It's an honour to speak to this audience.
Many of the people in this room, I was going to say, although I take responsibility for the exhibition A New Power,
actually many of the people in this room have informed what it is.
In many ways, it's a sense, a synthesis of a kind of collective body of discussion about photography over the last ten or 20 years.
And what I hope the exhibition offers everybody here is a platform on which to build and go
in all the various different directions that we've been hearing about during today's talks.
But let me begin by saying that it's, I think,
a striking anomaly in the literature on our field that no comprehensive history of British photography has yet been published.
One consequence is the inadequate attention paid to the nuanced specificity of that history.
In my paper, I want to signal at least one one issue deserving of that attention.
The ways in which race and class were visually engaged in early British photography.
Fortunately, the new Power exhibition provides a number of examples worthy of our contemplation.
Those examples primarily manifest themselves as photographic images reproduced in the popular press rather than as photographs per say.
In other words, my paper will also offer an opportunity to break free from the artificial constraint of medium purity,
thereby allowing me to encompass the history of British photographic practice in its entirety.
Nevertheless, I begin my talk with a photograph, a hand-painted daguerreotype by an unknown maker showing a prosperous,
plump and well-dressed man sitting in a chair, he has chosen to be depicted holding his preferred attribute, a copy of the Illustrated London News.
That attribute declares both his literacy and his class allegiance.
The news explicitly aimed for middle class readers by, among other things,
adopting the more expensive wood engraving process over that of the woodcut with its working class associations.
Some of the wood engravings in the Illustrated London News were copies of photographs.
As a consequence,
our seated man could well have opened his paper and looked at these three photographic images of Indigenous Australians published in January 1850.
In fact, oddly enough, published on Australia Day the 26th of January 1850.
We dispute that word now started out. I'm just telling you here, at least we'll stand up in a minute and tell you all about it.
At least four of the group of at least four of the group of daguerreotypes from which these portraits were derived have survived.
They were taken in Melbourne in 1847 by a recently arrived English photographer, Douglas Kilburn, brother of Edward Kilburn.
A number of his plates are in the exhibition.
The photographer had to offer bribes to get his subjects into his studio and none of them consented to come a second time.
One of those absent bits of response that we have to sort of read much into these portraits obey
the same basic conventions as seen in the daguerreotype of the gentleman with his newspaper,
albeit perhaps with a more frontal, almost confrontational pose.
The people seen in them were not granted the subject to the proper names or the illusion of a domestic setting.
I think, therefore we can assume Kilburn photographs were taken to certify native Australia's presumed otherness.
Kilburn pictures show their subjects in contemporary dress, a mixture of animal skins,
European blankets, ornaments and scarification, along with wooden boomerangs and digging sticks.
They speak, therefore, of the complex situation of these people.
In 1847, forced to negotiate a new world of cameras, pastoral leases, rapid urbanisation and unfamiliar European customs.
Among them, the ethnographic portrait and systematic genocide.
Daguerreotypes are, of course, unique and relatively fragile objects.
But as images, these ones soon travelled abroad, appearing as wood engravings and foreign publications, first in a book about Australia,
published in 1848, in Edinburgh, where there's been, oddly enough, a sex change engineered for one of the figures.
And then in a further translation of this first engraving in a Danish magazine in 1849.
In 1851 illustrations after these daguerreotypes even found their way into a journal devoted to religious science and general intelligence in India.
But they found their widest audience when a number of them were reproduced as wood engravings in that 1850 issue
of the Illustrated London News with an accompanying text that expressed the usual racial prejudices of the time.
This single item therefore speaks to the extraordinary mobility of the photographic image in the mid-19th century.
Each of the daguerreotypes from which these images were derived would have been
destroyed in the process of being traced and copied onto a woodblock for carving.
And yet, the photographic ghosts, these images circulated throughout the British Empire and beyond.
In this case, travelling as daguerreotypes from Australia to England before travelling back again to Australia in translated form,
while also being reproduced in Scotland, Denmark and India.
The sharing of such images of foreign peoples. The difference signalled by the darkness of their skin and the strangeness of their dress,
allowed the British Empire to maintain a sense of its own coherence as a as an apparently benign.
And yet all seeing. All powerful colonial enterprise.
And indeed any reader of the Illustrated British press in the 1840s and fifties would have encountered
a regular stream of deadpan photographic images of native peoples dressed in folkloric costumes.
Here, for example, are the, I quote, correct likenesses engraved from daguerreotype plates taken by Monsieur to get started
by Monsieur Claudet of Ojibbeway Indians attending a marriage ceremony in London.
The image appeared in an 1844 issue of the Pictorial Times during the group's visit to England in that year.
12 years later, in July 1856, the same photographer captured another such group from Canada's Walpole
Islands while they were on exhibit at the Panopticon in Leicester Square.
