Photography and the Artistic
Imagination in Victorian and
Edwardian Britain
Yale-in-London
Spring 2014
Course Tutor: Dr Sarah Turner
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Synopsis
This course will explore the technological and aesthetic development of
photography in nineteenth-century Britain. Although imaging equipment,
such as the camera obscura, had existed for several centuries, the nineteenth
century witnessed photographic innovation, invention and production at a
tremendous pace. The debate about whether photography was an ‘art’ or
‘science’ was vigorously discussed in the period and we will examine
nineteenth-century critical writings which grapple to come to terms with the
photographic image. In 1839, the British Royal Academy announced the
discovery of a way of obtaining images on paper by the action of light. We
will begin the course by examining the contentious ‘beginnings’ of modern
photography in Britain through the work of Henry Fox Talbot and his
contemporaries. Examining the impact of the daguerreotype (the first kind of
mass produced photograph) on nineteenth-century society, we will place
photography within its artistic and social contexts by looking at
photography’s relationship with the visual arts, journalism, social and
political campaigns, travel, tourism and empire, as well as debates about
materialism and spiritualism. We will also track the developing role of the
figure of the photographer through the nineteenth century and into the
twentieth, as well as the photographic collector (Queen Victoria was noted for
her acquisition of photographs). Photographers encountered in the course
will include: Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Fox Talbot, Clementina
Hawarden, Henry Peach Robinson, Roger Fenton, Alice Mary Kerr and John
Thompson.
Photographic practices and images undoubtedly had a huge impact on a
range of artistic media and we will examine the complex relationships
between photography, painting, sculpture and other visual arts in nineteenthcentury Britain. Key questions to be discussed and examined include: How
did artists in this period use photographs and to what effect? What were the
aesthetic relationships between 'established' art forms and the new ways of
making images which photography offered? Did photography offer new
methods of documenting and circulating artistic images in the nineteenth
century? How was photography displayed and exhibited in this period?
These questions and more will be discussed throughout the course of the
term. By the end of the course, students will:

have gained a deep knowledge of photography in nineteenth-century
Britain and the debates that surrounded its introduction and practice.
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



be aware of different approaches to nineteenth-century photography,
both theoretically and in terms of its practice.
be familiar with the work of a range of nineteenth-century
photographers.
be able to discuss the medium of photography in relation to other
artistic practices.
be familiar with the most current scholarship in the field of Victorian
photography.
The module will make particular use of the excellent collections of
photography in London and the UK, including the Victoria & Museum, the
Royal Collections, the British Library, the Wellcome Collection and the Royal
Photographic Society Collection. A number of seminars will concentrate on
particular photographs/ photographers in these collections. The module will
consist of a mixture of lectures, seminars and site visits to museums, archives
and private collections. An emphasis will be placed on discussion of
particular images and students will be encouraged to formulate their own
arguments about the material covered in the module.
Course outline
We will usually meet on Thursdays 10.00-12.15 in the Seminar Room of the
Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square. Instructions and directions for the
gallery trips will be given at the meeting in Week 1.
Week 1: 16th January
Introductory lecture and overview of the course
Week 2: 23rd January
Seminar: Births and beginnings: the “invention” of photography
Week 3: 30th January
Gallery visit: V&A Photography Gallery
Week 4: 6th February
Gallery visit: the photographic portrait (National Portrait Gallery)
Week 5: ** note change of day** 12th February
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Seminar: photography and the Pre-Raphaelites
Week 6: 20th February
Seminar: photography and travel through the lens of Roger Fenton
Essay 1 due (25 % of overall mark) – hand-in to Nermin by 5pm Friday 21st Feb.
Week 7: 23rd-26th Feb
Trip to Edinburgh, Bradford and York. Timetable to follow.
Week 8: 6th March
Seminar: photography and the artists’ studio
Week 9: Mid-term break
Week 10: 20th March
Seminar: women photographers and collectors in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain
Essay 2 due (25% of overall mark) - hand-in to Nermin by 5pm Friday 21st March.
