Developing Orientalism: Negative/Positive Ecologies ‘in the Field’ of the British Empire, c.1850–1888

Abstract

Histories of Orientalist photography focus predominately on the form and content of positive prints. This article argues that more attention should be paid to the distinctive visual qualities and associated meanings of photographic negatives within the colonial visual encounter. Paper and glass-plate negatives were the objects of frequent spectatorship and discussion for travelling British photographers working ‘in the field’ in the early years of the medium. While scholarship on such photography has traditionally emphasized the camera’s capacity to ‘fix’ the racialized Other as a static image available for the imperial gaze, the actual practice of making photographs ‘in the field’ was defined by fluid chemical processes and the fragile materiality of sensitized plates. I argue that such procedures yielded negative images that were defined not so much by fixity as mutability. The distinctive blemishes and marks that appeared on such negatives were read by photographers as indexes of volatile chemical and climatic agencies that decentered photographic authorship. Attending to photographers’ writings on such visual traits thus reveals a counter-discourse to the standard language of stasis and instantaneity that has come to dominate accounts of photography.