The Making of English Photography: Allegories (review)

How was making a photograph different from operating a carding machine at the dawn of the industrial revolution? Steve Edwards argues this question is key to a historical understanding of English photography. In an analysis that begins with William Henry Fox Talbot but centers on the classification of photography among the mechanical contrivances in the 1861 London International Exhibition, Edwards examines photographic authorship in relation to formations of labor and social class. Edwards focuses on the petit bourgeois photographer, who occupied an unstable position (between well-appointed portrait studios and cheap operators) in the new markets for photography, and who wrote about the economic anxieties and artistic aspirations of such a career in the mid-nineteenth-century photographic press. Edwards analyzes these texts for the ideas, metaphors, and fantasies linking petit bourgeois photographic art with fears of the worker and the machine. Unlike other photographic theorists, Edwards argues that issues of labor are central to the meanings of English photography.

In his introduction Edwards proposes reading photography allegorically as an "allotropic practice" (13), after the nineteenth-century chemical term for compounds that have divergent forms but share an atomic composition. Read as an allotrope, photography's artistic uses are twined with its commercial and industrial ones, and these are all, in turn, linked to mechanical production and the workers' world. He begins his narrative with a close analysis of Talbot's writings about the origin of his invention of photography from his practice of amateur drawing, reading Talbot's description of "the picture which makes ITSELF" (31) as a story of deskilling and the transformation of human labor by the machine. Edwards compares analogies in Talbot's writings with those in such texts as Andrew Ure's account of the automatic factory in The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) and places Talbot's interests within the Cambridge network of science and industry reform.

Yet, Talbot's own social status and labor as an amateur draftsman, and the uniqueness of artistic work, complicate connections between photography and factory labor. Talbot retained his authority, Edwards argues, by a practice of photographic objectivity: under a controlling gaze, the body of the photographer is displaced from the production of the image, and the photograph is seen to make itself, in an autogenic process. Later authorities did not share Talbot's desire to substitute a mechanical apparatus for the artist: Sir David Brewster expressly bracketed the fine arts from the benefits of the development of photography, assigning photography to the role of providing detailed facts of nature, applicable to deductive analysis. Edwards describes the emergence of the photographic document—the factual image—used for varied purposes, in this separation of artistic production from photography.

For the petit bourgeois photographer, whose class formation Edwards describes in an account of commercial portrait photography in the 1860s, photography needed to be connected with the fine arts. These economically insecure photographers voiced their claims for art in the pages of mid-century photographic journals, and Edwards's ideological analysis of the purposes and contents of these journals is excellent. This material is the main source for the second part of the book, a study of the photograph as an aesthetic form. Edwards analyzes photographic art theory published before and after the controversial classification of photography as a mechanical contrivance at the 1862 London International Exhibition. Studying the uses photographic theory made of Sir Joshua Reynolds's distinctions between mechanical copying and the work of the mind, Edwards contrasts the uncertain relationship of photography to the fine arts in the decade before the Exhibition with those made after, when photographers reinvented themselves as artists to counter the proximity of photography to the machine, and enlarged their aesthetic framework to include the new preference for naturalism and genre subjects in painting. Autogenic production—the picture makes itself—became autotelic production, in which the photographer-artist made an artistic self in the production of the image.

The two chapters on photographic art theory also reevaluate such canonical...