Week 11: 27th March
Seminar: Landscapes of Modern Life and the Social Worlds of Photography
Week 12: 3rd April
“In Focus” presentation
Week 13: 10th April
Visit: the Wilson Centre for Photography
Week 14: 17th April
Guest lecturer: Sean Willcock . Photography and Imperialism in India
Week 15:
Essay 3 due (25% of overall mark) and image exam (20% of overall mark)
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Assessment
The assessment for this course will comprise of:
1) Two essay papers (25% each): you will choose two topics from a set
list provided by the course tutor. The first paper (1,500 words) is due
on Friday 21st February. The second paper (1,500 words) is due on
Friday 21st March. These should be typed and comply with
‘Appendix A: Presentation of Assignments’ guidelines set out in the
guide to academic policies and procedures.
2) 1 final paper (25%): this will build on your ‘In focus’ class
presentation and will concentrate on a specific photograph and
photographer (1,500-2000 words). This is due in by 5pm on
24th April.
3) Image exam (1 hour) (25%): in this exam, you will be presented with
four images of photographs that we have encountered during the
module. The photographer and essential details about the image
(title, date, medium etc) will be identified for you. You will receive
marks for your visual analysis and critical discussion of the images.
Seminars and visits
Please prepare for the seminars and visits by doing as much of the set reading
as you possibly can. I have only set one presentation task (in Week 12), but I
will ask you to take part in informal group-work and tasks during the
seminars. The seminars will largely comprise of critical discussions of the
texts and images encountered during the course. Please be proactive and
prepare by bringing notes, questions and points for discussion. I will often
begin each seminar with a short presentation to kick things off. We will also
spend a good chunk of time looking carefully at key photographic images and
developing visual analysis skills.
I would also like you to build your own “Album” of images throughout the
course, collecting images of Victorian and Edwardian photographs that
interest you. Each week, we will dedicate the final 15 minutes of the class to
discussing these. You can use the “Albums” file of the shared Dropbox folder
or you might like to get creative and use Wordpress/Pinterest or similar
online tool to collate your images together.
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Readings and resources
The PMC Library holds all of the books on the reading list (please consult
separate sheet). I have also created a Dropbox folder and have deposited
some of the texts that I have an electronic copy of in there. The web is a
wonderful resource for finding images of historic photography. I particularly
like:
http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/home/
http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/
http://www.jeffcurto.com/classes/1105/index.htm
(not the prettiest site but lots of information!)
Any questions? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me by email
([email protected]) or come and see me in my office. You
can check with Lyndsey or Nermin at Reception and they will see if I am in
the building or you can call me on 07740107404 to check when I will be in
my office.
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Week 1: 16th January
Introductory lecture and overview of the course: Thinking about the
photograph, then and now
Humankind lingers unregenerably in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in
mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being
educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more
images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then
just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems.
Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, p. 3
This lecture will set out the key themes for the course and introduce you to
some of the material that we will be looking at in the course. The aim of the
lecture is to give you a broad survey of the course so that you feel prepared to
look at nineteenth-century photographs, photographic techniques and
apparatus and the careers of individual photographers in more detail in the
seminars. We will start to think about how we look at, discuss and write
about the practices, processes and aesthetics of nineteenth-century
photography.
The texts below will help you prepare for the rest of the course (I don’t expect
you to read these cover-to-cover, but a look at the introductions and having a
flick through the images will be particularly helpful).
Steve Edwards, A Very Short Introduction to Photography (Oxford: OUP, 2006)
John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs (London: British Library, 2009)
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence
King, 3rd edition, 2010)
Weaver, Mike (ed.), The Art of Photography 1839-1989 (London and New
Haven: Royal Academy, 1989)
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Week 2: 23rd January
Seminar: “Births” and “beginning” of photography
There are many histories which have triumphantly celebrated the ‘birth’ or
‘discovery’ of photography in the nineteenth century. The year 1839 is
undoubtedly an important chronological marker for the history of
photography, which witnessed the official announcements of the discovery of
two separate photographic processes in Britain and France. However, Stephen
Bann and others have warned about the problems of collapsing such a
complex history into a moment of ‘invention’. In this seminar, we will explore
early photography and the motivating desires to fix an image onto a physical
surface. We will pay particular attention to the work of Louis Daguerre and
Henry Fox Talbot who have regularly been described as the ‘pioneers’ of
photography in Britain.
We will also think more broadly about how we look at, think and write about
photography. The advent and wide use of digital photography has radically
transformed how we conceive of the medium. To help us prepare for our
close study of nineteenth-century photographs in the rest of the course, we
will explore the photograph as both image and object. The photograph exists in
both time and space and, as Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart argue, its
material and presentational forms and its uses are central to its function as a
‘socially salient object’.
