Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science

Introduction

ntroduction Ever since its invention in the 1830s, many have seen photography as a medium of truth and unassailable accuracy. Photographs have been used by scientists to map the planets, by police to identify criminals, and by magazine editors to document events around the world. Photographs are able to represent phenomena that are invisible or difficult to see with the naked eye, whether bacteria , a bolt of lightning, the landscape of Mars, or spirits of the dead, and thus can have the status of scientific data. Today, more than a century and a half after their debut, photographic images are shown as authoritative evidence in nearly every political campaign, from contests over abortion rights to those over war. Faith in the representational power of photography remains strong despite recent advances in digital technology that allow for the facile fabrication of almost any image imaginable. How did photographs acquire their authority as evidence in the first place, and how has photographic evidence been collected, organized, and institutionalized ever since? As the historian of art and photography John Tagg pointed out years ago, understanding the complex dynamics of the history of photographic evidence is crucial in today’s visual society. Tagg argued that the coupling of evidence and photography in the second half of the nineteenth century was bound up with the emergence of new practices of observation and record keeping that were central to the development of disciplinary institutions, including the police, prisons, asylums, hospitals, departments of public health, schools, and even the modern factory system itself.1 What photography critic Roland Barthes called “evidential force,” Tagg said, is a “complex historical outcome and is exercised by photographs only within certain institutional practices and within particular historical relations.” The very idea of what constitutes evidence has a history that implies “definite techniques and procedures, concrete institutions, and specific social relations—that is, relations of power.” It is into this more extensive field that we must insert the history of photographic evidence. To underscore the need to accept critically the assumption of  1 trust in photographs, he asked people to consider: “Under what conditions would a photograph of the Loch Ness monster (of which there are many) be acceptable?”2 We still lack the history of photographic evidence that would help us answer this fascinating question, particularly for photographs of the natural world, which themselves are situated within the disciplinary institutions of science. As Tagg noted, whether photographs are believed depends in part on what the representations reveal. Although historians accept the need to consider questions of photographic evidence across different cultural realms, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the microhistory of social processes involved in the manufacture of photographs as evidence across different levels of cultural production , from scientific atlases to tabloid magazines. This is especially true for photographs that were disputed in their time. Tagg’s own study, for example, while urging theorists and historians to consider the local reception of photographic evidence, dealt only in passing with photographs that were contested by contemporaries. There are many reasons historians continue to treat discussion about the evidentiary paradigms of individual photographs as unimportant or unnecessary . As Martin Rudwick noted in his 1976 article, “The Emergence of a Visual Language of Geology,” historians of science have long favored written texts over pictures as sources of knowledge about past scientific theory and practice.3 Other factors are practical and economic. It is often quite difficult to track the production and reception of individual images, particularly those that have not been canonized as exemplary evidentiary photographs. In addition , photographs that have already been reproduced are generally much cheaper to reproduce from archives than those for which new prints must be ordered. This contributes to the canonization in historical literature of a relatively small sample of the large number of surviving nineteenth-century scienti fic photographs. Surely the biggest reason historians have not paid more attention to how photographic evidence was established is the strong assumption that photography ’s authority was unchallengeable in the nineteenth century. As one journalist has put it, even the most outrageous photographic “lies”—such as “blatantly faked ‘spirit’ photographs”—were “taken at face value” during that period.4 Since at least World War II, the idea of the universality of nineteenthcentury faith in photography has been canonized by influential writings. William Ivins Jr., one of the foremost early historians of photography and a leading figure in its recognition as a signi...