now working on the reception of the X-ray and its impact on modern
Portuguese culture.
Miller, Rachel, ‘“Many Profitable Reflections”: Early Photography and the African
American Reading Public’
In March of 1853, readers of Frederick Douglass’ Paper were treated to an outing in one of
New York City’s best-known daguerreotype galleries. Writing as ‘Ethiop’, correspondent
William Wilson found himself ‘strongly attracted by some fine specimens of
daguerreotypes, hanging in a Broadway stair passage’. Although impressed by the facility,
Wilson expressed his dislike for the ‘swaggering air’ of a young black operator. His
account frames photographic spaces and practices as key sites of self-determination for
urban African Americans in the decade preceding the Civil War. It suggests two
employments of the new medium: one linked to a political project steeped in black
educated elite as consumers, and a second grounded in style and built from within a
nascent culture industry.
In light of Wilson’s encounter, this paper argues that race does not appear only in
photographic representation—and thus somewhat belatedly—but at the site of production
and in theorising its potential uses and meanings. My effort is inspired by recent calls for
attention to the business of early photography and beyond the visual as a tool of
repression or liberation. Relying primarily on black and antislavery newspapers, I identify
a series of strategic moves by both African American proprietors and customers. These
include access to a more equitable form of representation, the accumulation of capital, the
maintenance of social networks, a chance to display style and edification, and the
possibility of movement through and presence in ideologically charged space. Although
the first in the list might seem primary—the photograph’s ‘indexicality’ has long been
considered its defining feature—I argue that the last two emerge as the most significant in
this particular moment.
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Biography: Rachel Miller is PhD candidate in American Culture at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. This paper is part of her dissertation, currently titled ‘The Art of
Work: A Labor History of Creativity, 1830–1900’.
Minhinnett, Josephine, ‘The Megalethoscope: A Performance of Photography through
Optical Magic’
In 1862, during a period of mass tourism and increased demand for commercial
photography in Italy, Swiss optician and photographer Carlo Ponti invented a luxury
photographic viewing device called the megalethoscope. The device enhanced the
appearance of depth in photographic prints, and also produced brilliant optical effects in
specially crafted albumen photographic slides, transforming a monochrome photograph
into a colourful and illuminated night-time view.
Although the megalethoscope was invented in a decade of great improvement in the speed
and clarity of photographic materials—nearly twenty-five years after the advent of
commercial photography in 1839—it largely employed an older, pre-1839, optical
technology of the double-effect diorama invented by J. M. Daguerre. Additionally, while
reviews of Ponti’s invention are scarce, an unpublished nineteenth-century account of a
megalethoscope in the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York,
reveals a striking similarity to reviews of the diorama, which commented on its perfect
reproduction of reality. Art historian Stephen Pinson locates the origins of these reactions
to the diorama in ‘optical naturalism’, a particular nineteenth-century concept of reality
that involved viewing nature and its representation through an optical instrument, and as
such, is distinct from a number of other nineteenth-century theories of the Real.
Through a critical analysis of the unpublished megalethoscope account, alongside an
examination of its physical mechanism, this paper demonstrates how the invention of the
megalethoscope was a hybrid of two eras, blending pre-and post-1839 technologies, as well
as two differing theories of realism—the optical naturalism of the diorama and the more
recent photographic realism of Ponti’s age. Presenting the megalethoscope as one indicator
of a gradual change in nineteenth-century notions of realism, this paper provides context
to early debates surrounding photographic truth and opens a new channel for evaluating
the impact of recent technologies on perceptions of photographic realism in the
contemporary day.
Biography: Josephine Minhinnett is an independent scholar from Toronto, Canada. She
recently completed an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management at
Ryerson University in Toronto, in conjunction with the George Eastman House
International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York.
Novak, Daniel A., ‘Strike a Pose: Photography on the Victorian Stage’
This paper explores the remediation of photography on the Victorian stage and addresses
the way in which Victorian drama negotiated between technological and theatrical
standards of realism in plays performed in Britain from the 1850s to 1900. When, for
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example, Salem Scudder, the Yankee overseer and photographer of Dion Boucicault’s
Octoroon (1859), brandishes a photographic plate as evidence of murder, he appeals to
photography’s infallible realism (‘The apparatus can’t lie’)—a realism based on the idea
that it is an image without an author. While The Octoroon stages photography as a form of
non-performative objectivity, a wider range of Victorian drama depicts photography as
itself a form of theatrical illusion and presents theatre as more realistic and trustworthy
than deceptive technologies of realism. For example, when the fraudulent photographer of
Frederick Hay’s farce A Photographic Fix (1865) is discovered by his fiancée in an embrace
with another woman, he tries to convince her that what she sees is a photographic
illusion, ‘an optical infusion…a camera of the brain’. At the same time, rather than
operating outside of performance, photography is often used explicitly as a metaphor for
theatrical illusion. In this way, these plays are already thinking about theatre as a kind of
photography, one that is more accurate than photography. More broadly, by
foregrounding the role of the photographer and the process of taking, making, and
sometimes faking photographs, these plays intervene in current debates about critical
methodologies applied to photography. If, as Elizabeth Edwards suggests, we need an
alternative to the ‘traditional art-historical address of single images’, Victorian theatre
encourages us to rethink our approaches to nineteenth-century photographic culture,
because it makes visible the performative and illusionary, interactive and transactional
nature of photography—photography as process and performance rather than simply as
image and object.
