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

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the social organization of science began to change from private and individual amateur activities to collective and publicly disseminated enterprises. The members of such learned associations as the Royal Society had largely been wealthy gentlemen often working on their own for whom science was a philosophical and speculative activity, its outcomes and applications essentially kept within the bounds of such institutions. By the end of the century, researchers came from the middle classes, worked with colleagues in laboratories that had been set up by the state, and actively promoted their findings to an engaged public. The proliferation of science journals written in accessible language—for example, Nature—also brought science to a wider public. Most newspapers carried a science column, and social reformers emphasized the study of science as an activity that enhanced intellectual prowess. The science lecture, natural history museum, planetarium, botanical garden, and science display at international expositions made science a universal tool of edification and entertainment geared to a literate and educated public.

Photography's birth and evolution almost exactly coincided with this shift in the social organization of science. With the formation of separate scientific disciplines and the imbrication of these with forms of social, political, and cultural practices, photography was considered the medium best able to transcribe the scientific vision of nature as something knowable and measurable through the human faculty of direct observation. But although the application of photography to science dates from the birth of the medium, Jennifer Tucker shows in Nature Exposed that belief in its unmediated, authentic, and objective capacity was not as total as we usually assume.

Tucker's study explores how photography became established as a new form of scientific documentation in Victorian England as scientific practice took on its modern shape. For Tucker, the scientific photograph is a specific visual genre whose claim to scientific authority was not a given, but often contested. Questions about who made the photograph and how it was used affected what was understood to be scientific practice. And the struggle to define what made a photograph scientific, Tucker shows, was intertwined with the struggle to define science itself as well as to differentiate between scientific knowledge and popular science.

To understand how scientific photography helped define the Victorian image of both science and scientific observation, Tucker traces photography's displacement of other methods of evidence, particularly drawing, by using case studies to demonstrate the photograph's rising authority in debates over natural phenomena. As she ably demonstrates, the notion that photography was completely unmediated was already made unstable in the 1860s by the question of the gender, reputation, and social origins of who made the photographs. The earliest photographers were, like the members of the scientific community, wealthy amateurs (including the polymath William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the medium's inventors). By the 1860s, with improvements to processes and lower material costs, photography had become an industry and its practitioners often unskilled charlatans. To avoid association with fly-by-night operators, the amateurs—many scientists among them—had to distinguish their photographic activity from that of the working class and itinerant professionals. They did so by claiming science as their authority, in particular, science as practiced by educated men. This successful ploy shaped the direction of scientific photography for the rest of the century. By the 1880s, the now almost exclusively scientifically educated male photographers, organized around the journal Photographic News, dominated the community; they defined terms, professional requirements, and scientifically sound processes and protocols that brought status to the medium.

A chapter on spiritualist photography demonstrates the importance of who made photographs and under what conditions. Here Tucker shows how the "brotherhood of photography" was challenged when claims for the objectivity of the camera were used to prove the authenticity of ghost photographs. And why not? Given that photography was capable of making visible the invisible, why couldn't that invisible be...