1 00:00:03,530 --> 00:00:06,050 It's an honour to speak to this audience. 2 00:00:06,500 --> 00:00:11,149 Many of the people in this room, I was going to say, although I take responsibility for the exhibition A New Power, 3 00:00:11,150 --> 00:00:15,350 actually many of the people in this room have informed what it is. 4 00:00:16,340 --> 00:00:23,660 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. 5 00:00:24,050 --> 00:00:29,390 And what I hope the exhibition offers everybody here is a platform on which to build and go 6 00:00:29,390 --> 00:00:33,860 in all the various different directions that we've been hearing about during today's talks. 7 00:00:36,130 --> 00:00:38,890 But let me begin by saying that it's, I think, 8 00:00:38,890 --> 00:00:46,120 a striking anomaly in the literature on our field that no comprehensive history of British photography has yet been published. 9 00:00:47,140 --> 00:00:52,210 One consequence is the inadequate attention paid to the nuanced specificity of that history. 10 00:00:53,190 --> 00:00:57,690 In my paper, I want to signal at least one one issue deserving of that attention. 11 00:00:57,930 --> 00:01:02,730 The ways in which race and class were visually engaged in early British photography. 12 00:01:04,050 --> 00:01:09,060 Fortunately, the new Power exhibition provides a number of examples worthy of our contemplation. 13 00:01:09,990 --> 00:01:18,180 Those examples primarily manifest themselves as photographic images reproduced in the popular press rather than as photographs per say. 14 00:01:18,990 --> 00:01:25,980 In other words, my paper will also offer an opportunity to break free from the artificial constraint of medium purity, 15 00:01:26,430 --> 00:01:31,290 thereby allowing me to encompass the history of British photographic practice in its entirety. 16 00:01:33,470 --> 00:01:40,630 Nevertheless, I begin my talk with a photograph, a hand-painted daguerreotype by an unknown maker showing a prosperous, 17 00:01:40,830 --> 00:01:50,090 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. 18 00:01:50,990 --> 00:01:55,100 That attribute declares both his literacy and his class allegiance. 19 00:01:55,670 --> 00:01:59,990 The news explicitly aimed for middle class readers by, among other things, 20 00:02:00,170 --> 00:02:06,500 adopting the more expensive wood engraving process over that of the woodcut with its working class associations. 21 00:02:07,400 --> 00:02:11,960 Some of the wood engravings in the Illustrated London News were copies of photographs. 22 00:02:14,360 --> 00:02:15,350 As a consequence, 23 00:02:15,590 --> 00:02:24,920 our seated man could well have opened his paper and looked at these three photographic images of Indigenous Australians published in January 1850. 24 00:02:25,370 --> 00:02:29,930 In fact, oddly enough, published on Australia Day the 26th of January 1850. 25 00:02:30,410 --> 00:02:36,060 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. 26 00:02:37,640 --> 00:02:43,670 At least four of the group of at least four of the group of daguerreotypes from which these portraits were derived have survived. 27 00:02:44,240 --> 00:02:51,800 They were taken in Melbourne in 1847 by a recently arrived English photographer, Douglas Kilburn, brother of Edward Kilburn. 28 00:02:52,130 --> 00:02:54,860 A number of his plates are in the exhibition. 29 00:02:55,610 --> 00:03:02,390 The photographer had to offer bribes to get his subjects into his studio and none of them consented to come a second time. 30 00:03:02,630 --> 00:03:10,160 One of those absent bits of response that we have to sort of read much into these portraits obey 31 00:03:10,160 --> 00:03:15,110 the same basic conventions as seen in the daguerreotype of the gentleman with his newspaper, 32 00:03:15,500 --> 00:03:19,340 albeit perhaps with a more frontal, almost confrontational pose. 33 00:03:20,090 --> 00:03:25,680 The people seen in them were not granted the subject to the proper names or the illusion of a domestic setting. 34 00:03:26,270 --> 00:03:33,130 I think, therefore we can assume Kilburn photographs were taken to certify native Australia's presumed otherness. 35 00:03:34,900 --> 00:03:39,760 Kilburn pictures show their subjects in contemporary dress, a mixture of animal skins, 36 00:03:39,760 --> 00:03:45,940 European blankets, ornaments and scarification, along with wooden boomerangs and digging sticks. 37 00:03:46,690 --> 00:03:49,780 They speak, therefore, of the complex situation of these people. 38 00:03:49,780 --> 00:03:59,440 In 1847, forced to negotiate a new world of cameras, pastoral leases, rapid urbanisation and unfamiliar European customs. 39 00:03:59,860 --> 00:04:03,880 Among them, the ethnographic portrait and systematic genocide. 