Straightforward and Ordered: Amateur Photographic Surveys and Scientific Aspiration, 1885–1914

Abstract

The photographic survey in the late nineteenth century aimed to make photographs of traces of an English past that would stand as records for future generations. This article explores the ways in which the amateur photographers involved absorbed and connected to the values of science, especially those expressed through the activities of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and its Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom. It argues that despite the scientific aspirations of photographers and the mechanical reassurance of the medium, the photographic knowledge produced by the surveys could only ever be applied knowledge; it was always legitimated elsewhere. It raises interesting questions about photography's relationship to the tensions between scientific and nonscientific cultural authority.