The London Library Magazine Issue 34 Winter 2016

EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY IN FOCUS

The Library’s collection includes some rare and interesting landmarks of photographic history, as Louis Porter has discovered.

Hunting for books on early photography in The London Library requires the appetite and alert faculties that I assume come naturally to a truffle pig. The back stacks, like the dark oak forests of Périgord so loved by French truffle hunters, conceal the greatest treasures, and the best of these can generally be found away from the designated areas. For example, Alex Richardson’s remarkable Vickers Sons and Maxim, Limited: Their Works and Manufactures (1902) can be found on the folio shelves of S. Engineering. Photographs of artillery demonstrations conducted by men in pristine white uniforms, views of cavernous factory workshops assembling the ‘Maxim’ and ‘Pom-Pom’ guns that would soon churn flesh and soil on the fields of Europe, and scientific images of armour plating tests, are all rendered with extraordinary clarity.

One afternoon, hunting in Topography, I discovered a copy of Heinrich Schliemann’s Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer: Photographische Abbildungen (1874, T. Asia Minor, Troy, folio), which details Schliemann’s discovery of, among other things, ‘Priam’s Treasure’ . The two volumes of albumen prints include photographs of drawings, dig sites and collections of silver vases, goblets, copper lance-heads and a variety of other artefacts from ancient Troy arranged neatly on shelves, with object numbers carefully inscribed into the glass photographic plates. These arrangements are both scientific records and spectacles of plunder, a nineteenth-century precursor to the Haul videos that proliferate on YouTube today.

The prints themselves in Schliemann’s book are surprisingly crude. The albumen print was the first truly mass-produced form of photography, finding its way into millions of homes throughout the world. Despite the scale of production, albumen prints were hand made, a sheet of thin cotton rag coated with salted egg white and silver nitrate. When pasted into books the prints were often part of sumptuous editions, frequently sold in instalments by subscription.

The Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer, however, is an exercise in how not to make a photographic book, a mess of wonky, mis-trimmed and poorly coated prints, as if Schliemann in an attempt to save money had done the job himself, at night, in the dark. Although poorly realised, the book has a sense of authenticity that a more pristine creation lacks. I wonder, briefly, if the black soot that clings to the pages of these volumes has come from an ancient terracotta amphora and is not just dust dislodged from the top of one of the veins of mysterious piping that run through the back stacks.

The S. Photography section itself spans a respectable six shelves in Science and Miscellaneous (one more than its neighbour, S. Petroleum). Pedagogic manuals on photographic techniques, encyclopaedias and numerous works of cultural theory dominate the shelfmark.

Some works by photographers and artists do poke through, but the more visually inclined browser is better served by heading straight to the heavily illustrated and often lavish works of S. Photography, 4to. From the technical aficionado’s point of view, though, S. Photography contains some superb early photography manuals and, as a rule of thumb, the longer the title the better the book. Robert Hunt’s verbosely titled Photography: A Treatise on the Chemical Changes Produced by Solar Radiation, and the Production of Pictures from Nature, by the Daguerreotype, Calotype, and other Photographic Processes (1851) is, for example, a fascinating treatise offering workable instructions in the methods of some the medium’s pioneers. It also features possibly the shortest complete history of photography, at fewer than five pages.

For much of the nineteenth century, photography was a febrile mix of innovation and possibility. Almost every corner of the physical and mental world was in some way influenced by the new medium, and the shelves of the Library are a fascinating expression of this influence. Shelfmarks such as S. Movement, S. Crime and S. Ethnology present ample evidence of a time in photography’s history when the work of photographic scientists, artists and charlatans mingled frequently and at times seamlessly.

Occasionally I give a visiting friend or family member a tour of the Library, during which I like to show them the copy of Thomas Byrne’s Professional Criminals of America (1886) that can be found in S. Crime, 4to. Byrne, chief detective of New York City, was famed for his rough interrogation style and for his ‘Rogues’ Gallery’ , a collection of photographic portraits of known criminals on display at police headquarters.

The book is an overview of the gallery and features around 200 portraits of New York’s less elusive bank sneaks, burglars, hotel thieves and confidence tricksters. The gallery was designed to serve as a tool for detectives in identifying criminals, a fact not lost on the sitters themselves who often did what they could to evade the camera, contorting their faces and closing their eyes but, in Bryan’s words, ‘the sun has been too quick for them’ . Some were more reluctant than others, and the portrait of the prolific bank robber and burglar Edward Lyons features an unconscious Lyons recovering in hospital from gunshot wounds received during a botched robbery. The ‘Inspector’s Model’ , a theatrical image towards the beginning of the book, shows the supposed struggle of an unwilling subject. Byrnes himself looks on as his detectives, like retail assistants restraining an apoplectic department-store Santa, set to work preparing the sitter for his portrait.

The ‘Rogues’ Gallery’ of Professional Criminals of America was published before the standardisation of police photography and, despite its serious intent, the volume feels like a Central Casting look-book for Gangs of New York. Around the same time, Parisian police officer Alphonse Bertillon was developing an anthropometric system for use in law enforcement, and his work laid the foundation for the modern mug shot.

His rare Photographie Judiciaire (1890) contains some fascinating images, including an innovative use of cut-outs to demonstrate the misleading effect of facial hair on accurate suspect identification. Like Byrne’s book, Photographie Judiciaire features an ‘Inspector’s Model’ photograph; instead of a chaotic dungeon scene, however, we find an ordered, well-appointed police-department photographic studio. In the sitter’s chair, Bertillon, his head held in place by a metal rest, stares fixedly at the camera. This image serves as a powerful rebuke of the unrefined methods of earlier police photography. Bertillon was one of several nineteenth-century professionals who saw in the camera a perfect prism through which to view and interpret the social body.