Biography: Daniel A. Novak is associate professor of English at the University of
Mississippi. He is author of Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
(Cambridge, 2008), and co-editor with James Catano of Masculinity Lessons: Rethinking
Men’s and Women’s Studies (Johns Hopkins, 2011). He is currently at work on two book
projects: ‘Victoria’s Accursed Race’ analyses nineteenth-century representations of the
Cagots—an ethnic group of mysterious origins and indeterminate race—while ‘Specters of
Wilde’ examines the beginning of Wilde studies in the early twentieth century.
O’Meara, Adam (organiser)
Biography: Adam O'Meara is a lecturer and photographer in the School of Film
and Media at the University of Lincoln. His interests are in conceptual-based
photography and social engaged practice. He utilises various forms of photography
to mediate living in our 21st century society.
Passafiume, Tania, ‘Bayard Was There: Hippolyte and His Letters’
The history of photography has somewhat forgotten the importance of Hippolyte Bayard:
who he knew, who knew him, what he invented, and what he accomplished at a very
important stage of photography. One way to answer these questions is to read the letters
written by those who were present at the time. One might think that Hippolyte Bayard
was a man of few words, as there is very little written by him remaining. Luckily, he
deposited four letter packets dated 1839 to 1846 to the Académie des sciences in Paris.
History has not been kind to Bayard, as very little is written concerning these
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letters. Within these letters Bayard describes his four processes. His first letter: a negative
paper process; his second letter: the famous direct positive process; and finally his third
and fourth letters: additional negative paper processes. It is only when recreating these
processes, that one can fully understand the medium, the photographer, and the moment
of conception. This moment is forever fuelled by external pressures. For this presentation
I will describe the four letter packets, the paper they were written on, the contents of the
letters, where they were submitted, who opened them, and finally some little treasures
found within them. Bayard was there.
Biography: Tania Passafiume has been the Head Conservator of Photographic Materials
for Library and Archives Canada since 2005. After graduating Queen’s University’s MAC
Art Conservation programme, specialising in photographs, works on paper, and books
conservation, she moved to Rochester, New York. It was in Rochester at the George
Eastman House (GEH) where she remained for over three years, first participating in the
Certificate Program in Photographic Preservation and Archival Practice and then as a
Fellow in the first cycle of the Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Residency Program in
Photograph Conservation. It was during her three years at the George Eastman House,
where she first experimented with Hippolyte Bayard’s three processes with silver nitrate
by turning her hands black. It has become a lifelong passion. For the following three years
after GEH, Tania was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Photographic Conservation at the
Art Institute of Chicago. More recently, Tania has begun investigating with the Centre
de recherche sur la conservation in Paris, the history of science and technology of
Bayard’s processes.
Pérez González, Carmen, (rountable, see Sheehan)
Biography: Carmen Pérez González holds a master’s degree in Astrophysics (University
of Barcelona), an A.B.D. in Fine Arts (Photography, University of Barcelona), and a
doctorate in Art History (Leiden University), where she graduated with a dissertation
entitled “A Comparative Visual Analysis of 19thCentury Iranian Portrait Studio
Photography and Persian Painting”, awarded with the ICAS Best PhD Thesis Prize in
Humanities in 2011 (AAS/ICAS Honolulu, Hawaii). A revised and augmented version of
her dissertation was published with the title Local Portraiture: Through the Lens of the
19thCentury Iranian Photographers (Leiden University Press, Iranian Studies Series, 2012).
She has worked as project manager and curator (Science Museum in Barcelona;
Department of Culture of the Embassy of Spain in Prague; and Museum of East Asian
Art in Cologne). She worked as a postdoctoral curatorial research fellow at the Museum
of East Asian Art in Cologne (2009-2014) and wrote the exhibition’s catalogue From
Istanbul to Yokohama: The Camera Meets Asia, 1839-1900 (Walther König Verlag, 2014). Se
has co-edited two special issues on 19th century photography: “The First Hundred Years of
Iranian Photography”, History of Photography, Volume 37, issue 1; and „175 Years of
Photography in Spain“, PhotoResearcher, No 21.
She is currently working as a postdoctoral Research Associate at the IZWT
(Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies) at Bergische Universität
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Wuppertal. Her research project is focused on 19th century moon photography and
cartography.
Perich, Shannon, ‘Peeling Back the Historical Layers of Ambrotypes’
The ambrotype is often seen as a sort stepchild in the history of photography simply
serving as a transitional format from the singular, precious daguerreotype to multiple,
paper-based photographic formats created from glass plate negatives. An art-historical
model cannot be used to fully understand this format that is better served by material
culture and visuals studies perspectives. A closer examination of the ambrotype’s history
may deepen our understanding of social and cultural relationships to photography. Why
did some photographers limit their commercial opportunities by only producing
ambrotypes? Why did consumers choose to purchase a single image when multiples were
available? What does the legal case against Mathew Brady say about how photography
was understood? Why does the ambrotype technically look different in different
countries? Did the ambrotype point to a need, or give rise to the awareness, of keeping
certain types of images private, such as relationships, a sense of personal modesty and
political affiliations? Each ambrotype represents a series of complex and nuanced
decisions made by producers and consumers that change over the course of the short
lifespan of the ambrotype and diverse geo-locations; a wider and deeper study will help us
understand not just the history of the ambrotype but also of the era in which they were
produced and consumed.
