Abstract
The launch of the Royal Mail’s parcel post service in 1883 was concurrent with the increase of amateur photographers in Britain, supporting new ways for this group of practitioners to come together through postal photographic clubs. This article explores the influence that members’ participation, in assembling and distributing the portfolios shared by each club, had on photographers’ understanding of their own role in the production of photographic meanings and values. It does so by discussing the postal service as a technology of communication and transport; the virtual space created through circulating portfolios as a modern network; and the conjoint acts of writing, reading and looking at photographs that constituted each portfolio as reframing photographers’ idea of self. The article covers the period from the early 1880s to the early 1910s, by which time postal photographic clubs had become almost ubiquitous in Britain. The article demonstrates that this process implicitly challenged the institutionalisation of this period’s dominant photographic discourse.
Highlights
1 – Percy Lund, ‘Postal Photographic Clubs, and How to Work Them’, Practical Photographer (February 1899), 45. 2 – In this article I use ‘Royal Mail’ to refer to the delivery service and ‘Post Office’ to the government department
There are no meetings and reporters to spread the news; no important gentlemen in the chair, and no ‘highly appreciative’ audiences.1. By the time this text was written, postal photographic clubs had been a reality in Britain for over fifteen years, having prospered, as we will see, following the launch of the Royal Mail’s parcel post service in 1883.2 Their appeal was remarkable, affording to many photographers, including those who could not join ordinary photographic clubs and societies – because, for instance, of geographical distances or work commitments – the opportunity to connect with like-minded peers
This demonstrates that the history of photography contributes to a wider media studies because, as Mattern shows, ‘historic forms of communication inform and function as part of today’s media infrastructures’:131 as more than just a visual system, photography has played a central role for the production and circulation of knowledge in modern life, and it is as such a social and cultural force that we should evaluate its connections and impacts on modern communication infrastructures
Summary
4 – For a discussion of culture as a key site for the articulation of class in Victorian society, see Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian Britain, London: Routledge 1978; and Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City 1840–1914, New York: Manchester University Press 2000. See Barbara Black, A Room of His Own: A LiteraryCultural Study of Victorian Clubland, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press 2012; and Amy Milne-Smith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in late Victorian Britain, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011
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