The image was reproduced in the Illustrated London News on 12th of July 1856, having been photographed by Mr. Claudet for our journal Unquiet,
the occasion of the Great Exhibition and showed that a steady stream of visiting
foreigners were featured in the news in the form of frontal group portraits.
Wood engraved copies of daguerreotypes supplied by the Beard Studio included this one of
an Algerian family and another of this Chinese family at the Crystal Palace exhibition,
which appeared in the Illustrated London News on the 24th of May, 1851.
Chung Atai. I'm just quoting a Chinese professor of music and quote and his family were apparently
visiting London from Canton specifically to take part in the Great Exhibition.
Charles Dickens Household Narrative of Current Events reported that the family was invited to visit Queen Victoria, during which visit, and I quote,
The elder consort of Chung Atai, presented Her Majesty with a beautifully executed daguerreotype by Beard of the interesting Chinese group.
Endquote. It's likely that the daguerreotype was a variant of precisely the image that we are seeing here.
These portraits resemble those taken of British aristocrats or other celebrities a
difference in physiognomy rather than that of dress or pose being the primary distinction.
In July 1848, for example, the Illustrated London News published a number of engravings from daguerreotypes by Beard of Lords and ladies dressed
in historical costumes for a ball thrown by the Marchioness of Londonderry in aid of the Spitalfields School of Design.
An unusual example of ethnographic portraiture appeared on the cover of the 25th of October 1851.
Based again on a daguerreotype made by the Beard Studio. It consists of a seated portrait of an innocent man known as Erasmus York,
dressed in English garb and holding a hat with the word assistant prominently visible as part of the band.
York has assisted in the search for the Lost Franklin expedition.
A story, of course, featured in a new power. And then he returned to England, where, among other things,
he helped in the preparation of a publication titled Greenland Eskimo Vocabulary for the Use of the Arctic Expeditions.
His adoption of both European dress and familiar photographic conventions no doubt reinforced the
notion among readers of the news that the assimilation of native peoples was both possible and,
of course, desirable. What these various examples demonstrate is the interest among middle class Britons in seeing
for themselves through the apparently dispassionate and authenticating eye of the camera,
evidence of the ethnic and racial differences that British imperialism, whether military or economic, was in the process.
A bringing to order photographing other peoples was an important part of this process making
difference explicable by rendering it same or at least comparable and therefore measurable.
To photograph these peoples was therefore to exercise a certain symbolic power over them.
The same might be said about the people photographed by the Beach Studio on behalf of this man, the journalist Henry Mayhew.
Once again, as you can see, shown seated but at work in his case with a sheath of papers in his hand.
Mayhew was responsible for a multi-volume book,
first published in 1851 under the title London Labour and the London Poor Encyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of those that will work.
Those that cannot work and those that will not work. At first glance, Mayhew's project may be regarded as an extension of what we've already seen.
He even justified its mission by arguing that the British public knew less about the lives of its own working class wandering hordes,
as he called them then, than it did about, as he put it, the most distant tribes of the earth.
Compiled from the input of a number of authors.
Mayhew's text provided a richly ethnological commentary on London's poor based on over 400 interviews, a mass of statistics and social analysis.
Its view of the people it represents is somewhat contradictory.
While most is sympathetic, it also divides the deserving from the undeserving poor and often offers ethnic stereotypes in the guise of social science.
Nevertheless, Mayhew claimed that, and I quote, My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge
of the sufferings and the frequent heroism under those sufferings of the poor.
Thanks to Mayhew,
we do actually get to see the people that he's talking about and to notice the class and ethnic diversity of the British population of the time,
a diversity almost completely lacking in more recent discussions of early British photography.
Strikingly, his publication provides extensive quotations from interviews with individual workers written in vernacular English.
An unprecedented effort to give working people a public voice.
This voice was given extra impact by the addition of wood engravings based on photographs of the same people he interviewed.
Mayhew obviously felt that the caption from a daguerreotype added an indisputable authority,
a new power to his efforts, an advertisement for the publication which was initially issued in parts.
Prominently stated that each part included engravings of the scenes and people
described copied from daguerreotypes taken by Beard expressly for this work.
Beard, of course, was a trade name, as Steve as obviously eloquently demonstrated a trade name rather than an individual.
And any number of operators may have taken the actual photographs.
Its subject is seen from frontline and usually in motion showing their full body and tool of trade,
the slightly low point of view of the camera, giving them a monumental aspect.
Unlike middle class subjects who are almost always shown at rest and leisure make being an interesting exception.
The poor are always shown at work and on the move.
After close study of the engravings themselves, Timothy Barringer has suggested that, and I quote, the visual evidence.
These presents suggests that physiognomy, facial expression, clothing and gesture were significantly,
significantly transformed during the processes of drawing onto woodblocks and engraving.