Seminar task
To get your “Albums” started, I would like you to post two photographs in
the “Albums” dropbox folder which you are happy to discuss with the rest of
the group (please save them under your named folder). The first photograph
should be a historic photograph from the nineteenth century that you have
come across in the course of your preparation. The second should be a
photograph (digital or chemical) that you have taken. Please come prepared
to discuss these images with the rest of the group.
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Readings for this week
Set texts:
By the time of the seminar, please read, make notes on and come prepared to
discuss the following texts:
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Boston,
MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 22-53 (Chapter 2) – in the Dropbox
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the
materiality of images (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 1-15
(introduction)
Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 3-26 (‘In Plato’s Cave)
– in the Dropbox
Joel Snyder, On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of
Photography (Bullfinch, 1991), 3-35 (Chapter One: ‘Inventing photography’)
Further reading:
Gordon Baldwin et al, Looking at Photographs (Los Angeles: J Paul Getty
Museum, 1991) - this is very useful to help you with terminology. It might
even be worth buying a copy cheaply online.
Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park,
PA: The Pennsylvania State Press, 2006), chapter one
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence
King, 3rd edition, 2010), Part One, pp. 1-24 (this is a good introductory text)
William Henry Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature?
http://www.thepencilofnature.com/brief-historical-sketch/
Brusius, M., Dean, K. And Ramalingam, C. (eds), William Henry Fox Talbot :
beyond photography (New Haven; London: Published by The Yale Center for
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British Art, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, distributed by
Yale University Press, 2013) – the most recent publication on Fox Talbot.
Week 3: 30th January
Gallery visit: The Victoria & Albert Museum
This week we will visit the permanent Photography Gallery at the Victoria &
Albert Museum in South Kensington. In 1858, the V&A –or South Kensington
Museum as it was then known – became the first museum in the world to
display photographs. It is an opportunity for us to look carefully and fisthand at the different techniques, processes and photographers that we have
been discussing.
We will meet at the Paul Mellon Centre at 9.30am and travel to the V&A together.
To help us prepare, I would like you to read some important writing on
historic photography. Eastlake’s text is a particularly significant and
interesting early piece of writing on photography. Eastlake was particularly
close to the
Elizabeth Eastlake, ‘Photography’, in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays
on Photography (Sedgwick: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 39-68 – in the Dropbox
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931), Screen, 13: 1
(1972), 5-26 -in the Dropbox
Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, Atlantic
Monthly, 1859:
http://hnrs353.wikispaces.com/file/view/HolmesOliverWendell.pdf
Further reading:
Arts Council of Great Britain, From today painting is dead : the beginnings
of photography : the Victoria and Albert Museum, 16 March - 14 May 1972 (1972)
Coe, Brian and Haworth-Booth, Mark, A guide to early photographic
processes (London: V&A Publications, 1983)
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Week 4: 6th February
Gallery visit: the photographic portrait (National Portrait Gallery)
For if photography was a mirror to the world, how then might the world have
fashioned itself against its reflected image?
Roger Hargreaves, ‘Putting Faces to the Names’, p. 17
Using the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, we will look at the
nineteenth-century portrait photograph. We will examine the process by
which nineteenth-century sitters visited photographic studios to have their
‘likeness’ taken and the issues of class and social identity which are
inextricably linked to the genre of the ‘portrait’ (in photography and indeed
any medium). The demand for photographic portraits grew throughout the
period and new technical developments allowed them to be produced more
cheaply and in greater numbers.
Meet at the National Portrait Gallery (in the main lobby) at 10am – or you
can meet me at the PMC at 9.40 am to walk there together.
