PHOTOGRAPHY AND IRONY: THE SAMUEL BUTLER PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION AT THE TATE BRITAIN

Abstract

AN EXHIBITION of Samuel Butler's photography in Gallery Sixteen, an elegant rotunda room just off the entrance to the Tate Britain, offered a rare opportunity to see some of the photography of the author of Erewhon and to contemplate how Victorian photographic realism fares in the setting of a modern museum. The exhibition, celebrating the centenary of Butler's death, ran from November 2002 to May 2003 and was made up of thirty-five framed photographs, some of them digitally touched up by Dudley Simons, and an assortment of photobooks and editions of Butler's self-illustrated volumes. It was developed by Tate curator Richard Humphreys and Butler scholar Elinor Shaffer, with the support of librarian Mark Nicholls from St. John's College at Cambridge, which houses most of Butler's extensive photographic work in its special collections. Titled “Samuel Butler and the Ignorant Eye,” after Shaffer's notion in her Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer, and Art Critic (1988) that Butler's photography renders “the eye of the viewer … ignorant and open” (229), the black-and-white secularism of Butler's work offered a startling change in imagery from the intense colorism of “Rossetti and Medievalism,” the exhibit that preceded it in Gallery sixteen.