Biography: Perich is a Curator in the Photographic History Collection at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History where she has worked for over
nineteen years. She is the author of The Changing Face of Portrait Photography: From
Daguerreotype to Digital (Smithsonian Books 2011) and Portrait of Family (Harper Collins
2007) about Richard Avedon's photographs of the John F. Kennedy family. Her most
recent exhibition in 2014 was co-curated in Los Angeles at the Annenberg Space for
Photography, Country: Portraits of An American Sound. Other exhibitions include, Pushing
Boundaries: Portraits by Robert Weingarten, The Civil War Experience at the Smithsonian,
and Honky-Tonk: Photographs by Henry Horenstein, 1972-1981. She has taught History of
Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art and lectures frequently. Her blogs
can be found on NPR’s Picture Show and the National Museum of American History’s
website. She has recently been collaborating and presenting with a doctoral candidate on a
research project that explores curating in the 21st century. Perich’s research often explores
the dynamic intersections of the art, technology and history of photography, especially
where the personal experience and a national narrative are at play. That interest is
currently expanding as she serves as the project director for a new floor of the Museum
exploring American culture and national identity (opening summer 2018).
Peter, Carolyn, ‘Hippolyte Bayard—A Connector’
In a 1999 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell described ‘a particularly rare and
extraordinary type [of person]’. This type—‘the connector’—knows everybody and
quietly spreads information while bringing together unexpected parts of society. The
photographer Hippolyte Bayard was a nineteenth-century connector. Although he
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presented himself as a solitary, vulnerable figure in his 1840 self-portrait Le Noyé (The
drowned man), Bayard can be seen as a central hub in the early days of photography.
My paper will argue that Hippolyte Bayard spread the aesthetics and techniques of
photography into artistic, scientific, and governmental circles in France and Europe. As
evidenced in Bayard’s 1839 album of photographic experiments found at the Société
française de photographie (SFP), he quickly shared his investigations with the scientist
Jean-Baptiste Biot, the engraver Gavarni, the architect F. C. Gau, and the comte de
Clarac, a conservator of antiquities at the Louvre, among others. By July 1839, he
presented his photographs in the company of Old Master and contemporary paintings in a
public art exhibition. Bayard submitted letters explaining his photographic recipes to the
Académie des sciences and the Académie des beaux-arts. He also ensured the legacy of
fellow photographers as a founder of SFP and through gifts of their works to SFP and
other institutions such as the Musée des arts et métiers. Along the way, Bayard’s sphere
grew. Henry Fox Talbot and Josef Hamel, an emissary for the Russian Academy of
Sciences, followed his progress closely as seen in diaries, correspondence, and official
reports.
The canon of the history of photography has chosen to ignore Bayard or to reinforce a
view of an isolated inventor with some limited success. However, to borrow from
Gladwell, when you connect all the dots that constitute the vast apparatus of government,
the arts, and societal influence, you’ll end up coming back to Bayard again and again.
Bayard was a connector.
Biography: Carolyn Peter is the Director and Curator of the Laband Art Gallery at Loyola
Marymount University, Los Angeles. Peter previously served as Associate Curator of the
Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the UCLA Hammer Museum. She has curated
numerous exhibitions and is the author of A Letter from Japan: The Photographs of John
Swope, ‘Wordsmithing: Mixing the Verbal with the Visual in the Art of Wallace Berman
and Robert Heinecken’, Stephen Berkman: Chamber Pieces, and ‘California Welcomes the
World: The International Expositions, 1893–1939, and the Selling of a State’.
Ramalingam, Chitra, ‘Histories of Photography as Invention and Science in Victorian
Britain’; see also Sheehan (roundtable)
The newly invented medium of photography was first made public in an era marked by
intense controversies about the nature of scientific discovery and invention, and about
how the histories of discovery and invention should be told. These debates unfolded
against a backdrop of great uncertainty about the social character and status of the
scientific and inventing communities. This paper explores the earliest historical writing
on photography in Britain in popular and technical periodicals and photographic manuals,
in which early ‘histories of the art’ and commentaries on patent and priority disputes were
published. These first histories of the medium—which was widely described as both an art
and a science, an invention and a discovery—were crucial in constructing a durable origin
story for photograph. Their commitment to relocating origins, as well as their distinction
between the slow accumulation of knowledge and the sudden spark of innovation—
concerns and assumptions that continued to resurface in the following century and a half
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of scholarship on early photography—were shaped by the new Victorian literary genres of
historical writing about science and technology
Biography: Chitra Ramalingam is Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine
Program at Yale University and Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art.
She is co-editor of William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale, 2013) and author
of ‘To See a Spark: Experiment and Visual Experience in Victorian Science’, under
contract with Yale University Press.
Rozental, Rotem, ‘Pioneering the Body: The Formation of the Zionist Photographic
Archive’
This paper observes the photographic archive established by the Propaganda Department
of the Jewish National Fund (Hakeren Hakayemet Le’Israel, abbreviated KKL in Hebrew,
JNF in English) in the 1920s, its move to Palestine, and impact on the photographic
landscape in consecutive decades. This archival space is understood as a constitutive
machinery, generating an image of land and body, striving to produce a community and
its historical narratives. The institutional photographic archive is thus conceived as a
crucial site of power and disciplinary political functions, as a machine of homogenizing
and a space of fantasy of mastery and control.
The JNF purchased and leased lands from local authorities and private individuals, and
prepared an infrastructure for the Zionist immigrants (referred to as Olim, ascenders). By
examining operational procedures and the public circulation of commissioned
photographic works, this study aims to show that the archive is not a system of
documentation but an apparatus appropriated by a nationalist movement whose sovereign
is an imagined state. Seen as an ideological system of making meaning in the landscape,
the archive effectively constructs the Zionist narrative and, crucially, shapes a new body
formation: that of the pioneer, the powerful halutz, occupying and redeeming his
seemingly desolate homeland. I ask to observe the photographic enunciation of this body
in the landscape, and the ways in which it excluded its others, namely, non-Zionist Jewish
communities and previous Arab residents in various territories.