Set reading:
Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The beautiful and the damned: the
creation of identity in nineteenth century photography, (National Portrait
Gallery and Lund Humphries, 2001), 17-56
John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs (London: British Library, 2009), 96-113 (Chapter Four: The
Portrait)
Will Strapp, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Portrait’, in Mike Weaver (ed.)The Art
of Photography 1839-1989, 44-75 – in the Dropbox
Further reading
Juliet Hacking, Princes of Victorian Bohemia : photographs by David Wilkie
Wynfield (Munich; London: Prestel, 2000)
Lara Perry, ‘The carte de visite in the 1860s and the serial dynamic of
photographic likeness’, Art History, 35: 4 (2012), pp. 728-749 – in the Dropbox
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Week 5: ** note change of day** 12th February
Seminar: photography and the Pre-Raphaelites
This seminar will address the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite
movement and photography in the Victorian period. This was very much a
two-way relationship. We will examine how painters, sculptors and
photographers in this period wrestled with questions about “truth to nature”,
realism and the role of photography as a “fine art”. The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood of artists, which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William
Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, came together as a group of artists at
exactly the same time photography was making its presence felt in Britain.
We will use the Pre-Raphaelites as a case study to begin to examine the
rivalries and connections between painting, sculpture and photography in
this period. As Lyndsey Smith explores in her work (see set reading for this
week), the novel presence of the camera not only transformed acts of looking,
but also had a tremendous impact of aesthetic vocabularies of vision and
perception.
We will also use the display on Janey Morris at the National Portrait Gallery
(which we visited in Week 4) to discuss issues surrounding the Pre-Raphaelite
model/muse and photography. See
http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2013/janey-morris-pre-raphaelitemuse.php
Set reading
Waggoner, Diane, The Pre-Raphaelite lens : British photography and painting,
1848-1875 (Farnham: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund
Humphries, 2010), 2-17 in particular, but look at the rest of the catalogue too!
Lindsay Smith, ‘The Seed of the Flower’: Photography and Pre-Raphaelitism’,
Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 55:1 (Winter), 37-33
Further reading
Bartram, Michael, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1985)
Bills, M. and Webb, D., Victorian artists in photographs: the world of G F Watts :
selections from the Rob Dickins Collection (Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery,
2007)
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Lukitsh, J., Thomas Woolner: seeing sculpture through photography (Leeds: Henry
Moore Institute, 2005)
Week 6: 20th February
Seminar: photography, travel and war: the lens of Roger Fenton
This seminar will explore the ways in which Victorian photographers looked
beyond the British Isles for new subjects upon which to train their lenses. As
well as considering the relationship between photography and nineteenthcentury concepts of travel, we will also explore how Victorian photographers
‘framed’ images of warfare and ideas about the documentary nature of the
medium in an age of expanding empires and territorial acquisition. These
issues are of pressing importance today as we confront the relationship of
photography and war around the globe in the twenty-first century. One
photographer that we will look at particularly closely is Roger Fenton.
Set texts for the seminar
Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Cultures of
Realism (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1996), 97-144 (Chapter 4: ‘Framing
the Crimea)
Helen Groth, ‘Technological Mediations and the Public Sphere: Roger
Fenton's Crimea Exhibition and "The Charge of the Light Brigade"’, Victorian
Literature and Culture, 30: 2 (2002), pp. 553-570 – in the Dropbox
John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs (London: British Library, 2009), 50-81 (Chapter 2: To the Ends of
the Earth)
Further reading
Ali Behdad, ‘The Orientalist Photograph’, in Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan,
Photography’s Orientalism (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2013),
pp. 1-32 - in the Dropbox
Gus Macdonald, Camera: A Victorian Eyewitness (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd.,
1979), p. 80-90
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Week 7: 23rd-26th February
Trip to Edinburgh, Bradford and York.
Hurray! A highlight of this visit in regards to this course is the session at the
National Media Museum in Bradford. In preparation, please look carefully at
their website (http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/). I will also provide
some short readings to help you to prepare for our research visits on the trip.
You might also like to read about two of the most famous Scottish
photographers of the Victorian period, Hill and Adamson.
Stevenson, Sara, Facing the light: the photography of Hill & Adamson (Edinburgh:
National Galleries of Scotland, 2002)
The National Media Museum, Bradford
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Week 8: 6th March
Seminar: photography and the artists’ studio
The debate about photography’s status as an art form has dominated
discussions about the medium since its invention. There were many
photographers and writers who wished to elevate photography to the status
of fine art. Equally, there were many commentators who argued that it
remained firmly rooted in the mechanical and scientific and, therefore, could
not be granted the status of art. In this seminar, we will explore the
intersections between photography and other practices of visual art in the
nineteenth century.
