The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards (review)

During the thirty or so years bracketing 1900, hundreds of amateur photographers wandered through English cities, towns, and countrysides making tens of thousands of images of churches, gates, cottages, rood screens, mills, castles, door jambs, threshing flails, baptismal fonts, sheep roasts, bridges, and the odd farmer in gaiters and smock. In an era of swift and sometimes disorienting change in the social and cultural landscape, dozens of local photographic surveys—carried out mainly by hobbyists and camera clubs within loose and shifting networks that could also include libraries, scientific societies, and other civic institutions—sought to preserve for future generations the material remains of England’s past. A few of the photographs were strikingly beautiful, most were ordinary, some were aesthetically dreadful or technically inept. All had been generally ignored by scholars before they caught the attention of visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards, who, in this original and sophisticated work, explores what they demonstrate about “the complexity and ambiguity that emerged around photography, ideas of evidence, and history in the popular imagination” (p. xii).

Edwards takes an ethnographic approach to her analysis of the surviving survey photographs (she has looked at 55,000 of them) and of the discourse about such surveys in contemporary photographic periodicals. Her chapters unfold thematically, not chronologically, and they examine the manifold tensions inherent in the efforts to negotiate a relationship between photography and the historical imagination: tensions between the local and the national, between the amateur and the professional, between disappearance and salvage, between the dominant pictorialist aesthetic—subjective, individualistic, even selfish—and the qualities of what were often called “record” prints, deriving from the photographer’s “sense of duty and the moral values of objectivity constituted through diligence and self-restraint” (p. 84).

Some of her analysis challenges conventional wisdom and comes to surprising conclusions. Given that the survey movement coincided with the height of Britain’s global empire and the flourishing of what might be called an imperial consciousness throughout many institutions of British life, it would be easy to assume that this genteel effort to preserve the nation’s disappearing past was yet another exercise of the imperialist imagination. Edwards, however, sees “no direct appeal to empire or to overtly imperialistic sentiment within the rhetoric of the survey” (p. 154), which was instead inward-looking and local. Nor should the surveys be dismissed as merely nostalgic, she contends, or as rooted in a romantic or even reactionary melancholy over the loss of a (possibly imaginary) social order. She argues that while the discourse about the surveys did incorporate conservative strands, it also expressed a dynamic and complex sense of the relationships between past, present, and future. The photographs “served not only as a reminder of how things ‘were,’ but of how things ‘are.’ … A sense of loss was coupled with a dynamic view of the potential of photographs to at least partially counter that loss” (p. 165).

Edwards’s handsome book is not an easy read, particularly for anyone not well versed in (or anyone impatient with) critical theory. It’s not an easy view, either. She does state plainly that although the 115 historical photographs accompanying the text were chosen as “typical” and “relevant to the point under discussion,” they are “in a sense … interchangeable” since her focus was “the photography complex,” not the individual image (p. 27). But some of the chosen individual images are indeed specifically analyzed in the text, others that are invoked and described aren’t shown, and in many cases, the text directs us to examine a particular photograph without offering any clue as to what we are supposed to take from that examination or how it was “relevant” to the point. This is, by design, a book about 55,000 photographs, not about some photographs; it is more concerned with how people engaged with a kind of image than with how they created images. While some scholars may...