Metropolitan Surveillance and Rural Opacity: Secret Photography in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland

Abstract

This essay considers the significance of the Foucaultian notion of surveillance in accounts of the history of photography, raising the question whether Ireland's colonial placement during the nineteenth century led to a different history of the medium. The study focuses on Irish Special Branch's adoption of secret photography during the latter part of the nineteenth century in order to determine why this type of photography was considered useful. It also pays attention to the types of photographs collected by the Branch. The writer situates Special Branch's adoption of secret photography within a visual economy in Ireland where an alternative type of imagery (commercially produced eviction photographs) was employed to construct a different register for what constituted legitimacy and lawlessness. In addition, emphasis is placed on the role of photography in Ireland within a larger discursive framework of colonial policy making. Visibility is crucial to the Foucaultian model, and the failure to embed such signs in both the photographs produced and collected by Special Branch indicates that it was possible to produce lacunae in the power/knowledge paradigm. The writer concludes that the history of the deployment of secret photography in Ireland reveals how it failed to produce the required visual signs needed to win consent for control.