Mechanised Work or Artistic Creation: Nineteenth-century Debates on Class and Photography

Abstract

What do we mean by ‘work’ when we talk about a work of art? And what happens to the status of this work when it becomes possible to mechanise some of its operations, such as drawing using an optical aid? Ideas about art and work in capitalist society are central to this book. ‘These categories are normally taken to be antinomies: art is seen as free and creative, while work is servile and repetitive. Like most antinomies, however, these two depend upon one another for their meanings and effects. Art is what it is because it is not work, and vice versa. But for all the mutual determination of these two terms, critical writing has overwhelmingly held them apart’ (p. 15). Not so in this book, where Steve Edwards successfully shifts the debate away from abstract notions of what is photography, or art, to focus instead on the labour, practical and intellectual, involved in producing photographs as art. By closely analysing writing in the nineteenth-century photographic press, a material passed over by most historians as of only very sporadic interest, Edwards argues that issues of class are relevant not only to social histories, but also to art theory, as they are intimately bound up in its fabric. He shows how the project of several English writers – to develop a theory of fine-art photography by recasting Joshua Reynolds's art theory to suit the working conditions engendered by photography – was impossible, as it was based on definitions of art as a noble occupation of the mind, in opposition to base mechanical copying as an occupation of the hand now substituted by photography. Its fundamental incoherence makes this a revealing case study of the relationships between conceptions of labour, art and photography, exposing the dependence of definitions of art on class-based distinctions between manual work as mindlessly following instructions, even if these came from nature, and intellectual labour as relaying on mental abstraction and creativity. This perspective allows us to see how this unpromising material – the nineteenth-century photographic press is no light reading, and as Edwards himself points out, it hides no undiscovered heroes or subversive voices – demonstrates how much debates on art are fuelled by energies in which aesthetic concerns cannot be separated from class anxieties. As in one of the memorable images evoked by this book – that of the Koh-i-noor diamond illuminated by coal-generated gas lights at the 1851 Great Exhibition, dramatising the social interdependence of the two forms of carbon – so in this book the diamond of art is illuminated by the coal-as-light of labour.