Dislocated Narratives and Sites of Memory: Amateur Photographic Surveys in Britain 1889–1897

Abstract

Prior to the formation of Sir Benjamin Stone's National Photographic Record Association (NPRA), a number of amateur photographic societies throughout Britain embarked on photographic surveys. The catalyst for these endeavours was ‘Illustrated Boston’, a set of slides visually describing the New England town sent from the Boston Photographic Society and premiered by the Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association in 1889. These slides were then shown in photographic societies throughout the United Kingdom. Although William Jerome Harrison had published erudite advice on how to carry out such a task, these formative surveys reveal a dislocation between ideal methodology and the realities of amateur surveying. This disjuncture has significant import for the representation of place and, drawing on the theories of Timothy Mitchell and Pierre Nora, this article examines the surveys as reflecting, and contributing to, particular social, aesthetic, political and institutional contexts integral to which was an oculo‐centric culture of display founded on the primacy of visual knowledge and therein experience. It argues that the failure to capture the genius loci of place that Elizabeth Edwards has determined in the NPRA emerges from these early processes and their contexts and concludes by considering the impact of digitization on these surveys as images and material artefacts.