The British polymath and father of eugenics Francis Galton developed a form of ‘composite portraiture’ which, through superimposing individual portraits, would by a process of formal accumulation highlight any mutual physical characteristics between groups of people. Galton’s first published description of the process can be found among the Library’s periodicals, in an 1878 edition of the journal Nature. Probably the best reproductions of Galton’s technique can be found in volume 2 of Karl Pearson’s exhaustive The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1924, Biog. Galton, 4to). Although in Nature Galton suggests that the process could be of use to amateur genealogists, the subjects of his own experiments included criminals, the sick and, forebodingly, ‘The Jewish Type’ .

The Library has several copies of Galton’s half-cousin Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, including the 1872 first edition (S. Psychology, Darwin). At only 30 photographs the historical significance of Expression can be easily overlooked, but on further examination the menagerie of peculiar portraits reveals an interesting early collaboration between scientist and photographic artist. The Swedishborn Oscar Rejlander produced many of the photographs for the book.

The illustration for ‘sneering’ features his wife Mary and, with varying degrees of credibility, Rejlandler himself enacts fear, disgust, indignation, indifference and surprise. Rejlandler was a well-regarded photographer of children and, of the ten child emotions he photographed for Expression, one took on a life of its own. ‘Mental Distress’ would become known as ‘Ginx’s Baby’ , and Rejlander would go on to independently sell over 300,000 copies of the photograph.

The jewel of the Library’s collection of early photographic portraiture is arguably The People of India, edited by J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye and located in the Safe, an 8-volume compendium of 468 albumen prints and descriptive texts, which depict bird catchers, acrobats, potters, grass-cutters, charcoal carriers, horse dealers, fruit sellers, minstrels, barbers, rulers, soldiers, courtesans, families and other members of the castes and tribes that inhabited British India. Published by W.H. Allen & Co. for the India Office between 1868 and 1875, The People of India was a failed attempt to produce a methodical and statistically informed photographic analysis of a vast cultural and social landscape. Of the eighth and final volume, only 200 copies were ever made and, through lack of subscription, the project was wound up, well short of completing its task.

The photographs vary widely in their quality and mostly adhere to the formal conventions of Victorian studio portraiture. There are, however, some superb group portraits, in particular of the various professions. What is more consistent is the tone of the textual comments that accompany each photograph, a blend of cultural superiority, revulsion and suspicion. For example we learn that ‘Khunjurs are liars, dacoits, thieves’ , and that Changars are ‘repulsively mean and wretched’ . Individuals fare no better: of Shair Ali Syud the author declares, ‘It is hardly possible, perhaps, to conceive features more essentially repulsive’ . Not even Afghan fruit escapes disdain: ‘none of it has the juiciness or flavour of English fruits of the same description. ’

The rebellion of 1857 casts a heavy shadow and, for all its ethnographic intent, the work has much in common with Byrne’s Professional Criminals of America. The descriptions of northern-frontier tribes dedicate much attention to military strength, tactics, arms and their loyalty to the empire. Groups who took sides against the British in the rebellion often receive the harshest attention; the Goojars, for instance, ‘are dishonest, untrustworthy, and lawless in a high degree; and require constant and unremitting supervision’ .

The analytical eye of the nineteenthcentury camera was not confined to studying human subjects. In 1882, The Horse in Motion: As Shown By Instantaneous Photography (Higginson Collection, 4to.) was published at the behest of Leland Stanford, an industrialist, politician and keen horse breeder, who set out to answer a question that preoccupied many equine enthusiasts: ‘When galloping, do a horse’s hooves ever simultaneously leave the ground?’ To answer this question the photographer Eadweard Muybridge was employed to develop a photographic system to freeze the actions of a horse travelling at speed.

Using a series of 24 cameras arranged at linear intervals and triggered by trip-wires, Muybridge not only proved that a horse’s hooves do indeed leave the ground at the same time but, by projecting the stills in sequence at the California School of Fine Arts in 1880, can lay claim to producing the first motion-picture screening. Other animals are depicted in the book, including oxen, deer, dogs and a boar – although unlike its fellow quadrupeds the boar requires the encouragement of a farm-hand with a whip to cross the trip-wires of Muybridge’s cameras. The photographer’s collaboration with Leland ended acrimoniously, but Muybridge would go on to use the multicamera technique to produce his hugely popular volume Animal Locomotion (1887), which echoes in the work of artists including Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon.

At around the same time, French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey was conducting similar experiments with purpose-built equipment. In his book Movement (1895, S. Movement), Marey describes some of the most intriguing experiments in the history of early photography, and his subjects included horses, athletes, rubber balls, tortoise hearts and pigeons. His work on camera shutters and methods for winding film on to bobbins form essential parts of the technical matrix from which cinema and modern photography would soon emerge.

Muybridge and Marey were direct contemporaries, both lived between 1830 and 1904 and their work was often discussed within the same public forums. But on closer inspection radically different approaches emerge. Muybridge, the showman and professional photographer, had a penchant for attractive naked human subjects, never let the truth get in the way of his work and on many occasions edited his sequences for aesthetic appeal. Conversely, Marey was a scientist to the core, and the beguiling quality of his images was simply a by-product of a deeper investigation. For a short time, propelled by the wonderment of the new technology of photography, a peculiar cross-pollination between science and art emerged, not always with positive results. Regardless of its effect, one of the most intriguing places to explore this relationship must surely be a Library whose history, almost to the year, spans that of photography itself.