Nineteenth-Century Contexts

An Interdisciplinary Journal

ISSN: 0890-5495 (Print) 1477-2663 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20

Photography and/as nineteenth-century context(s)

Jennifer Green-Lewis

To cite this article: Jennifer Green-Lewis (2020) Photography and/as nineteenth-century

context(s), Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 42:2, 131-135, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2020.1733316

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2020.1733316

Published online: 13 May 2020.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS
2020, VOL. 42, NO. 2, 131–135
https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2020.1733316

INTRODUCTION

Photography and/as nineteenth-century context(s)

Jennifer Green-Lewis
Department of English, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

For much of the nineteenth century, the word photography functioned as it does now: it
was an umbrella term, referencing a variety of objects and practices having to do with
camera-produced images. It was not yoked to a particular chemical event, but suggested
any one of a number of different processes, which themselves were abandoned or
modified and developed over time. Among the more consequential of those developments
was the adaptation of photography to print, which was similarly achieved in a variety of
ways and with different consequences. As Geoffrey Belknap argues in his recent book of
the same name, the phrase “from a photograph,” which accompanied book and newspaper
illustrations for so much of the Victorian period, referenced not just a primary source, nor
even one particular kind of image, but rather a variety of technologies and a series of
events (Belknap 2016).
Print was just one means by which photographs circulated, but until our own age of
pixels and phones, it was among the most far-reaching in its consequences. Photographs
reached a wide segment of the population through their appearance in newspapers, books,
and other commercial publications. They ceased to be rare, privately-held curiosities, and
became part of the matter of everyday life. In so doing they became in a sense less visible,
which is, arguably, how context itself evolves – context being the circumstances in which
we live and to which, for the most part, we pay little or no attention. During the course of
the nineteenth century, photography moved like air into all the spaces of human existence.
While a small number of individual photographs continued to achieve or inherit lasting
public visibility – those with a particular kind of beauty or political significance – the
vast majority became historically invisible. They were part of life’s matter.
Interest in the ramifications of photography’s contextual invisibility provides the con-
nective tissue in this special edition of Nineteenth-Century Contexts. In each of the five
new essays, photography is context as well as text, part of the historical circumstance as
well as a contributor to it; each writer is interested in the way in which photography par-
ticipated in the material and psychological conditions of nineteenth-century life at particu-
lar moments and in specific places. Subjects for discussion are varied: the essays consider
war at mid-century in the context of geological advancement; female agency and same-sex
eroticism in late-century stereographs; the ontological play invited by Victorian photo-
graphs of ancient sculpture; theatrical performance and the stereoscope as tools of cultural
myth-making; and the non-chemical printing processes present to photography’s earliest
days.

CONTACT Jennifer Green-Lewis jmgl@gwu.edu The George Washington University, 617 Phillips Hall, Washington
20052, DC, USA
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
132 J. GREEN-LEWIS

Although Richard Stein and I, your guest editors, gave our authors no particular guide-
lines, their essays nonetheless all represent ways of doing photographic history that clearly
reflect the scholarly movement of the past couple of decades, a movement defined by its
turn away from the linear, biographical narrations of art history and the study of individ-
ual works, toward a material history that attends more closely to the lives and habits of its
consumers or readers. Even where well-known figures and familiar works do appear here –
Roger Fenton’s best-known Crimean photograph is revisited by Stein, while William
Henry Fox Talbot provides the focus of Belknap’s essay – the narratives of accomplish-
ment and lines of inquiry are differently informed and lead elsewhere than they might
have just a few decades ago. Belknap, for example, expands our understanding of
Talbot’s work with his argument that experiments in printing are part of the history of
early photography and that the boundaries we have historically drawn, such as those
between photography and engraving, are of our own making, and are consequently
both artificial and unhelpful. By examining the potential implications of this argument
for our conception of the history of photography, he furthers the work of scholars such
as Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam (2013), whose recent volume
of groundbreaking essays on Talbot carries a suggestive subtitle: Beyond Photography.
Much new work on photographic history might in fact be described as reaching
beyond. Locating itself beyond disciplinary boundaries, deferential to a variety of scho-
larly expertise, it demonstrates that the history of photography no longer belongs to –
or only to – the history of art. Recent scholarship makes a persuasive case for Media
Studies as the appropriate home for the new inter-disciplinary work (Leonardi and
Natale 2018); certainly, it’s hard to argue these days with the view that photography
is a means of communication and networking, or that to tell its life story requires
some study of transportation and reproduction, those locomotive systems that
carried the early photograph away from its singular existence on the gallery wall
and album page to the reproductive and kinetic world of commerce and exchange.
But departments of Literature, too, have also been making their own contributions
to the history of photography, partly because in recent decades they have focused
on the study of reading practices while also dramatically expanding the accepted
boundaries of textuality. Four of the five essays in this volume approach their subjects
from that disciplinary bias, their authors presumably sharing the view that Victorian
photography, as reading material in its own right, and as context for literary develop-
ments, is now not just fair but necessary game for serious students of nineteenth-
century literary and cultural studies. Others have noted the additional influence on
photography’s new historiography of philosophy, women’s studies, anthropology, and
sociology, as well as a recent (and presumably related) emphasis on both the global
and the vernacular (Batchen 2008, 126). A glance through a recent collection on
rethinking the whole notion of photography’s origins shows its authors to be, as
expected, art historians, researchers, and archivists of photography, but also scholars
of American Studies and English Literature, as well as historians of science who
“share an impulse to understand photography in relation to seemingly non-photo-
graphic contexts, such as political happenings, scientific discourses, or practices in
other media” (Sheehan and Zervigón 2015, 4).
“Seemingly” should probably be underscored in that sentence; what we learn from any
one of the essays in this journal edition is that there is no non-photographic context,
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 133