40 00:04:06,180 --> 00:04:09,780 Daguerreotypes are, of course, unique and relatively fragile objects. 41 00:04:10,350 --> 00:04:18,479 But as images, these ones soon travelled abroad, appearing as wood engravings and foreign publications, first in a book about Australia, 42 00:04:18,480 --> 00:04:24,750 published in 1848, in Edinburgh, where there's been, oddly enough, a sex change engineered for one of the figures. 43 00:04:25,200 --> 00:04:31,290 And then in a further translation of this first engraving in a Danish magazine in 1849. 44 00:04:32,530 --> 00:04:42,010 In 1851 illustrations after these daguerreotypes even found their way into a journal devoted to religious science and general intelligence in India. 45 00:04:43,430 --> 00:04:49,430 But they found their widest audience when a number of them were reproduced as wood engravings in that 1850 issue 46 00:04:49,430 --> 00:04:55,430 of the Illustrated London News with an accompanying text that expressed the usual racial prejudices of the time. 47 00:04:56,720 --> 00:05:02,690 This single item therefore speaks to the extraordinary mobility of the photographic image in the mid-19th century. 48 00:05:03,530 --> 00:05:06,859 Each of the daguerreotypes from which these images were derived would have been 49 00:05:06,860 --> 00:05:11,480 destroyed in the process of being traced and copied onto a woodblock for carving. 50 00:05:12,110 --> 00:05:17,690 And yet, the photographic ghosts, these images circulated throughout the British Empire and beyond. 51 00:05:18,080 --> 00:05:24,920 In this case, travelling as daguerreotypes from Australia to England before travelling back again to Australia in translated form, 52 00:05:25,250 --> 00:05:28,910 while also being reproduced in Scotland, Denmark and India. 53 00:05:30,160 --> 00:05:37,540 The sharing of such images of foreign peoples. The difference signalled by the darkness of their skin and the strangeness of their dress, 54 00:05:37,810 --> 00:05:43,390 allowed the British Empire to maintain a sense of its own coherence as a as an apparently benign. 55 00:05:43,600 --> 00:05:47,170 And yet all seeing. All powerful colonial enterprise. 56 00:05:48,540 --> 00:05:54,329 And indeed any reader of the Illustrated British press in the 1840s and fifties would have encountered 57 00:05:54,330 --> 00:06:00,540 a regular stream of deadpan photographic images of native peoples dressed in folkloric costumes. 58 00:06:01,200 --> 00:06:08,700 Here, for example, are the, I quote, correct likenesses engraved from daguerreotype plates taken by Monsieur to get started 59 00:06:08,700 --> 00:06:13,800 by Monsieur Claudet of Ojibbeway Indians attending a marriage ceremony in London. 60 00:06:14,340 --> 00:06:20,610 The image appeared in an 1844 issue of the Pictorial Times during the group's visit to England in that year. 61 00:06:21,800 --> 00:06:29,030 12 years later, in July 1856, the same photographer captured another such group from Canada's Walpole 62 00:06:29,030 --> 00:06:33,080 Islands while they were on exhibit at the Panopticon in Leicester Square. 63 00:06:34,310 --> 00:06:43,580 The image was reproduced in the Illustrated London News on 12th of July 1856, having been photographed by Mr. Claudet for our journal Unquiet, 64 00:06:45,170 --> 00:06:48,590 the occasion of the Great Exhibition and showed that a steady stream of visiting 65 00:06:48,590 --> 00:06:52,370 foreigners were featured in the news in the form of frontal group portraits. 66 00:06:53,030 --> 00:06:57,709 Wood engraved copies of daguerreotypes supplied by the Beard Studio included this one of 67 00:06:57,710 --> 00:07:03,200 an Algerian family and another of this Chinese family at the Crystal Palace exhibition, 68 00:07:03,650 --> 00:07:08,330 which appeared in the Illustrated London News on the 24th of May, 1851. 69 00:07:09,380 --> 00:07:15,440 Chung Atai. I'm just quoting a Chinese professor of music and quote and his family were apparently 70 00:07:15,440 --> 00:07:19,760 visiting London from Canton specifically to take part in the Great Exhibition. 71 00:07:20,690 --> 00:07:29,000 Charles Dickens Household Narrative of Current Events reported that the family was invited to visit Queen Victoria, during which visit, and I quote, 72 00:07:29,240 --> 00:07:37,370 The elder consort of Chung Atai, presented Her Majesty with a beautifully executed daguerreotype by Beard of the interesting Chinese group. 73 00:07:37,580 --> 00:07:43,400 Endquote. It's likely that the daguerreotype was a variant of precisely the image that we are seeing here. 74 00:07:45,310 --> 00:07:49,870 These portraits resemble those taken of British aristocrats or other celebrities a 75 00:07:49,870 --> 00:07:55,030 difference in physiognomy rather than that of dress or pose being the primary distinction. 