Memory Machine/Ideological Motor

Abstract

Ever since her first book was published in 1992, Elizabeth Edwards has produced pioneering studies on anthropology and photography.1 More recently, she has begun to extend her interest in visual anthropology to develop an ethnography of photography.2 Art history and critical theory have generated a number of studies telling us what photographs should mean, but no one has paid much attention to investigating what people actually do with photographs; how they value them (or do not); what they say about them; even how they handle them. On the whole, the study of photography in art history has largely atrophied.3 Yet beyond the borders of the disciple – in area studies, material culture, and cultural studies – there is lively work going on and Edwards has been central to the debates. Edwards's latest innovative book The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 will probably come to be valued as the major study of mass photographic practice. Despite the title, the book is not a study of hobbyist snaps of family members posed in front of castles or village ducking stools; rather, it is a detailed history of the English photographic survey and record movement. Active in the period between 1885 and the end of WWI photographers associated with these surveys attempted to produce a systematic archive of historical buildings, monuments, popular traditions, and ‘folk’ practices. The title of this book is drawn from The Camera as Historian, which was published in 1916 as a contribution to, and reflection on, the survey movement. Two overlapping groups were central to this practice. On the one hand, local surveys were conducted on a city or county basis (the Warwickshire survey and the Surrey survey were two of the most sustained). These projects, now usually housed in local libraries, were local studies intended for local audiences in line with the vision set out by Jerome Harrison (a midlands-based teacher of science, geologist and keen amateur photographer). On the other hand, the National Photographic Record Association (NPRA), linked with the Conservative MP Sir Benjamin Stone, was intended to be lodged in the British Museum as the national collection of record images. There was no unanimity among these branches of the survey movement and Stone's profile and contacts allowed him to marginalise Harrison at the time. The extent of this work has remained largely unknown, but Edwards has detected at least seventy-three such surveys that were planned or operated in some form. She informs us that fifty plus have left no extant record, but she has been able to research seventeen such surveys, which include the work of a little over a thousand photographers. Taken as a whole this amounts to an archive in the region of 55,000 photographs. What is more, Edwards has unearthed biographical data for around 80% of these individual photographers, enabling her to make some tentative connections and sociological comparisons (pp. 25–6). Almost all of the photographers involved were amateurs, with a significant overlap with local photography societies and clubs. Overwhelmingly, this was a middle-class network with a fair number of participants from the higher professions of law, medicine, and the church; but also the newer occupations of local government officers, librarians, engineers, and architects. However, Edwards suggests that as many as 40% may have been clerks or trade workers with some artisans and unskilled workers; at least 13% of the total were women (pp. 42–5). This mass photographic practice found its way into public circulation via exhibitions in local libraries, lantern slide lectures, and publications such as Sir Benjamin Stone's Pictures of 1906. There was also an extensive discussion in magazines such as Amateur Photographer and the British Journal of Photography. The sheer numbers of people involved, and the volume of prints produced, allow Edwards to write a brilliant ethnographic study of both amateur photography and attitudes to history.