Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (review)

The operations of technology, like those of science, rely extensively on photographic evidence, often of a very specialized nature, where the camera is used as a deputy to record phenomena that are invisible to human sight. Nature Exposed explores how photography came to acquire the authority of scientific evidence after its invention in 1839. This was the period when both science and industry were coalescing into modern institutional frameworks, served by the growth of specialized professional classes. As Jennifer Tucker argues, the social forces and institutions involved in creating the genre of scientific photography had many parallels with this wider process, and to make this case, her book draws on recent research in such fields as the history of photography, history of science, British intellectual and cultural history, and visual studies.

Nature Exposed focuses on the microhistories of conflicts over the authority and interpretation of photographic evidence in various fields. These include the debate about the existence of "canals" on Mars, the use of photomicrography in bacteriology, the production of spirit photography in the cause of psychical research, and the development of meteorology in relation to the gathering of data on storm mechanisms and the forms of lightning. The wealth of material and sources presented allows us to understand the heterogeneous range of cultural practices within different emerging sciences and the methods in which previously existing ways of making and reading images within specific social networks of enthusiasts, scientists, and genteel amateurs were carried over into the formation of ideas of photographic evidence.

For example, we see how between 1870 and 1900 the Royal Meteorological Society began organizing the work of hundreds of skilled amateur and professional photographers who already had an established discussion network on the joys and technical problems of landscape and weather work through the pages of photographic journals. Organizing this mass of personal observations was not simply a matter of coordination, but of popular education as to how nature should be observed in a scientific way. Amateurs were taught how to take photographs that were scientifically valuable, by preparing and focusing the camera in advance or by including objects to indicate scale and distance. Thus the lightning flash, for example, that most elusive of subjects, could be caught and subsequently categorized.

All of Tucker's case studies offer material from relatively overlooked primary sources, including journals such as Photographic News or the occult-oriented Borderland that aimed to "democratize the study of the spook." Outside of critical histories of photography, the issue of how photographs came to be used as evidence has not been widely studied until recently because, as Tucker writes, there has been a "strong assumption that photography's authority was unchallengeable in the nineteenth century" (p. 2). The main effect of the rich source material throughout this book is to demonstrate a level of informed skepticism among Victorian scientific audiences that overturns some of those assumptions about our grandparents' credulity in the face of photographic testimony. Equally, we see that it was not necessarily any visual quality in photographic evidence that allowed it to gain acceptance; but rather other considerations, such as the gender or class of the photographer.

In the history of technology as in the history of science, the use of photographic evidence in context has not been widely studied. (One recent exception is Richard Lindstrom's October 2000 Technology and Culture article on the Gilbreths' studies of scientific management.) Despite our digital savvy, I suspect that technical photography has become so established as an objective, mechanical trace of nature that we often forget that it is a product of human representation that forms part of a continuum of established visual conventions, created by human labor within specific institutional frameworks, and gains or loses authority through being "appropriated, resisted, and transformed by different groups" (p. 10).

As Steve Lubar reminded us in his defense of the study of visual culture ("Representation and Power," Technology and Culture [supplement, 1995]), "[technological representations] have enormous power when...