certainly not now, and perhaps not ever, at least since photography entered the Victorian
consciousness. When that happened is of course hard to determine, but we can likely agree
that it wasn’t limited to a particular day in January, 1839. What Tanya Sheehan and
Andrés Mario Zervigón call “the preciousness of the origin” has been largely devalued
by the growing consensus that photography has not just one, but many origins: many
stories, as well as many moments of frustration and breakthrough (2015, 4). Certainly,
photography entered the human imagination at different times, and in a host of
different ways. Most people heard about it before they actually saw an example of it,
and what they heard was not only through the public forum of newsprint, but also
through personal conversation and private correspondence. Individual images were infor-
mally discussed and anticipated before actually being viewed: as Belknap notes elsewhere
of one particularly well-known photograph, “Before it ever reached the pages of Nature,
Darwin’s portrait was already circulating within his letter network, through review, and
through visitors to Rejlander’s studio” (2018, 143). The very concept of photography
was itself a subject for discussion, and speculative exchange about it presumably often pre-
ceded any experience of the practice itself.
Alexandra Neel’s essay is among those that explore the idea of photography, in Neel’s
case specifically with regard to the reanimation of a particular cultural event. Neel con-
siders the peculiar intimacies of the virtual viewing experience of the stereograph, using
as her case study photographs of relics retrieved six years after Sir John Franklin and
his 128-man crew disappeared into the Arctic in 1848. Lieutenant John Cheyne’s 1859
stereographic photographs of the find, available to viewers by subscription, fed a lively
public fascination with the event, and offered a novel way of experiencing it through
what Rachel Teukolsky calls the “intimate public sphere” of the stereoscope. Neel exam-
ines the experience of viewing these stereographs in light of Dickens’s 1857 theatrical
interpretation of the Franklin expedition, a juxtaposition that sheds light on the roles of
both performance and embodiment in the construction of cultural narratives.
Teukolsky also takes up the issue of embodiment in her essay, which examines a
number of racy photographs of women made some forty years later, for the still extant
Victorian market in stereographs. She posits ways of viewing these “ostensibly objectifying
and limiting” images of women that may have “signified differently for Victorian viewers”
than they do for us, and thus raises the possibility of a more complex response, “pointing
to a new, fraught era in female spectatorship and female autonomy.” The stereoscope itself,
she argues, “epitomized modernity and signaled the observer’s new embodiment.” While
Teukolsky draws on Jonathan Crary’s much-cited analysis of that technological embodi-
ment, she also rectifies his omission of “what stereoviews actually depicted,” as well as
“how gender might have informed questions of nineteenth-century spectatorship,” by
looking at specific images in order to provide a fuller accounting of how the stereoscope’s
location at the intersection of private domestic life and public commercial world illumi-
nates the “twisty gender allegiances of the late-Victorian sex wars.” Contributing to the
twistiness was a new kind of emergent spectator: female, mobile, self-consciously
modern, ready to engage with a wider public life, as Teukolsky notes, in places newly
and increasingly hospitable to her, such as stores, tea shops, clubs, and restaurants.
How might this new female spectator have engaged with soft-core erotica of the kind
Teukolsky examines here? How might such photographs anticipate shifting mores of
the late-nineteenth century and in what ways did they signify change?
134 J. GREEN-LEWIS