Biography: Rotem Rozental is a doctoral candidate in the Art History Department of
Binghamton University, New York. Her dissertation investigates photographic archives,
technologies, and nationalism, focusing on Zionist archives (1903–48). She is the Online
Editorial Director of the Shpilman Institute for Photography and the Jerusalem Season of
Culture. Her writings and scholarly texts have appeared in publications such as
Artforum.com, Philosophy of Photography, and Uncertain States. She recently interviewed
Santiago Sierra, Walead Beshty, and Rodulf Steiner. Her curatorial projects include ‘We:
Festi-Conference for Creative Collectives’ (Jerusalem, 2012–13), ‘Three Cities against the
Wall’ (New York, Ramallah, and Tel Aviv, 2005), and most recently, the collaborative
archival project ‘Outlet: The Archive of the Israeli Trade Center’. In the past decade,
Rotem has been working as a consultant, editor, writer, and organiser for various
international publications, as well as cultural non-profits and organisations.
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Ryan, James R., ‘Placing Early Photography: The World and Work of Robert Hunt in
Mid-Nineteenth Century England’
The invention of photography in the late 1830s is conventionally framed in terms of
simultaneous rival developments by a few well-known figures in England and France.
Less attention has been paid to how early photography was shaped by a wider cast of
individuals placed in both metropolitan and regional networks of science and applied arts.
This paper examines the significant but frequently overlooked contributions made to
early photography by the chemist and popular science writer Robert Hunt (1807–1887) as a
way to open up questions about the historical geography of early photography.
Based in South West England, and from a relatively humble background, Hunt
experimented widely with early photographic processes and shared his findings with both
Sir John Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot. Hunt’s book A Popular Treatise on the Art of
Photography (1841) was the earliest English language manual and general history of
photography. Hunt occupied an influential position in local, regional, and national
networks and institutions of applied science and art, notably as Secretary of the Royal
Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth (1840–45), where he championed photography
in Cornish learned society through exhibitions and lectures, and Keeper of Mining
Records in London from 1845. He took founding roles in the Calotype Club (1847) and the
Royal Photographic Society (1853), and played an important part in opposing Talbot’s
patent claim on the photographic process. Hunt’s researches and writings on chemistry
and light secured him election to the Royal Society in 1854. Hunt’s important—and at
times contentious—contributions to early photography need to be better appreciated and
understood alongside the contemporary place of science and applied arts in Cornwall and
beyond. As Hunt’s work demonstrates, accounts of early photography might profit from
paying more attention to the diverse places and networks in which photographers, as well
as their photographs and writings, were located.
Biography: James R. Ryan is Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography at
the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall. His research interests lie in the
historical and cultural geography of modernity and concern three overlapping fields:
photography and visual culture; British colonialism and imperialism; and AngloAmerican geographical knowledge and science. Recent publications include: Photography
and Exploration (Reaktion, 2013); Visible Mending: Everyday Repairs in the South West (with
Caitlin DeSilvey, photographs by Steven Bond; Uniform Books, 2013); and New Spaces of
Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century (edited with Simon Naylor; I.
B. Tauris, 2010). His research on Robert Hunt is supported by a British AcademyLeverhulme Senior Research Fellowship.
Sage, Jessica, ‘The Photograph and What It Doesn’t Show: Alice Liddell as the Beggar
Maid’
Photographs of children taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whilst receiving some
critical consideration since their rediscovery by Helmut Gernsheim in 1947, have been
subject to little sustained analysis and are often positioned as evidence for biographical
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assertions (see, for example, Edward Wakeling’s Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle).
As Jacqueline Rose has argued, ‘The innocence of the photograph as a record or document
seems to vouch for the innocence of our pleasure in looking, and no more so perhaps than
when what we are looking at is a child.’ Following her argument, this paper questions
Victorian photography’s relation to childhood through a claim to a shared innocence and
follows through the consequences this has for considerations of early photography.
In doing so it revisits perhaps the most famous of Dodgson’s photographs, Alice Liddell as
the Beggar Maid (1858), and questions the critical position that claims this picture shows or
reveals either the real Victorian child or the intentions of the nineteenth-century
photographer (Margaret Higonnet’s Pictures of Innocence; Diane Waggoner’s
‘Photographing Childhood: Lewis Carroll and Alice’). It critiques the notion, common in
art history debates, that early photography gives access to a past scene of photographing
(see for example John Berger, and Harry Berger’s exemption of photography from his
expansive ‘fictions of the pose’ theory). Instead, the paper develops a new reading of
Dodgson’s photograph, drawing on interdisciplinary debates about art, literature, and
meaning.
It reads Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid as a construction of childhood and a wholly
mediated seeing, an analysis that raises questions about the hegemonic position of the
photograph as access to the real. In concluding, this paper repositions Dodgson’s
photographs of children through a destabilisation of them as evidential objects, arguing
that Daniel A. Novak does not go far enough in his claims about realism and
manipulation in Victorian photography.
Biography: I am an early-career academic, having completed my PhD on ‘Constructions
of the Child in Charles Dodgson’s Photographs and Their Criticism’ in 2014, and I work
as a sessional lecturer at the University of Reading. My research interests include
nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, critical theory, children’s literature, and
archive theory; current projects include a chapter on contemporary children’s book covers
and a paper on Victorian retellings of the Cophetua myth. I am also the founder of the
@wethehumanities project, which offers an online platform to humanities researchers and
practitioners. My first article, ‘The Object of Criticism: Dodgson’s Missing Photographs
of Children’, will be published in Parallax in October.