There are also vast numbers of nineteenth-century photographic
reproductions of works of art. Photographers quickly established firms
devoted to art reproduction. These international businesses were often made
photographic reproductions for book illustration, for sale as loose prints or as
stereographs. In this workshop, we will look closely at the documentation of
art in the nineteenth century through photographic reproductions. Some of
these photographic reproductions were expensive because they were printed
in limited edition, but others were mass-produced and immensely popular.
There will also be a “hands on” element to this workshop when we look at
stereographs which require a special stereographic viewer.
Set reading
Geoffrey Batchen, ‘An Almost Unlimited Variety: Photography and Sculpture
in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roxanna Marcoci (ed) The Original Copy:
Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2010), pp. 20-26 –in the Dropbox
John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs (London: British Library, 2009), 82-95 (Chapter 3)
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Lawrence
King, 2011), chapter 3, pp. 76-98
Further reading
Hamber, A., A higher branch of the art - photographing the fine arts in England,
1839-1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1996), pp. 1-34
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Vaizey, M. and Blood, A., Photography and art: documents and dreams (London:
Central Books, 2013)
Week 9: Mid-term break
No class this week
Week 10: 20th March
Seminar: women photographers and collectors in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain
Women undoubtedly played a significant role in photography’s history –
right from its introduction. In this seminar we will look at the work of two
know notable practitioners, Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina
Hawarden, as well as the work of lesser-known women photographers. We
will ask questions about the professional status of photography in the
nineteenth century and the impact that this had on women photographers.
Other subjects that we will explore through the photography of Cameron and
Hawarden include: childhood and the subjects of representation; the politics
of being “in front” and “behind” the lens; the status of the “lady amateur”;
women as collectors; albums and their construction.
Set reading
Carol Armstrong, ‘From Clementina to Kasebier: The Photographic
Attainment of the “Lady Amateur”’, October, 91 (Winter 2000), 100-39
Mirjam Brusius , ‘Impreciseness in Julia Margaret Cameron's Portrait
Photographs’, History of Photography, 34:4, 342-355 – in Dropbox
Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden
(1999), 1-33
Further reading
Siegel, Elizabeth, Playing with pictures: the art of Victorian photocollage (Chicago:
The Art Institute of Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2009)
Hudson, G., Sarah Angelina Acland: first lady of colour photography, 1849-1930
(Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2012)
Lawson, J., Women in white : photographs by Clementina Lady Hawarden
(Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1997)
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Mavor, Carol, ‘Collecting loss’, Cultural Studies (1997), 11:1, 111-137 (SVT has
a copy)
Olsen, V., From life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian photography (London:
Aurum, 2003)
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Week 11: 27th March
Seminar: Landscapes of Modern Life and the Social Worlds of Photography
The nineteenth-century witnessed mass urbanisation, migration from the
countryside to towns and cities and rapid industrialisation. Focusing on
Britain and the United States, this seminar will explore how photography
captured these changing social conditions and how photographic practice
was itself an important part of these changes. We will examine the ways in
which social reformers used photography to document, but also ‘stage’, the
living conditions of the urban working classes and the impact that these
images had on other artistic media. As the illustrated, London-based journal
The Graphic noted, photography provided a vehicle by which ‘the manifold
industries of the poor of our great City are transferred from the street to the
drawing room’. What power dynamics were involved in such transferrals?
What purpose did such ‘documents’ serve?
Set reading for the seminar
John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in
Photographs (London: British Library, 2009), 152-161 (Chapter 7)
Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our
Lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), pp. 163-178
John Tagg, ‘God’s Sanitary Law: Slum Clearance and Photography in Late
Nineteenth-Century Leeds’, in John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays
on Photographies Histories (Basingstoke and London: MacMillan, 1988)
Week 12: 3rd April
Student “in Focus” presentations. Detailed instructions will be handed out in
an earlier class.
Week 13: 10th April
Visit: the Wilson Centre for Photography. A special visit to a private
collection and research centre! – more details to follow.
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You might like to look at the catalogue of the recent exhibition at the National
Gallery which was curated by the curator we will mmet at the Wilson Centre,
Hope Kingsley.
Kingsley, Hope, Seduced by art: photography past and present (London: National
Gallery, 2012)
Week 14: 17th April
Guest lecturer: Sean Willcock (University of York). Photography and British
India.
Week 15:
Essay 3 due (25% of overall mark) and image exam (25% of overall mark) –
precise time and location of the exam will be announced in due course.
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