The readership of photographic images is Teukolsky’s primary focus, as it is for Richard

Stein. Stein’s mid-Victorian readers of Fenton’s Crimean photographs are, in his view,
potentially alert to the geological nuance of reading war against a landscape; at the very
least, they inhabit a world in which an awareness of deep time as well as the concept of
oblivion have both begun to loom. By imagining the viewers’ newly historical sense of
the barren terrain, with its rubble of cannon balls and vast blank sky, Stein proposes a
more historically sensitive and contextually informed reading of Fenton’s best-known
photograph that arguably makes the vexed issue of the photograph’s staging – the focus
of so many readings of this work – irrelevant.
While these essays are mostly concerned with obviously interesting photographs –
images with artistic pretensions, or with specifically identifiable historic interest, or that
engage with social mores – it’s worth noting that the most startling photograph in
Lindsay Smith’s essay on Victorian photographs of the temple of Athena Nike in
Athens is in fact a personal snapshot that Smith found tucked inside one of the albums.
The unidentified image, presumably hidden from view for decades since someone
tucked it away for safekeeping, erupts out of the album, giving Smith what she describes
as a “jolt.” Perhaps, she conjectures, her jolt of strange recognition has to do with the
private life of photographs, the ordinary human existence that they record and to
which category, after all, the vast majority of photographs belong. The snapshot of two
women seemingly dancing outdoors – untethered from any narrative, an apparently
random addition to an album of formal sculptural images – has the force of the personal,
the intuited; its sudden emergence recalls what Smith terms “the unique ability of a photo-
graph to take flight, to have been bound for a destination,” as well as, presumably, for that
destination to have taken an unexpected turn; to be, it turns out, entirely other than orig-
inally imagined.
Smith is in the company here of Walter Benjamin, whose essay “Unpacking my
Library” ([1931] 2019) provides her a way of thinking through what she calls “the
future anterior, the conceptual, which is equally the material, receptiveness of photo-
graphs to the staging of fate.” This future anterior is the same peculiar temporal space
later described by Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981), and his articulation of it is part
of the great accomplishment of that small book. In exploring her unexpectedly
emotional response to a stray photograph from a family not her own, however,
Smith’s essay also demonstrates the kind of “analytical oscillation” Batchen proposes
for a fuller historical accounting of photography, “a back and forth between whatever
orphaned examples of snapshot culture we encounter in the world and our own
prized photographic reliquaries” (2008, 137). Batchen is talking specifically about a
history of the snapshot, but his prescription for intellectual flexibility, a back and
forth between the private and the public spheres, invites scholarly movement
among all of the worlds in which photography exists, and it arguably holds for
much of the best new interdisciplinary work. It is, we think, a kind of movement
that defines each of these essays and the growing field to which they belong. We
hope you enjoy them.

Note from the journal editors

Special thanks to Dr. Kate Ingle for her work in bringing this issue to fruition.
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 135

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Jennifer Green-Lewis is Professor of English at the George Washington University in Washington,
DC, where she teaches courses in Victorian and Modernist literature in the context of the visual
arts. She is the author of Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern
Memory: Already the Past (2017; paperback 2020), Teaching Beauty in Delillo, Woolf, and
Merrill (2008), and Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (1996), as
well as many essays and reviews. She is the series editor for Key Texts in Victorian Photography
(Bloomsbury Academic), which reproduces nineteenth-century works on photography, themati-
cally curated and introduced by leading scholars; the first volume, forthcoming in May 2020, is
by Lindsay Smith.

References
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 2008. “Snapshots: Art History and the Ethnographic Turn.” Photographies 1 (2):
121–142.
Belknap, Geoffrey. 2016. From a Photograph: Authenticity, Science and the Popular Press, 1870-
1890. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Belknap, Geoffrey. 2018. “Photographs in Text: The Reproduction of Photographs in Nineteenth-
Century Communication.” In Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century, edited
by Nicoletta Leonardi and Simone Natale, 131–146. University Park, PA: Penn State
University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. (1931) 2019. “Unpacking My Library.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah
Arendt, and translated by Harry Zohn, 1–10. New York: Mariner Books.
Brusius, Mirjam, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam, eds. 2013. William Henry Fox Talbot:
Beyond Photography. Newhaven: Yale University Press.
Leonardi, Nicoletta, and Simone Natale, eds. 2018. Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth
Century. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Sheehan, Tanya, and Andrés Mario Zervigón, eds. 2015. Photography and Its Origins. Abingdon:
Routledge.