The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards, and: Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey by Josh Ellenbogen (review)

These two important books both consider British and French photography around the turn of the nineteenth century, yet their concerns illuminate new and widely divergent aspects of this history—surprisingly, for such erudite works addressing the same period, neither author cites the other, an indication of how far apart their interests lie.

Elizabeth Edwards is an internationally respected scholar of the history and anthropology of photography. Since her ground-breaking edited collection, Anthropology and Photography: 1860–1920 (1992), she has been a leader in exploring the entanglement of photography with modernity, science, colonialism, and history. Among her many innovations, most inspiring for me in recent years has been her work on photography’s social uses: drawing from actor-network theory, she has developed a posthumanist approach toward photos as agents that emphasizes their circulation through social networks, including material practices of making, circulation, and use, rather than focusing upon their discursive meaning or ideological context. In The Camera as Historian, she applies these insights to examine the role of photography as a form of historical imagination, as articulated by the amateur photographic survey movement between 1885 and 1918. One outcome of her approach is a consideration of the images not as unique texts to be read, but as “typical” or even “interchangeable” and as such they are scattered alongside her textual argument as instantiations of the “photography complex” (27).

Her title is taken from a small book of the same name published in 1916 by the Photographic Survey and Record of Surrey, providing detailed advice for the use of photography to record traces of the past. The movement aimed to produce an archive of the English landscape and its antiquities, buildings, customs, and current circumstances. In the process it raised key questions about photography as evidence, its public utility, and the popular historical imagination during a period marked by a widespread sense of social and environmental change and loss that coincided with the popularization of recreational photography. Edwards has undertaken an ethnography and history of this “peripheral” amateur movement (3).

I am Australian, and thus very distant in space and experience from these landscapes—but just holding and looking through Edwards’s beautiful book fills me with nostalgia and longing for a landscape I have never known. Yet Edwards argues through careful analysis that the body of work she explores (some 55,000 images) was much more than a melancholy impulse to record and reveal the “silent ghosts of the dusty, shadowy past”; she suggests that such images were not inflected with a sense of loss by contemporaries until after the First World War. Instead, she argues, the movement was more “complex and ambiguous … concerned with dynamic futures as much as imagined pasts,” engaging with both the “exhilaration” and anxiety of transformation in a “complex temporal response,” and a historical desire “torn between discovery and recovery, loss and love” (21). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced nation-building, especially in an imperial context, alongside an intensi-fied sense of the past and its preservation. Yet there is an implicit sense in these images that a core identity could be kept free of the contaminations of Empire. Parish churches, villages, manor houses, traditional agricultural practices, and their rooting in the national earth: all establish the mythscapes that express and rework the elements of the historical imagination.

Edwards also identifies a tension between the national meaning given to these images and their subject matter, and their irreducibly and distinctively local values. She explores questions of memory and history, noting that photos came to be considered authentic evidence within an increasingly scientific sense...