Unblushing Realism and the threat of the pictorial: Photographic Survey and the production of evidence 1885–1918

Abstract

The late nineteenth century saw a mass of photographic projects which harnessed the energies of amateur photographers in making ‘record photographs’. This essay explores the tensions between record photography and the aesthetic aspirations of amateur photographers who participated in the photographic survey movement in England between 1885 and 1918. The aim was to harness the evidential qualities of photographs to recording antiquities, ancient buildings and other social and material survivals of the past for the benefit of the future. These loosely associated groups of photographers, in local camera clubs and the photographic sections of local antiquarian and archaeological societies, were united in a sense of purpose, attempts at institutional rigour and, above all, a belief in the evidential force of photographs. Yet their efforts were threatened at every turn with the dissipation of such objectives through the ambiguities of photographic inscription and of style, and through the desires of photographers themselves. I argue that these tensions constitute a struggle over the social role of photography and its aesthetics aspirations, between individual and collective engagements with the medium and between forms of knowledge and the moral values that embed them, which went to the heart of social expectations of the medium.