About

This research is on the presentation of photography and photographic images in the printed press at the end of the nineteenth century. While previous histories and theories of photography have looked to the announcement of photography (c. 1839) to understand what photography was conceived of being—or doing, this project considers how photography was presented, narrated and imagined at the close of the nineteenth century. 

By the 1880s, instantaneous silver gelatin dry plates had changed the way photographs were taken, as well as the kinds of images that could be made. The aspiration for images that ‘moved’, along with images that could seemingly arrest movement, was coming to fruition. At the same time, one of photography’s long-awaited uses came into full effect with the half-tone process for the photomechanical reproduction of images in print. The end of the nineteenth century also saw the dawn of the Kodak era, whereby many of the processes that had previously been carried out by photographers, darkroom operators and assistants would soon take place within the factory. 

Whereas twentieth-century theories of photography have centred on the photograph’s indexicality as its defining characteristic, this project draws on popular illustrated magazines and specialist publications (the photographic press) to understand how photography was communicated in the late nineteenth century; what distinguished photography from other forms of image-making and image reproduction (such as engraving); the peculiarities of how photographs were titled, captioned and written about; and the extent to which process, rather than indexicality, defined photography.