Saltz, Laura, ‘Made By Light? Actinism and the Discourses of Early Photography’
This paper re-examines the place of actinism in photographic history. Actinism is John
Herschel’s name for the physical and chemical changes that take place when objects are
exposed to the sun’s rays. Because the term describes the most fundamental part of the
photographic process (which is now simply called ‘photochemistry’), it has seemed too
commonplace to merit investigation. At the same time, as the name for physical reactions
initiated by certain wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, it has seemed too
scientifically obscure.
I demonstrate that actinism generated intense cultural fascination in the Anglo-American
reception of early photography. Actinism pointed to a conundrum that had considerable
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scientific and metaphysical implications: despite the widespread notion that photographs
were made by light, the forces within a ray that produce photochemical changes are not
the same as those that produce illumination. In practical terms, this meant it was possible
to make photographs in the dark. Far more than a matter of semantics, the distinction
between light and actinism prompted writers such as chemist and historian Robert Hunt
to suggest that actinism was a force as crucial to the planet as gravity. Responsible both
for making images and for the growth of plants in photosynthesis, actinism—and thus
photography—might hold the key to the mystery of life itself.
Examining a range of mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American popular and scientific
texts, this paper demonstrates that actinism was prominent in photographic discourses of
the time. In highlighting the paradox that images seemingly ‘made by light’ were in fact
created by a previously unknown and invisible force in nature, actinism anchored early
conceptions of photography to the discourses of Romantic science. As much as
photography was a picture-making technology, it was also a legible sign of formerly
illegible operations of nature.
Biography: Laura Saltz is an Associate Professor at Colby College in the United States,
where she teaches in and directs the American Studies programme. Her scholarship has
focused on the engagements of nineteenth-century American literature with photography,
and on early photography and the science of light. Her book manuscript is entitled
‘Imponderables: Photography and the Science of Light in American Romantic Literature’.
Schneider, Jürg, ‘Rethinking Early African Photography: Business Strategies and Social
Networks’
Since Christraud Geary’s statement in 1988 that ‘a potentially fruitful area of research on
photography in Africa has been almost totally ignored, namely photography by Africans,
including the role of African photographers in early photography’, scholars of various
academic disciplines have increasingly embarked on exploring the work and biographies
of nineteenth-century African photographers, thus continuing and expanding research
carried out by pioneers such as Vera Viditz-Ward and Stephen Sprague. In addition to
this, African photography, in particular mid-twentieth-century African portrait and
studio photography, has moved into the focus of the international art market. Altogether,
this thriving interest in Africa’s photographic heritage and contemporary production has
led to a substantial and still growing number of books and articles dealing with African
photography from the mid-nineteenth century to date. Hence, although we know today
the general outlines of the history of African photography and dispose of a number of
studies devoted to individual nineteenth-century West African photographers such as the
Lutterodts, N. Walwin Holm, or Francis W. Joaque, comparatively little research has
been conducted into the professional environment in which early West African
photographers, economically and socially, prospered and failed. To do this we still have to
rely on bits and pieces but it is worth taking this step forward by asking where these
photographers learnt their profession, what their social standing was, how and where they
promoted their businesses, if there were also female photographers, and what types of
images were the most sold. Researching these questions, the paper will focus on the West
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African coastal elite of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the way they
appropriated and integrated photography in their everyday social practices.
Biography: Jürg Schneider is an historian affiliated with the Centre for African Studies,
University of Basel, Switzerland. He has organised and curated various exhibitions. His
writing on historical and contemporary African photography and photography in Africa
appears in various journals and books. He co-initiated the project
http://www.africaphotography.org, a platform for historical photographs from Africa, as
well as www.african-photography-initiatives.org, a non-profit organisation involved in
various projects with the common goal of promoting Africa’s rich photographic heritage.
Recent publications include essays in Visual Anthropology and in the collection Photography
and Its Origins (Routledge, 2015).
Schwartz, Joan M., ‘Rethinking Discursive Origins: Alexander von Humboldt,
Photography, and the Geographical Imagination’
The origins of photography have usually been traced to the aspirations of a professional
diorama painter, on the one hand, and the frustrations of an amateur artist, on the other.
But did the widespread acceptance and rapid spread of photography have much to do with
artistic endeavour? How might the history of photography be recast if the camera is
considered a tool of observation and the photograph a way of seeing across space and
time? What if we rethink the origins of photography to situate it, not in the contexts of
scientific invention and pictorial convention, but rather in the nineteenth-century
enthusiasm to know the world and visualise one’s place in it?
In this paper, I suggest that the discursive origins of photography can be traced, literally
and symbolically, to a historic meeting in December 1838, when Alexander von
Humboldt, in the company of noted astronomer François Jean Dominique Arago and the
famed physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, paid a visit to the Paris studio of Louis-Jacques-Mandé
Daguerre, as part of a committee of the Académie des sciences sent to assess Daguerre’s
new process for fixing the images of the camera obscura. The significance of this
encounter between one of the founders of modern geography and one of the founders of
modern photography has largely been overlooked.
Although Humboldt played a key behind-the-scenes role in the technological acceptance
of and popular enthusiasm for Daguerre’s process, he is known only as a minor figure at
the dawn of photography. His connections to Daguerre—and to William Henry Fox
Talbot—are noted only in passing in English-language histories of photography, and are
all but ignored in histories of geography. Yet, Humboldt’s concerns shaped photographic
practices; Daguerre’s invention influenced the geographical imagination. This paper
examines the intellectual space at the dawn of photography where the figure of Alexander
von Humboldt looms large.