76 00:07:55,750 --> 00:08:04,750 In July 1848, for example, the Illustrated London News published a number of engravings from daguerreotypes by Beard of Lords and ladies dressed 77 00:08:04,750 --> 00:08:11,740 in historical costumes for a ball thrown by the Marchioness of Londonderry in aid of the Spitalfields School of Design. 78 00:08:14,080 --> 00:08:19,780 An unusual example of ethnographic portraiture appeared on the cover of the 25th of October 1851. 79 00:08:20,170 --> 00:08:27,820 Based again on a daguerreotype made by the Beard Studio. It consists of a seated portrait of an innocent man known as Erasmus York, 80 00:08:28,120 --> 00:08:34,450 dressed in English garb and holding a hat with the word assistant prominently visible as part of the band. 81 00:08:36,060 --> 00:08:39,180 York has assisted in the search for the Lost Franklin expedition. 82 00:08:39,510 --> 00:08:45,360 A story, of course, featured in a new power. And then he returned to England, where, among other things, 83 00:08:45,600 --> 00:08:53,220 he helped in the preparation of a publication titled Greenland Eskimo Vocabulary for the Use of the Arctic Expeditions. 84 00:08:54,280 --> 00:09:00,129 His adoption of both European dress and familiar photographic conventions no doubt reinforced the 85 00:09:00,130 --> 00:09:05,500 notion among readers of the news that the assimilation of native peoples was both possible and, 86 00:09:05,500 --> 00:09:13,590 of course, desirable. What these various examples demonstrate is the interest among middle class Britons in seeing 87 00:09:13,590 --> 00:09:18,330 for themselves through the apparently dispassionate and authenticating eye of the camera, 88 00:09:18,660 --> 00:09:25,500 evidence of the ethnic and racial differences that British imperialism, whether military or economic, was in the process. 89 00:09:26,540 --> 00:09:32,389 A bringing to order photographing other peoples was an important part of this process making 90 00:09:32,390 --> 00:09:38,120 difference explicable by rendering it same or at least comparable and therefore measurable. 91 00:09:38,750 --> 00:09:44,060 To photograph these peoples was therefore to exercise a certain symbolic power over them. 92 00:09:45,720 --> 00:09:52,530 The same might be said about the people photographed by the Beach Studio on behalf of this man, the journalist Henry Mayhew. 93 00:09:53,070 --> 00:09:59,100 Once again, as you can see, shown seated but at work in his case with a sheath of papers in his hand. 94 00:10:00,150 --> 00:10:02,700 Mayhew was responsible for a multi-volume book, 95 00:10:02,700 --> 00:10:11,790 first published in 1851 under the title London Labour and the London Poor Encyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of those that will work. 96 00:10:12,030 --> 00:10:20,770 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. 97 00:10:21,310 --> 00:10:28,240 He even justified its mission by arguing that the British public knew less about the lives of its own working class wandering hordes, 98 00:10:28,240 --> 00:10:33,490 as he called them then, than it did about, as he put it, the most distant tribes of the earth. 99 00:10:35,200 --> 00:10:37,540 Compiled from the input of a number of authors. 100 00:10:37,870 --> 00:10:47,140 Mayhew's text provided a richly ethnological commentary on London's poor based on over 400 interviews, a mass of statistics and social analysis. 101 00:10:47,950 --> 00:10:50,860 Its view of the people it represents is somewhat contradictory. 102 00:10:51,490 --> 00:11:00,550 While most is sympathetic, it also divides the deserving from the undeserving poor and often offers ethnic stereotypes in the guise of social science. 103 00:11:01,450 --> 00:11:08,319 Nevertheless, Mayhew claimed that, and I quote, My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge 104 00:11:08,320 --> 00:11:12,940 of the sufferings and the frequent heroism under those sufferings of the poor. 105 00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:15,960 Thanks to Mayhew, 106 00:11:16,140 --> 00:11:23,460 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, 107 00:11:24,000 --> 00:11:29,310 a diversity almost completely lacking in more recent discussions of early British photography. 108 00:11:30,240 --> 00:11:37,560 Strikingly, his publication provides extensive quotations from interviews with individual workers written in vernacular English. 109 00:11:37,860 --> 00:11:41,220 An unprecedented effort to give working people a public voice. 110 00:11:42,380 --> 00:11:48,500 This voice was given extra impact by the addition of wood engravings based on photographs of the same people he interviewed. 