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

While much has been written about the artistic and social uses of photography, "the history of the experience of looking at scientific photographs and deciding on their worth as empirical forms of pictorial representation has been little studied" (p. 5). However criticized and deconstructed, the idea of photography as endowed with scientific accuracy is still deeply ingrained in our understanding of the medium. Nature Exposed begins to answer to a very real "need to combine the study of the ideal of mechanical objectivity in photography with analysis of the actual processes through which people mobilized and used photographic evidence" (p. 4). As Jennifer Tucker argues in this densely researched book, evaluating evidence involves social values—class, gender, and race—as well as scientific protocols.

Before technology enabled photographs to be reproduced cheaply in books and magazines, few people had actually seen scientific photographs, yet "scientific pictures had a disproportionate hold on people's concept of what photography was" (p. 8). This was because it was legitimized by being discussed as science and art—rather than as manufacturing and shopkeeping, which were closer to the realities of working photographers, or to the other visual entertainments increasingly available to amateurs as consumers. In chapter 1 Tucker analyzes photography as science in a variety of contexts—in particular, the pages of the Photographic News. Edited by a former chemist, this journal attempted to gather a photographic community around commitment to scientific technical standards, and good taste in subject matter and composition. Its coverage of the "photographic experiences of men of science" (p. 60) contributed to the boom in photographic collections in scientific and medical institutions from the mid-1860s onward.

Chapter 2 is concerned with how images of spirits and ghosts failed to acquire scientific status. As the outer limit of scientific imaging, spirit photographs are interesting—but this topic might have been better discussed in a different book. This would have given scope to analyze fully the many fascinating instances of scientific photographs, lectures, and archives that Tucker can only mention. Fewer, better illustrations, fully discussed in the text, would also have made this a more useful and better-looking book.

Meteorological photography, discussed in chapter 3, is a successful example of the uses of photography in nineteenth-century scientific studies, and of the collaboration between amateurs and professionals in gathering large quantities of data. The complex issue of evaluating evidence provided by tools that make visible the invisible is convincingly tackled in the chapter on the study of bacteria. This is wonderful material to analyze the strengths and limitations of photography, for manual drawings continued to be used and in many cases were found to be better as illustrations to train doctors and educate the general public. It is also a paradigmatic case of the blurred boundaries between nature and representation, as human interventions shape the preparation of the slides to be looked at under a microscope—for example, by coloring them—even before deciding how to record the resulting images. Chapter 5 focuses on the role played by photographs of Mars in making scientific debates of interest to a wider public, caught between scientific and fictional accounts of life on that planet that were using each other to attract attention.

Throughout the book, Tucker demonstrates that nineteenth-century audiences were not naïve believers in the power of photographs as truthful, as later literature often assumes: when reflecting on the meaning of scientific evidence and what could count as knowledge, they were aware of the possibility that photographs could be misleading for a number of reasons—technical limitations, faulty craftsmanship, or deliberate misuse. As Tucker concludes, "what we are witnessing with the advent of digital imaging is analogous to [Victorian] photography: the cultural invention of a new medium of seeing, not simply the introduction of a new technology" (p. 239).