Biography: Joan M. Schwartz is incoming Chair of the Department of Art History and
Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Kingston, where she is also cross-appointed to the
Department of Geography. From 1977 to 2003, she was a specialist in Photography
Acquisition and Research at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. Her current
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research project, funded by a four-year Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, focuses on the role of ‘photographic images and
geographical imaginings’ in nineteenth-century Canadian nation-building. She is a Fellow
of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Society of American Archivists.
Sheehan, Tanya (roundtable chair), ‘Photography and Its Origins’
This research roundtable brings together art historians and historians of science to rethink
the notion of the ‘first photograph’. These scholars will debate how and why we invest in
originary photographic images as the basis for understanding photography’s past, present,
and future.
The pursuit for a singular ‘first’ has long preoccupied historians, collectors, and curators of
photography. Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras has topped lists of
possible candidates since Helmut Gernsheim rediscovered the pewter plate in 1952 and the
Harry Ransom Center dubbed it ‘the world’s first photograph’. While more recently there
have been efforts to locate photography’s beginnings outside Europe and the United
States, most assume that the earliest photographs in South America, Africa, and other
parts of the world could only derive from an essentially Western invention. Today reports
of newly rediscovered ‘firsts’—such as the photographic drawing of a leaf that came up for
auction in 2008—spark vociferous debate, but rarely lead people to question the cultural
and technological foundations of the photographic medium.
Why, this roundtable asks, do scholars in the West invest so much in the so-called
photographic ‘firsts’, charging them with meaning and economic value often exceeding
their materiality? What effect does such investment have on the writing of photography’s
history? What, ultimately, does the obsession with ‘first photographs’ allow scholars to
see, and not to see, about the medium?
Each roundtable participant will deliver a short paper that raises critical questions about
‘first photographs’ and introduces a case study from his or her own research. Mirjam
Brusius (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History of Art, University of Oxford) will
use her investigation of William Henry Fox Talbot’s extensive archive to reconsider the
weight scholars, especially art historians, have placed on his earliest photographs. Rather
than marking a discrete beginning in Talbot’s knowledge or practice, she argues, these
images derived from a discourse of inscription that runs throughout his archive. Maki
Fukuoka (Lecturer, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of
Leeds) will turn to some of the earliest photographs produced outside the West, critiquing
the teleological, Eurocentric narratives in which many scholars would situate those
images. By mining indigenous sources, she shows that Japanese scientific discourse
shaped how the ‘first photographs’ were appropriated and understood in Japan. Carmen
Pérez González (Research Associate, Bergische Universität Wuppertal) will look at the
myriad ‘first’ astronomical photographs created between the 1840s and the end of the
nineteenth century, attending to the first words and expectations that scientists attached
to them and, in effect, to the medium of photography. Chitra Ramalingam (Research
Associate, Yale Center for British Art) will reconsider the earliest arguments about
photographic ‘firsts’ in Victorian Britain, showing how they were part of a broader
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contemporary debate over how best to narrate the histories of scientific discovery and
technical invention. Finally, Larry Schaaf (Director, William Henry Fox Talbot
Catalogue Raisonné, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) will address how and why
we value ‘first’ photographs by reflecting on the dating of Niépce’s View from the Window
at Le Gras and on the controversy that surrounded his speculations about the now
infamous leaf print in 2008. Tanya Sheehan (Associate Professor, Department of Art,
Colby College) will moderate the ensuing discussion, drawing upon her efforts to rethink
the historiography of early photography in the edited volume Photography and Its Origins.
Tanya Sheehan is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Colby College. She is
the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011).
Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its
Origins (2015), and the forthcoming Grove Art Guide to Photography. As a research associate
at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard
University, Tanya Sheehan is completing a book that explores ideas about race in
American photographic humour. She serves as editor of the Archives of American Art
Journal and organizer of the Photography and Migration Project based at Colby College.
Stevenson, Sara, ‘Accident in Early Photography—The Uncontrolled Art’
The industrial or technological origins of photography proposed an extension of human
skill, a support system, which would enable design and copying to be efficiently achieved.
William Henry Fox Talbot compared it to an imperial road, as a direct method of
communication—‘the royal road to drawing’.
In its realisation, the photograph took an independent turning, and developed a life of its
own, whether beyond or alongside human intention and control. The camera as a machine
proved not to be the equivalent of human seeing—making a photograph was difficult;
achieving consistent results was a serious challenge; capturing or controlling the intended
image—all tripped over accidents of life, chemistry, and physics.
It is proposed to take a brief look at the nature of such accidents, as they were seen at the
time, and for their impact on modern scholarship. The intention is to look at some of the
possibilities of the new visual form through the unexpected and partially uncontrolled
results, which skewed it from its role as a practical form of industrial assistance into an
independent art form.
Biography: Dr Sara Stevenson was Chief Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland
for twenty-six years, and was responsible for building and developing the Scottish
National Photography Collection. She has specialised in the work of David Octavius Hill
and Robert Adamson, and her doctorate from the University of St Andrews was called
‘The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill’. This was published by Yale University Press
in 2002 and won, in 2003, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity prize for
writing. She is about to publish (in June), with Alison Morrison-Low of the National
Museums, the critical narrative account of Scottish photography in the first thirty years.
She is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and Research
Associate of the National Museums Scotland.
