From a Photograph: Authenticity, Science and the Periodical Press, 1870–1890 by Geoffrey Belknap, and: Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-makings and Reproductions ed. by Julie Codell and Linda K. Hughes (review)

As the title of Geoffrey Belknap's From a Photograph: Authenticity, Science and the Periodical Press, 1870–1890 suggests, this volume has the capacity to make a significant contribution to the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies. While the investigation focuses primarily on the Graphic, Nature, and the Astronomical Register, many other periodicals also feature, such as the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, English Mechanic, Knowledge, Leisure Hour, the Manchester Times, and Punch, to name but a few. Belknap contends that "reading" photographs published in the periodical press between 1870 and 1890 was a "process of disentangling layers of reproduction" that ultimately sought to ask whether a photograph could be deemed "trustworthy" (2, 4). Chapter one focuses on the first two decades of the Graphic, a weekly periodical launched in 1869 (it became the Daily Graphic in 1890) and the main rival to the Illustrated London News. Belknap examines portraits, foreign landscapes, and objects depicted in the pages of the Graphic and the Illustrated London News, establishing the importance of the phrase "from a photograph" in the Graphic's claim to greater representative accuracy (39). Chapter two focuses on the scientific press and its use of the photograph to "authenticate observational data" (86). This chapter further shows how, prior to 1890, scientific periodicals had to map carefully the stages of translation from photograph to illustration in order for the photographic source to have the desired validity-enhancing effect. Chapter three positions photography not only as a technology of representation but also of communication, affecting understandings of space, distance, and time. Developing this argument further in a chapter titled "Photographing the Invisible: The Periodical and the Reproduction of the Instant," Belknap documents the photograph's role in stabilizing the "instant," a time concept that has significant implications for the history of the periodical as well. Concluding his study, Belknap discusses the politics of reproduction inherent to any examination of photography in the nineteenth-century periodical press. He makes the case for the history of photography and periodical journalism as inextricably bound together in the process of establishing printed media as stable depositories of "true" meaning; more specifically he demonstrates their dual importance to the establishment of science as a subject that is authenticated by replication. From a Photograph provides a useful intervention in complicating the many ways in which we approach the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

Julie Codell and Linda K. Hughes's edited collection, Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-makings and Reproductions, is a quintessentially interdisciplinary set of essays that engages the many meanings of the term "replication" across the long nineteenth century. In their introduction to the collection, Codell and Hughes emphasise not only the various and often complex meanings of replication but also the shifting cultural value attached to the replica. They highlight the way the nineteenth-century replica "disrupted" Romantic understandings of originality and genius before modernism demanded a turn to the small, the avant garde, and the exclusive (14). Codell and Hughes remind us that postmodernism and its attendant theorists, particularly Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, in some ways reprivileged the replica or, at the very least, questioned whether there could ever be such a thing as the original. This has interesting implications. If Western culture exists on a pendulum of taste that alternates between denigrating and celebrating the concept of the replica, our current state of post-postmodernism or post-humanism (as some critical voices declare it) may be approaching a move against the reproduction, the mass produced, and the virtual.

In "The Failure of Replication in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Why It All Just Comes Out...