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pilogue: nlarging the oncept of hotographic vidence It is more important than ever at this historical and political moment to consider the complex ways in which knowledge based on photographs is appropriated , resisted, and transformed by different groups. Visual arguments and evidence are central role to a range of policy and institutional activities today. More than a decade after the Rodney King trial in Southern California and in the wake of recent images of Mars and photographs from the “War on Terror,” new attention is being paid in the United States and elsewhere to how visual images are used as testimony in contemporary law and society. Techniques of mechanical reproduction hold great attraction for those for whom the machine holds out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation. Nevertheless , as I have tried to show, despite its powerful image as a conveyor of unmediated truth, the very canon of scientific photography was the product of social efforts to establish through new theaters of persuasion what counted as objective and subjective, credible and ridiculous. By 1914, as a result of some of the struggles described here, photography as a new visual language helped define the nineteenth century as an age of scienti fic discovery and invention. In Britain, the question of how to disseminate and police scientific practices and how to manufacture and interpret photographic images using scientific procedures involved deliberation on who made photographs, how, and for what purpose. As it does today, scientific photography generated great reflection on the meaning of scientific evidence and of what could count as knowledge. This fact compels us as historians to ask questions about excluded and included categories, as well as about how the practices of truth-telling in scientific photography related to other social processes, including science-in-the-making and gender-in-the-making. We must combine the study of the idea of mechanical objectivity in photography with studied analysis of the changing material and social processes through which people mobilized and used photographs as evidence in making claims about science and nature.  234 Studying the historical and disciplinary frameworks in which scientific photographs emerged as empirical proof yields a more complex understanding of the epistemologies associated with scientific photography than the “unshaking belief” theory of nineteenth-century photographic attitudes. Exposure of the historical and social roots of photographic criticism in the sciences lays bare some of the arguments for selectivity, judgment, skill, and aesthetics behind the Victorian claim that photography was a neutral mirror of reality. It then becomes possible to examine critically statements that scientific photographs are too difficult for lay people to interpret, or that their meanings are transparent and self-evident. Instead, we see that scientific photography, no less than other types of visual images, exhibited a multiplicity of meanings for different audiences in diverse viewing contexts. Although it never achieved the scientific recognition that many Victorian scientists hoped it would, spirit photography continued well into the twentieth century. The photographs of supposedly real fairies that were taken in 1917 and 1920 by two young girls in the village of Cottingley and famously championed by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, represent an ongoing cultural fascination with a veiled or secret world.1 Interest in spirit photography in England was revived after World War I, when numerous pictures were made for mourners of war dead; there are more such photographs from this era housed today in the British Library and the collection of the Society for Psychical Research at the Cambridge University Library than for the earlier years covered by this book. There is currently a revival of interest in the history of spirit photography, propelled in part by the growing interest in the connections among photographic technology and religion, and in the role of women in photography and science. Martyn Jolly’s research on early twentieth-century spirit photography, moreover, reveals a significant social connection between W. T. Stead’s work and spirit photography during the 1920s.2 Ada Deane was a spiritualist medium whose husband left her and who brought up three children on her own by working as a servant. During the 1920s she became one of Britain’s busiest photographic mediums, holding more than 2,000 sittings in North London, some of them with debunkers determined to discredit her. As Jolly points out, Deane’s moment of “greatest notoriety” came in 1924 through her involvement with the...

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