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Tunesi, Annalea, ‘Stefano Bardini’s Photographs: From a Network Instrument to a
Reinterpretation and Objectification of Works of Art’
Nineteenth-century art dealers, from the middle of the century onwards, increasingly
adopted photography as a means to document and show clients works of art in their
collections. Photography, during its rapid development, became a new form of
documentation, which accelerated the process of memorialisation, objectifying past and
present. The physical presence of photographs constantly recalls the past and fills the gap
between the time of their creation and the present. Stefano Bardini (1836–1922) was a
polymath: art dealer, collector, amateur architect, and photographer. As art dealer he
dominated nineteenth-century international art collecting for fifty years. In 1883, Bardini
created a contemporary space that combined two important elements: the commercial and
the museological. Furthermore, Bardini set up a photographic studio in order to document
the works of art in his collections and interior displays. He left an archive of 6,000 images.
His photographs were created using a sophisticated process that combined composition,
lighting, perspective, symmetry, and frames in a unique manner. These photographs
therefore had several functions. Firstly, as tool for selling works of art. As objects they
travelled and were shown to clients, creating a virtual community of amateurs around
Bardini. Secondly, these images established Bardini’s power as art dealer and collector,
showing consciously and unconsciously how he was rooted in his time. In this paper I will
analyse three photographs. The first is one of Bardini’s many portraits, a statement of his
personal social improvement. The second, a still life created from works of art in his
collection, presents two aspects, the documentary and the aesthetic: a photograph of works
of art and a photograph as work of art. The third photograph shows one of Bardini’s
interior displays and can be seen both as an historical document—showing Bardini’s taste
and his museological project—and as an instrument of propaganda.
Biography: After attending the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Annalea
worked for sixteen years as an art director and set designer. Her PhD research at Leeds
began with the Florentine art dealer Stefano Bardini (1836–1922), focusing on medieval and
Renaissance revival in Florence and in England, and the iconological analysis of
nineteenth-century photographs and displays of interiors. She has delivered papers at the
Wallace Collection, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Senate House, and at the
2014 College Art Conference in New York with a paper on Bardini and his marketing
technique. She is preparing a postdoctoral project on the relationship between Bardini and
his English clients as a matter of taste in Italy and in England.
Warren, Treena, ‘Animal Magic: The Photograph and Nineteenth-Century Narratives of
Enfreakment’
Like the anthropomorphic inhabitants of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, which featured a
talking rabbit, frog footmen, and mutating pig/baby, the performers in Victorian freak
shows were often styled as human-animal hybrids such as Ella Harper the ‘Camel Girl’,
Millie and Christine McCoy the ‘Two-Headed Nightingale’, and the famous ‘Elephant
Man’ Joseph Merrick, to name some prominent examples. As Robert Bogdan maintains,
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these identities were very much the construction of entertainment culture (including the
input and cooperation of the ‘freaks’ themselves), and this paper will explore how the
photographic image was a crucial component of the strategies and techniques used in the
staging and promotion of these ‘human curiosities’. Often used in advertising, and sold as
souvenirs, the photograph’s unique status as both documentary record and aesthetic
endeavour enabled narratives of natural history, Gothic horror and nineteenth-century
celebrity culture, to converge in a spectacle that was both fantastic and monstrous.
Such human-animal conflations also play on a conceptual interspace that is horrific in
Kristeva’s sense of the ‘abject’, producing beings that cannot be comfortably
accommodated by traditional modes of species classification and thereby provoking
disturbing questions about subjectivity, selfhood, and the other: sensations that are
compounded by the photograph’s inherently uncanny qualities and its evocation of death.
While the freak show is essentially a discourse of entertainment that incorporates
traditional interpretations of the anomalous body as a natural marvel or portent, the
nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a parallel, medical discourse that defined
physical difference as pathological. Looking at images from the archives of Barts
Pathology Museum, I will also examine the role photography played in the increasing
medicalisation of corporeal disparity and consider how the aesthetic conventions of
display compare and diverge in medical and theatrical photographs of the freak.
Biography: Treena Warren is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, researching
manifestations of the horrific and fantastic in nineteenth-century photography. She is a
lifelong admirer of the strange and macabre in both nature and art.
Ward, Shelagh Mary, ‘Capturing Careers—Female Employment in the Photographic
Industry in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’
This short paper aims to focus attention on women employed in the flourishing trade of
photography during late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Commercial
photographers were predominantly male, yet a substantial number of women worked as
photographers during this period, either on their own account, in partnership, or for an
employer.
A considerable number of male photographers worked with their wives as recognised or
unacknowledged partners. In addition to this, the vast majority of photographers engaged
female staff to perform a variety of subsidiary roles: artistic, technical, and clerical,
depending upon studio size. These roles provided longstanding employment for women
and opportunities for career progression, which included management, partnership, and
running their own successful businesses. This paper examines the extent and nature of
female employment and the development of careers and businesses, celebrating the
achievements of the everyday female workforce, who have been largely overlooked.
By consulting census material from 1861 until 1911, local directories, press, and original
cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs taken by female studio photographers of the
period, it offers an overview of female involvement in the industry and charts the
progress of various women’s lives and work. It is illustrated with photographs showing
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the work of female studio photographers from archive collections of the Royal
Photographic Society and the Kodak Museum held at the National Media Museum, and
my own personal collection.
