Victorian Visual Culture

I was inspired by @flannerylangton’s post about missing context in Felice Beato’s photographs, that there is an implied context inserted by the viewer. Beato’s photograph, Clock Tower, Lucknow, 1858, encapsulates the wanderer’s imagination: the sole individual in the picture stands ahead, back to the viewer, hands on hips, (assumedly) marveling at the ravaged clock tower; the anonymity of the individual appropriately embodies the viewer, and that is the issue (Chaudhary 81).

Felice Beato, Clock Tower, Lucknow, 1858. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109BT6

One can imagine oneself wondering about the empty space, the ruins, the potential this space holds — what must have happened. The issue of imagery bereft of context, which notably existed in British homes, and which now floats around on the internet with sentence-long blurbs that hardly situate, is that Western minds construct; the enduring armchair historian. 

I considered the photograph before I read Zahid R. Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire, and I like many Western viewers, reveled at the possibility of the past; I considered the “natural” degradation of an unused space and filled the black and white image with inaccuracies: people, color, meaning — a mythical history. Chaudhary’s impression of the “phantasmagoric aesthetic,” as it relates to Beato’s photograph, illuminates the “technical mediation” and, “penetration” by fantasy and imagination — the root word “phantasm” calls to mind insertions of ghosts, even, who falsely occupy the land (Chaudhary 81). These ghosts are spectral manifestations of colonialism, too. 

In viewing photography, history becomes an insubstantial plaything; the adventurer’s ignorant prerogative is to preserve this photograph, to ask questions, to lament over the lost history. Objective facts loosen in private British collections of memorabilia, and the impression of the photograph becomes that it is evidence of history itself; just the word, just the mystery of it. In doing so, blame and violence are manipulated — whatever occurred is softened by the capacity of a lost past. Chaudhary describes the process that renders violence not “invisible,” but digestible: “Such apperception includes an alienation from one’s own social and physical embodiment that becomes the ground from which otherwise invisible violence towards others[…]may be witnessed with comparative ease” (Chaudhary 81). Ruin and pain, to the Western audience, are distorted by this “apperception,” which leaves room for impressionistic descriptions of photographic history. This is much like the City of Gold, in a sense, which has an indiscernible location and an insertable history, and in being so is blindly sought after in the ultimate Western, self-serving fantasy. 

Work Cited

Chaudhary, Zahid. Aftermath of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.