The first thing you see when you walk into the show A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 is not, in fact, a photo. It is an oil painting of a pale man, smartly dressed, hair combed, with one hand resting on a small wooden box, the other removing a cap from the box’s brass lens: he has a new daguerreotype camera, the first instrument of modern photography.
While this looks innocent enough, the picture has the force of a slap: who needs oil painters, who will trust them, when you have photographers, accurate, objective and instant? There’s a reason the lens looks like a cannon trained on an enemy. And if the man has removed the cap, it means he’s taking a photograph: of the artist — and of us. The little box is coming for you too, dear viewer, the unknown painter says.
It even came for Queen Victoria, as this subtle, surprising exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford shows. In 1852, she and five of her children sat for a daguerreotype — produced by exposing to light a chemically treated silver-plated copper sheet set within a camera — in the Regent Street studio of William Edward Kilburn, one of the entrepreneur-artists who had popped up to offer their high-tech services to society. But the photographer caught the Queen with her eyes closed (“horrid”, she wrote in her diary) and in her irritation she scratched her face off the finished picture, leaving a rather spooky decapitated figure stroking a young prince’s head.
With her defacement, Victoria was only doing in anger what others did on purpose: manipulating photographs. The great lesson of A New Power is precisely the opposite of what the unknown portraitist presumably feared: photography could be anything but accurate and objective, put to use for propaganda and profit. What was conceived as a technology for capturing the world as it was — art critic John Ruskin said a daguerreotype was “very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself” — instead became subject to that obscure mishmash of human motives and emotions which bends reality to desire.
Daguerreotypes were fragile and expensive, so most of the general public would not have had access to them; the main means of transmission was reproduction by an engraver in newspapers and magazines, line drawings accompanied by the phrase “engraved after daguerreotype” to vouchsafe their accuracy. Yet figures could easily be “cut and pasted” from separate photographs into a final engraving or reorganised to suit the artist’s eye. A daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet’s studio of Lajos Kossuth, exiled regent-president of the kingdom of Hungary, was reproduced again and again as he fundraised for an independent Hungary, but subtly altered: in an 1851 engraving, his hand lingers on a balcony railing; a year later, he’s holding a scroll. If anything, photography demanded more trust and critical engagement from viewers right from the start.
It was not just the rich and powerful who found themselves at the lens end of the daguerreotype camera. In journalist Henry Mayhew’s reporting, collected in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), he met those condemned to Victorian England’s lowest professions: rag salesman, sewer-hunter, barista. “The struggle to get a living is so great . . . it’s only those as can get good ‘pitches’ that can get a crust at it,” says the coffee-seller in Mayhew’s book, pictured in an engraving after a daguerreotype, serving a cup from an urn on his stall. While the several images from Mayhew’s book in this show are far from caricatures, we cannot trust that they are free from pity either.
Louis Daguerre’s announcement of the invention of photography in January 1839 quickly drew out his competitors, who had also invented photography. Shortly afterwards, English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot raced to declare his own process, which he called photogenic drawing and which used paper soaked in weak salt water then brushed with silver nitrate solution, rather than metal plates, before being exposed. He soon refined this further into the calotype process, which needed a shorter exposure.
He did not refine it quite far enough. In 1846 the Art-Union journal asked Talbot for 7,000 prints based on calotype negatives to be glued into an edition opposite an essay about his process; Talbot and his former valet, now photographic printer, Nicolaas Henneman, quickly produced them, but they equally as quickly faded. If I say there’s nothing worth seeing in the three examples on display here, it is not meant as a criticism: the thin washed-out pillars of a gothic building in one of them testify to Talbot’s technical failure and consequent financial calamity. In the last 30 years of his life, he did not take another photograph.
But what he had enabled, the world saw. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, where exhibitors from all corners of the British empire and beyond gathered their finest commodities in London’s Hyde Park, the official photographs were taken using Talbot’s calotype process. A striking photo of a cabinet of feathers, all abstract curls, anticipates Man Ray’s Surrealist images by 70 years. The camera’s use in such an imperial project, as well as to illustrate “anthropological” essays about the quaint or outraging customs of imperial subjects, shows it could also be a tool of ideology: abusable like any technology, but perhaps all the more disappointing (and powerful) because of its implicit promise of impartiality.
It never really was impartial, though, or at least as impartial as the human eye is. It was capable of stirring documentary, such as the massive crowds at a Chartist rally for political reform in 1848, in surprisingly finely detail, top hats and banners all discernible, and of ravishing, radiant works of art, as in Edward Kilburn’s portrait of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, who is captured in person and in reflection, the mirror acknowledging the constructedness of the situation, the house of images the camera created. The house of images we still live in today.
To May 7, bodleian.ox.ac.uk
