10. Samuel Butler’s Photography: Observation and the Dynamic Past

Abstract

This essay considers the 'snapshot photography' of Victorian critic, writer and polymath, Samuel Butler. It explores how we might understand Butler's photography in relation to the visual rhetorics of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as inflected through his very individual and idiosyncratic view of the world. The essay has two key strands. First, Butler's photography in relation to the cultural processes and parameters of shifting observational practices in the late nineteenth century, especially those emerging around the delineation of different cultures in proto-modern anthropology. Such debates were characterised by a sense of the past. Salvage ethnography, especially, aimed to record that which was presumed in the context of a Darwinian inevitability to be dying out. Second, is the idea of photography as a form of an analogy for prosthetic memory, which goes to the heart of Butler's neo-Lamarckian biological ideas. Both these strands are linked by an archaeological imagination, which excavates and positions in the present that which is 'buried' and invisible within the past, a form of historical consciousness projected onto a subject matter. This essay is the first time that Butler's photography has been explored in terms of his biological ideas and as such constitutes a contribution to the intellectual history of late nineteenth-century photography.