The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards Owen Clayton (bio) The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards; pp. 1–326. Durham; London: Duke UP, 2012. $26.00 paper. The survey Movement inspired dozens, perhaps hundreds, of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographers to tour the streets of British towns, cities, and villages, recording sites of historical interest and documenting local and national histories. Yet the movement, despite having provided a permanent photographic record of the British past, has been largely forgotten. Elizabeth Edwards’s new book changes that. The Camera as Historian contains a staggering amount of research. Having visited many archives and local libraries, its author has uncovered a wealth of material, much of which has never been analyzed as part of the Survey Movement. The result is a truly impressive piece of historical excavation, an ethnographic study into what Edwards calls the “historical imagination” of the years 1885 to 1918. The Survey Movement, which was at its peak during this period, has been sidelined by much subsequent scholarship. When it has been analyzed, it has usually been seen as primarily the work of one man: Sir Benjamin Stone, Conservative MP and founder of the National Photographic Record Association (npra). Since Stone’s own photographs tend toward the nostalgic and picturesque, historians have often seen the Survey Movement itself as embodying these qualities. The Camera as Historian complicates this view by examining the social and cultural conditions that led to the movement and by paying attention to the small army of amateurs who took most of its images. By doing so, Edwards recovers the Survey Movement as both a practice and an experience—as, for example, when she discusses photographic walks, [End Page 139] which were organized by camera clubs and local surveys. During these walks, amateurs would tour their local area looking for sites of historical worthiness. One of the book’s strengths is the way in which it illuminates the role of these previously overlooked photographers. The amateur photographers were managed according to the rules of local and national surveys. Rules typically included a ban on photographic manipulation, stipulations about how pictures were to be taken and the materials to be used in photographing and displaying the images. Edwards highlights these latter elements in chapter 3, in which she constructs a particularly compelling argument. This chapter examines “the technical and material aspects of photography” that were “integral to articulating, enhancing, and maintaining” an ideology of photographic objectivity (80). Profound concerns about photographic loss and entropy led to the formation of “regulatory ideals” concerning the correct use of “plates, lenses, labels, and boxes” (97). Such material features of photographic creation, printing, storage and display are, as Edwards notes, “too often absent from the consideration of the ways in which photography makes its meanings” (97). By analysing these aspects, the author convincingly argues that the Survey Movement, far from being directed by an all-powerful npra, was in fact “dispersed, various, and too diverse to be effectively controlled” (110). This concern with materiality changes the way in which scholars think about the Survey Movement and also has wider implications for photographic study generally. In a later chapter on surveys and local identity, Edwards goes on to argue that the movement was decentralized rather than being controlled by luminaries such as Stone. Edwards’s concern is not with photographs as representation, and so she does not often attempt to “read” survey photographs. Given that she examined approximately 55,000 images, one can see the wisdom of this approach! Instead, she looks for patterns that emerge from the archives, including tropes like the parish church or village green. More than simple necessity, this methodology enables her to draw larger conclusions than would have been possible otherwise. Rather than echo scholarship that sees the Survey Movement as purely nostalgic, Edwards once again nuances critical understanding by showing that a significant minority of images were concerned with the industrial present, as well as with a possible future in which record photographs would be used as a guide to the past. One important implication of this argument...