So that, he says, details are exaggerated to intensify social and racial difference in the context of a true apology of known and recognisable types.
If we are to believe its caption, at least one of these daguerreotypes seems to have been taken on the street itself,
giving us a crudely engraved view of the facade of a shop selling fruit.
Many other illustrations place their subjects in a street setting,
but were actually based on undergrad types taken in a studio, ignoring relatively lengthy exposure times in 1858,
Mayhew argues that the photograph gives but the particular and accidental look
of an individual for the mere moment is in front of the camera in court.
Nevertheless, in his book, each of these so-called individuals is subsumed to their representation of the type.
Thus the Irish street seller is given an ethnic identity and a form of labour, and she even gets to speak directly to us.
Quote, I wish people that thinks were idle now were with me for a day.
I'd teach them. But she is not given the dignity of her own name, nor are we told the circumstances in which she was photographed.
Unfortunately, as in so much of this early history, none of these actual daguerreotypes has survived.
However, the text that accompanies the illustration of old Sarah, a blind hurdy gurdy player shown next to her guide,
Liza tells us that they were both conveyed to Mr. Beard's establishment to have her daguerreotype taken.
They were transported there in a horse driven cab the first time either of them had been on one.
Sarah, we're told at first didn't enjoy sitting with her back to the horse, but soon came to appreciate the novel experience.
Tragically, both she and Lisa were soon to be killed by just such a cab when it collided with them.
We are told that Sarah had to ascend quite the high flight of stairs that led to the portrait rooms, unquote,
presumably in the attic of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Cavendish Square, where Beard's studio is situated.
Finally, we are told that, and I quote, when the portrait was finished, she expressed a wish to feel it, unquote.
Remember, of course, she's blind.
We are thus reminded that one of the cultural dynamics being staged for us in this publication is the transformation of a solid,
touchable and unique photographic object into a mass reproduced, an ephemeral, printed image.
This transformation enabled by his fascicles to be self and just tuppence each
so that the people depicted in them could purchase and read their own stories.
A number of them, including this man Charles Alloway, wrote Letters to Mayhew about those stories.
And these letters were then published by Mayhew. Allaway thanked Mayhew for directing donations his way.
But other members of the London poor complained that Mayhew was exposing trade secrets in his
interviews and thereby thereby harming the prospects of the very people he claimed to be helping.
Encouraged by a rival newspaper, a group calling itself the Street Traders Protection Association,
used public meetings and letters in the press to present a different view of street street workers than the one offered in London for woundlingly.
One writer even claims that made his text that, quote,
The unvarnished language to which Mayhew alludes is neither our is neither ours nor of those belonging to us, unquote.
Such a comment is designed to question not just the content of Mayhew's his publication, but its very form.
The questioning necessarily encompasses the seemingly unvarnished photographic images that accompanied the language and the dispute.
Here we have one of those strange situations where the image speaks back to those in power in order to throw its own authenticity into doubt.
For some reason, I'm skipping a little page here, which is always very interesting.
I also wanted to point out another example of an image that speaks back to power.
Born in New York, Ira Aldridge was an African-American actor, playwright and theatre manager from 1824, the year he emigrated to the UK.
Aldridge made his career largely on the London stage and in Europe he became well known as a performer in plays by Shakespeare,
including taking roles usually played by white actors such as Richard, the third King Lear and Macbeth.
His portrait. A steel engraving based on the.
However, his portrait still engraving by Senator Garrett typed taken by William Paine of Islington, who has a daguerreotype in the exhibition,
appeared in an 1851 publication titled Tallis Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes.
Among the images of other celebrated Shakespearean actors are a number of men dressed in blackface to play Othello.
The series is a reminder of the popularity of the theatre and actors, even in the mid-19th century.
Even Queen Victoria bought a copy of this publication, but also of the casual racism that was part of everyday British life.
Aldridge's career took off at the height of the movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.
He chose to play a number of anti-slavery roles on stage and often addressed his audiences on closing night.
Speaking passionately about the injustice of slavery in December 1832, for example,
we know that he performed a poem offered as a sound bite in a new power if you use your phone that emphasised
the brutalities of the slave trade and praised British efforts to end that traffic and liberate the slaves.
He finishes of justice heaven.
But his the time is nigh. Freedom approaches from the western sky sheds bright glory toward the Indian seas and shakes a banner or the Caribbean.
The tortured black man hears a thrilling voice and checks his groans.
One moment to rejoice.
My talk has tried to show that race and class differences were frequently registered in British daguerreotype culture of the 1840s and 1850s,
even if not in most subsequent publications about that culture.
The expansion of our histories of photography to encompass the photographic image in all its
many forms allows the representation of such differences to be acknowledged and critiqued.
A first step, I think, towards a more diverse and even accurate rendition of both the past and the present.
Thank you.