111 00:11:49,310 --> 00:11:54,380 Mayhew obviously felt that the caption from a daguerreotype added an indisputable authority, 112 00:11:54,650 --> 00:12:01,160 a new power to his efforts, an advertisement for the publication which was initially issued in parts. 113 00:12:01,460 --> 00:12:05,900 Prominently stated that each part included engravings of the scenes and people 114 00:12:05,900 --> 00:12:10,790 described copied from daguerreotypes taken by Beard expressly for this work. 115 00:12:11,900 --> 00:12:18,620 Beard, of course, was a trade name, as Steve as obviously eloquently demonstrated a trade name rather than an individual. 116 00:12:18,800 --> 00:12:22,010 And any number of operators may have taken the actual photographs. 117 00:12:24,020 --> 00:12:29,860 Its subject is seen from frontline and usually in motion showing their full body and tool of trade, 118 00:12:30,170 --> 00:12:34,160 the slightly low point of view of the camera, giving them a monumental aspect. 119 00:12:34,880 --> 00:12:40,760 Unlike middle class subjects who are almost always shown at rest and leisure make being an interesting exception. 120 00:12:41,060 --> 00:12:44,030 The poor are always shown at work and on the move. 121 00:12:45,540 --> 00:12:52,010 After close study of the engravings themselves, Timothy Barringer has suggested that, and I quote, the visual evidence. 122 00:12:52,030 --> 00:12:57,989 These presents suggests that physiognomy, facial expression, clothing and gesture were significantly, 123 00:12:57,990 --> 00:13:02,910 significantly transformed during the processes of drawing onto woodblocks and engraving. 124 00:13:03,450 --> 00:13:13,020 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. 125 00:13:16,290 --> 00:13:21,420 If we are to believe its caption, at least one of these daguerreotypes seems to have been taken on the street itself, 126 00:13:21,690 --> 00:13:26,130 giving us a crudely engraved view of the facade of a shop selling fruit. 127 00:13:27,930 --> 00:13:31,230 Many other illustrations place their subjects in a street setting, 128 00:13:31,350 --> 00:13:39,960 but were actually based on undergrad types taken in a studio, ignoring relatively lengthy exposure times in 1858, 129 00:13:40,140 --> 00:13:44,910 Mayhew argues that the photograph gives but the particular and accidental look 130 00:13:44,910 --> 00:13:48,960 of an individual for the mere moment is in front of the camera in court. 131 00:13:49,680 --> 00:13:56,130 Nevertheless, in his book, each of these so-called individuals is subsumed to their representation of the type. 132 00:13:57,150 --> 00:14:04,260 Thus the Irish street seller is given an ethnic identity and a form of labour, and she even gets to speak directly to us. 133 00:14:04,540 --> 00:14:08,580 Quote, I wish people that thinks were idle now were with me for a day. 134 00:14:08,610 --> 00:14:16,260 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. 135 00:14:16,800 --> 00:14:22,470 Unfortunately, as in so much of this early history, none of these actual daguerreotypes has survived. 136 00:14:24,070 --> 00:14:30,940 However, the text that accompanies the illustration of old Sarah, a blind hurdy gurdy player shown next to her guide, 137 00:14:30,940 --> 00:14:36,970 Liza tells us that they were both conveyed to Mr. Beard's establishment to have her daguerreotype taken. 138 00:14:37,750 --> 00:14:42,430 They were transported there in a horse driven cab the first time either of them had been on one. 139 00:14:43,350 --> 00:14:49,710 Sarah, we're told at first didn't enjoy sitting with her back to the horse, but soon came to appreciate the novel experience. 140 00:14:50,460 --> 00:14:55,830 Tragically, both she and Lisa were soon to be killed by just such a cab when it collided with them. 141 00:14:56,850 --> 00:15:02,280 We are told that Sarah had to ascend quite the high flight of stairs that led to the portrait rooms, unquote, 142 00:15:02,550 --> 00:15:09,000 presumably in the attic of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Cavendish Square, where Beard's studio is situated. 143 00:15:09,890 --> 00:15:16,100 Finally, we are told that, and I quote, when the portrait was finished, she expressed a wish to feel it, unquote. 144 00:15:16,460 --> 00:15:17,810 Remember, of course, she's blind. 145 00:15:19,370 --> 00:15:25,549 We are thus reminded that one of the cultural dynamics being staged for us in this publication is the transformation of a solid, 146 00:15:25,550 --> 00:15:31,040 touchable and unique photographic object into a mass reproduced, an ephemeral, printed image. 147 00:15:31,880 --> 00:15:36,080 This transformation enabled by his fascicles to be self and just tuppence each 148 00:15:36,440 --> 00:15:40,490 so that the people depicted in them could purchase and read their own stories. 