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Chapter 2  esting the nity of cience and raternity From the late 1850s on, the press reported numerous cases of mistaken photographic identity, particularly in metropolitan cities. Although readers learned about many people who were arrested solely on the basis of a photograph, they also learned about mixed success with photographs as a test of identification. They discovered, for example, that a solicitor sued the sheriff of Surrey for false imprisonment after he was arrested on the basis of his likeness to a photograph of someone else, that even a photograph was insufficient to give certainty about the identity of a dead man found in Hackney, and that Lord Chief Justice Cockburn , who heard arguments about identity based on photographs, “has not a high opinion of the trustworthiness of photography.”1 In some cases, sitters who took photographers to court to demand the return of their money for disputed likenesses won judgments.2 Inside and outside the courtroom, photographers reminded consumers that portraits were not always exact likenesses. As one photographer stated in 1861, “It might be supposed that a portrait obtained by means of mechanical appliances would trace the features of the sitter literally, but such is not always the case, for many causes operate to deprive photographic portraits of that resemblance to the original, which, theoretically, they ought always to possess.”3 Another exclaimed, “A little reflection on the conditions of photographic portraiture will suggest the wonder rather that the photograph is so frequently a successful and satisfactory likeness, than that it occasionally fails.”4 During the early 1870s the national coverage of the trial of the Tichborne claimant for perjury elevated the complexities surrounding photographic evidence into a wider public discourse on imposture and criminal deception. The Tichborne claimant case was regarded by many photographers in Britain as a disaster that put on trial not only the claimant but also respectable photography . At the center of this story was a man who claimed to be the lost son of a dying heiress near Guildford, south of London. He apparently had died at sea about twelve years earlier. The claimant answered Lady Tichborne’s advertise-  65 ment for information about her son and explained that he had, in fact, survived a deadly shipwreck off the coast of South America before being rescued by sailors and moving to Australia. Although the claimant was physically very different from the young Roger Tichborne, being fat where the lost man had been thin, he nevertheless presented sufficient personal knowledge of the family and their circumstances to convince many people— and significantly, Lady Tichborne —that he truly was Roger Tichborne.5 It was the longest criminal trial in British history, lasting four years as witness after witness was called to testify for or against him. Photographs were central to the case, as a daguerreotype made of the young Tichborne before he died served as a major piece of physical evidence and identity. As the Tichborne case showed, although photographs were said to be readily comprehended, the reality was often far different. Witnesses ranging from jurors to judges to photographic experts frequently disagreed over what the photographs showed, and in the middle of the trial, a judge impugned the ethics of a photographer hired by the defense.6 A photographer who observed the trial later commented that the status of photography was ironically never more uncertain than in the 1870s, the moment of its ascendancy as an epistemological practice of seeing. Capturing well the complexity of social perceptions of photographic evidence at the end of the trial, he declared: “There is a certain anomaly in the public estimation of photography which is worth noting.” He continued: “No art is so frequently treated with contempt and contumely,” yet “none more blindly and unreasoningly admired and trusted.”7 After the trial, the debate over the photographic evidence continued, with William Mathews, a physician who supported the claimant, publishing a comparison of photographs of the young Tichborne and the claimant in order to try to prove their identity (Fig. 2.1). Although these challenges never cast serious doubt on photography’s evidentiary value, they generated public awareness that there was a gap between the ideal of mechanical objectivity and the realities of photographic practice, where the operator’s skill, judgment, and attentiveness to details were recognized as playing some role in obtaining good likenesses. Portraits and their kin, spirit photographs, illustrate nicely how nineteenth-century consumers shaped the meanings of photography, whether...

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