This ongoing research into women’s employment in nineteenth- and early twentiethphotography developed from a smaller case study which was delivered as a paper entitled
‘A Vision of Progress: Victorian Studio Photographers in Bradford’ at the Victorian
Cities Revisited: Heritage and History Conference (a joint initiative between the
Transporter Bridge Visitor Experience Project and University of Huddersfield), held in
Middlesbrough in October 2014.
Biography: Dr Shelagh Mary Ward is an Associate of Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies,
Leeds Trinity University, where she studied for her MA Victorian Studies and doctorate.
She is an active member of the LCVS post-doctoral research group with research interests
in female criminality and representation, and Victorian/ Edwardian photographers. In
addition to other employment, she lectures on the MA Photography programme at
Bradford Whistling Woods International Film School (Bradford College, validated by
Teesside University).
Waters, Erin, ‘Interior Life: Photography’s Place in the Home’
Using my extensive collection of photographs of interior spaces, I will demonstrate that
late Victorians and Edwardians displayed photography not only to remember loved ones
or tastefully decorate, but also to express themselves. I will focus on the popularity of
collage photographic displays (which often took up entire walls) while examining people’s
use of stock art photographic prints and photographs of family and friends. Interwoven
with photographs from my collection will be photographic advertising, images, and
commentary gathered from magazines and books of the period. The commentary about
how to use photographs is enlightening because of the variety of options discussed and the
emphatic nature of the opinions about what was proper.
One design critic, Hester M. Poole, wrote in January 1894’s Household News that ‘without
pictures walls are bare and cheerless [but] it must be confessed they may be made
eyesores’. What Poole described as eyesores are actually the most intriguing elements of
interiors designed using photographs: those instances where the decor trended towards
large-scale collage. A variety of novel design schemes are evident in both the literature
and in the photographic evidence, most expansively in those photographs featuring cosy
corners or documenting a dormitory room. The photographs hung in one’s own space—
collections of family, friends, places, and famous persona—were often generously
interspersed with ephemera and became visual networks of a person’s life. Budding
snapshooters wanted to preserve something they knew was ephemeral. The documentary
photographs they took of their creations offer us glimpses of a time when interior design
and a concept of individual personality were evolving simultaneously with the diversity
of affordable photographic processes. Thus, the surviving antique photographs themselves
are the creator’s catalogue of her vision, a personality writ large.
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Biography: Erin Waters is a full-time photography dealer based in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. Thanks to her father, a photographer turned collector/dealer, she has
collected photographs since she was eight years old. Waters has a degree in Russian
Studies from Hamilton College. Her Honours thesis, ‘Cataloguing Empire: Photographic
Typologies in Late Imperial Russia (1839–1917)’, explored the work of William Carrick and
Sergei Prokudin-Gorski in conjunction with ideas of empire in Russia. In 2002, she was
awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia, where she conducted an oral history and
photography project with Russian babushki. Waters has an MA in Museum Studies from
New York University, where she researched vernacular photography’s place in art
museums while investigating the views of collectors, curators, and dealers. Her
photography collection has been featured in a number of exhibitions. She is currently on
the board of The Daguerreian Society. Waters sells at shows around the United States, on
eBay as fotographiya, and on her family’s website, www.finedags.com.
Ziętkiewicz, Marta, ‘Making Stars: Staged Photographs of Nineteenth-Century European
Actors’
This paper will explore how photography helped to create a new status for nineteenthcentury European theatre actors as celebrities, and how their photographs contributed to
portray them as heroes of bourgeois society. Since the mid-nineteenth century, immense
economic, political, and cultural changes made theatre a popular form of entertainment in
Europe, virtually accessible and affordable to the members of any social class. Theatres
turned into prosperous enterprises. Whereas prior to the mid-nineteenth century they
were mostly managed by troupes, at that moment in time businessmen and state officials
took them under their entrepreneurial and political wings. As a consequence, the actors'
social status weakened, and their social fate became highly dependent on their own public
popularity as performers. Actors began taking advantage of photography on a regular
basis, to increase their visibility and popularity.
Analysing visual materials, press releases, and articles, as well as letters and diaries, I will
show what social and cultural functions photographs of actors fulfilled, how they were
circulating in public, in what contexts they were used, and what meanings their viewers
read into the images that they projected. I will focus on photographs of actors in character;
that is, pictures that not only displayed their visual likenesses but also their ability to live
up to professional standards. However, attending specifically to photographs of renowned
Polish actors Jan Królikowski and Michał Chomiński, the paper will consider literature in
theatre history to extract nineteenth-century actor photographs from such histories of
photography that subsumed them under the exclusive category of commercial photoportraiture. I will argue that they served the social needs of actors who struggled for
public recognition in the new cultural and economic reality that reshaped the nature of
European life in the nineteenth century.
Biography: Marta Ziętkiewicz works as a researcher for the externally funded project
‘Sources for the Nineteenth-Century History of Polish Photography’ at the National
Library of Poland/Liber Pro Arte Society. She is also collaborating as a researcher with
the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, and is a Lecturer
in History of Photography at the Warsaw School of Photography. Having obtained her
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Master’s degree in History of Art from the University of Warsaw, Marta is currently
completing her PhD in the Institute of Fine Arts at the Polish Academy of Science
(Warsaw), specialising in the history of nineteenth-century Polish photography. Her
research interest focuses on the development of early photographic markets in Poland and
the subsequent establishment of international networks of photographic knowledge
exchange.
Campus Map
Parking: Unfortunately, we cannot provide on-campus parking, but there is a car park just
over the other side of Brayford Pool on Lucy Tower Street.
Taxis: Taxis in Lincoln are quite cheap. We recommend Handsome Cabs: 01522 545352.