149 00:15:41,120 --> 00:15:46,430 A number of them, including this man Charles Alloway, wrote Letters to Mayhew about those stories. 150 00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:53,360 And these letters were then published by Mayhew. Allaway thanked Mayhew for directing donations his way. 151 00:15:53,780 --> 00:15:58,280 But other members of the London poor complained that Mayhew was exposing trade secrets in his 152 00:15:58,280 --> 00:16:03,230 interviews and thereby thereby harming the prospects of the very people he claimed to be helping. 153 00:16:04,090 --> 00:16:09,670 Encouraged by a rival newspaper, a group calling itself the Street Traders Protection Association, 154 00:16:09,910 --> 00:16:18,820 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. 155 00:16:19,030 --> 00:16:21,880 One writer even claims that made his text that, quote, 156 00:16:22,060 --> 00:16:29,440 The unvarnished language to which Mayhew alludes is neither our is neither ours nor of those belonging to us, unquote. 157 00:16:30,560 --> 00:16:35,960 Such a comment is designed to question not just the content of Mayhew's his publication, but its very form. 158 00:16:36,770 --> 00:16:43,580 The questioning necessarily encompasses the seemingly unvarnished photographic images that accompanied the language and the dispute. 159 00:16:44,610 --> 00:16:52,410 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. 160 00:16:59,220 --> 00:17:02,520 For some reason, I'm skipping a little page here, which is always very interesting. 161 00:17:03,540 --> 00:17:09,900 I also wanted to point out another example of an image that speaks back to power. 162 00:17:10,500 --> 00:17:19,980 Born in New York, Ira Aldridge was an African-American actor, playwright and theatre manager from 1824, the year he emigrated to the UK. 163 00:17:20,220 --> 00:17:27,330 Aldridge made his career largely on the London stage and in Europe he became well known as a performer in plays by Shakespeare, 164 00:17:27,540 --> 00:17:33,660 including taking roles usually played by white actors such as Richard, the third King Lear and Macbeth. 165 00:17:34,560 --> 00:17:37,720 His portrait. A steel engraving based on the. 166 00:17:38,790 --> 00:17:45,660 However, his portrait still engraving by Senator Garrett typed taken by William Paine of Islington, who has a daguerreotype in the exhibition, 167 00:17:45,990 --> 00:17:53,460 appeared in an 1851 publication titled Tallis Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes. 168 00:17:54,180 --> 00:18:00,270 Among the images of other celebrated Shakespearean actors are a number of men dressed in blackface to play Othello. 169 00:18:01,020 --> 00:18:06,090 The series is a reminder of the popularity of the theatre and actors, even in the mid-19th century. 170 00:18:06,480 --> 00:18:13,200 Even Queen Victoria bought a copy of this publication, but also of the casual racism that was part of everyday British life. 171 00:18:15,350 --> 00:18:20,000 Aldridge's career took off at the height of the movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. 172 00:18:20,570 --> 00:18:26,660 He chose to play a number of anti-slavery roles on stage and often addressed his audiences on closing night. 173 00:18:26,990 --> 00:18:32,810 Speaking passionately about the injustice of slavery in December 1832, for example, 174 00:18:33,020 --> 00:18:39,589 we know that he performed a poem offered as a sound bite in a new power if you use your phone that emphasised 175 00:18:39,590 --> 00:18:45,320 the brutalities of the slave trade and praised British efforts to end that traffic and liberate the slaves. 176 00:18:45,860 --> 00:18:49,280 He finishes of justice heaven. 177 00:18:49,280 --> 00:18:59,060 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. 178 00:18:59,450 --> 00:19:03,460 The tortured black man hears a thrilling voice and checks his groans. 179 00:19:03,470 --> 00:19:05,240 One moment to rejoice. 180 00:19:07,300 --> 00:19:15,070 My talk has tried to show that race and class differences were frequently registered in British daguerreotype culture of the 1840s and 1850s, 181 00:19:15,400 --> 00:19:18,770 even if not in most subsequent publications about that culture. 182 00:19:19,390 --> 00:19:23,860 The expansion of our histories of photography to encompass the photographic image in all its 183 00:19:23,860 --> 00:19:29,110 many forms allows the representation of such differences to be acknowledged and critiqued. 184 00:19:29,470 --> 00:19:35,350 A first step, I think, towards a more diverse and even accurate rendition of both the past and the present. 185 00:19:35,890 --> 00:19:36,280 Thank you.