Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science

1. Constructing Science and Brotherhood in Photographic Culture

Chapter 1  onstructing cience and rotherhood in hotographic ulture Photography, by the end of the nineteenth century, was a well-established method for documenting different aspects of the city: its streets, people, and monuments. A photograph taken by Scottish photographer James Valentine between 1870 and 1880 shows London Bridge teeming with people and commerce (Fig. 1.1). The capital city of London was the scene of rapid innovations in the sciences and the visual arts, of vigorous experimentation in ways to bring these together, and of reflection on the meaning of art and science. The rise of photography as a new form of evidence in the sciences over the course of the century occurred in the context of wider reflections on the nature and interrelationship of scientific authority and observation. However, scientific observation was not a monolithic category but a term associated with cultural practices ranging from observing comets through a telescope to painting a landscape to making daily thermometer readings. To understand how photography became established as a new form of visual documentation in science, it is necessary to take a fresh look at what different Victorians meant by scientific practice and how these understandings shaped perceptions of photography as a new tool for discovery. The Promise of Photography A medallion designed by the Irish medallist William Woodhouse for the Photographic Society of Ireland’s award for the “Best Paper Negative,” given to Lady Mary Rosse in 1859, shows a classical female figure taking a picture with a modern tripod camera (Fig. 1.2).1 The scene is remarkable for its representation of a woman behind a camera at a time when men outnumbered women in the practice of photography, and for its suggestion that the camera itself was a subject of mystery. The figure is shown seated, facing the viewer, one hand holding a laurel wreath in her lap, the other drawing the cloth away from the camera lens. She is preparing to expose a plate, the tools associated with photography —distilling equipment, a dust brush, plateholder, water vase, and lens box—at her feet.  17 The figure’s gesture—unveiling the camera to expose a plate—is a fitting one for Victorian photography, which was a new wonder of the age. Photography ’s inventors were masters of curiosity and illusion: Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype in Paris, was a theatrical scene painter, and William Henry Fox Talbot, the creator of the calotype process in England, was a gentleman collector of natural wonders and artificial curiosities. These two men raised the curtain on photography during the 1830s, an age of fascination with techniques of illusion and feats of mechanical achievement. On Lake Como—the Italian lake where, years earlier, Mary Shelley had invented the figure of Frankenstein—Talbot in 1833 conceived the idea for something that also took on a life of its own: the idea for a technique to make permanent chemical images of nature. Talbot finally succeeded at creating a process for making “sun pictures” at his home in Lacock Abbey, near the golden spa town of Bath, England, during the “brilliant summer” of 1835 but kept it a secret until 1839, when the public announcement that Daguerre was making such images propelled him into a race for priority of invention. Early photographers were involved in a partnership with nature, and at the same time they were artists familiar with traditions of picture making. Working with a medium that called into question so much in art and representation, photographers often attended to the special conditions obtaining in their medium. In his photographically illustrated book The Pencil of Nature (1844), Talbot imagined an audience with varying interests like his own, genteel amateurs interested in travel, family history, decorative art, botany, and architecture . In reflecting on the distracting questions that his photographs raised, he showed how much he relished their incidentals and dwelled on their mystery and fascinating irrelevancy.2 For example, a photograph of a Parisian street re-  18 fig. 1.2. William Woodhouse, “Truth” personified as a woman, ca. 1859. Silver medallion awarded to Lady Mary Rosse by the Photographic Society of Ireland for “Best Paper Negative.” Birr Castle, Dublin. Rosse was the first recipient of the honor. vealed much tangential information. This, for many, was the pleasure of photography and the source of its documentary power: things that the observer did not...