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

Reviewed by: Michael Paris, University of Central Lancashire, UK

Historians, perhaps because their primary sources have traditionally been text, have often tended to overlook the importance of visual evidence, particularly photographs. Of course, photographs are frequently used to illustrate text, but this might well be claimed to be merely a cosmetic use of the photograph, but, as historians of material culture would argue, the picture itself has an intrinsic historical value – it can often reveal new detail, new information. Elizabeth Edwards includes a fine example of this in her new book, The Camera as Historian. A photograph is compared with an architect’s drawing of an elaborately decorated wrought-iron lock from Beddington Manor in Surrey with a photograph of the same subject. The differences are striking, for clearly the photograph has not only revealed far more information but has also revealed the quite dramatic inaccuracies in the work of the architect. The example actually comes from a 1916 publication The Camera as Historian by three members of the ‘Photographic Survey and Record of Surrey’, and raises the question of the validity of the claim for the superiority of the photographic record over other forms of graphic record. Edwards’ objective here is to ‘explore claims about photography and its relation to popular historical imagination as that imagination was articulated through the photographic survey movement in England between 1885 and 1918’ (1–2).

Photography has been around for well over a hundred and fifty years, beginning with the daguerreotypes of the 1840s, through calotype paper negatives to the developments of the American George Eastman and the creation of the Kodak camera in the 1880s which made photography available to a much wider public. By 1905, while still beyond the financial reach of much of the working class, over 10 per cent of the population of Britain had ‘access to camera technology and engaged in making photographs’ (5). One consequence of the growing popularity of amateur photography was the search by photographers to give their hobby meaning and a common idea was the notion of producing ‘photographs of record’– a record of the national cultural heritage and this eventually led to a number of survey initiatives among amateur photographers throughout Europe.

In Britain the impetus came from W. Jerome Harrison, a geologist, schoolteacher and keen amateur photographer. In 1889 Harrison presented a paper to the Birmingham Photographic Society in which he proposed a systematic survey of England’s visible past, buildings, antiquities, customs and the physical state of the nation, which would provide an archive for the future historian. Harrison widely circulated copies of his paper and advertised in the photographic press. As Elizabeth Edwards demonstrates, the appeal resonated through photographic circles and combined with the widely held notion that people were living through an age of rapid change in the landscape and culture of England – industrialization, rapid suburban growth, and the disappearance of customs and traditions in rural areas.

In May 1890 the Photographic Survey of Warwickshire was founded and provided a model for other surveys such as Barnstaple, Devon in 1892, West London in 1893 and Dorset the following year. Harrison continued to work for a nation-wide survey which he likened to a modern-day Domesday Book, urging photographers to ‘fix the fleeting features of the epoch in which we live and hand down to posterity the “outward and visible” state of things as they existed’ (34), and by and large his efforts were successful. Edwards identifies some seventy-five of these town, city or county surveys, carried out between 1890 and 1918, although, as she points out, some continued well into the post-war years. However, looking at the social composition of the amateur photographers involved shows that rather unsurprisingly by far the largest majority were from the middle classes – local gentry, professionals and a handful of craftsmen. Interestingly, over 13 per cent of the photographers so far identified were women. However, with such a middle-class dominance, Edwards is prompted to ask the question, ‘whose history was being recorded?’, among the other questions that the survey raises, such as what is the relationship between photography and the past, with historical imagination, and so on. These questions, of course, still need to be addressed.

Beautifully illustrated and well written, The Camera as Historian is a welcome account of the little-known early twentieth-century Photographic Survey Movement, but it is also a stimulating foray into the complicated relationship between photography and history.