Victorian Visual Culture

The lack of “knowledge nor control over the uses and meanings of [one’s] likeness” is a point that James Ryan came to in his chapter “Photographing the Natives” and that our class has dwelled on in almost every meeting (Ryan, 143).  The natives Ryan discusses in his book chapter had no control over their images and the subsequent “scientific” studies of them. Photography had become an authority which could “prove” one’s level of civilization or other such claims. Portman’s studies of the Andamanese used photograph’s as “direct measurements of the intelligence of and temperament of an individual body” (153). Furthermore, in describing the features which represented intelligence he was quoted as saying “intelligence…is usually accompanied by refined good features, particularly nose and mouth” (153). However, the very details that photography was suppose to capture, “good features,” are very subjective and unmeasurable. Here, the Andamanese have no control over the meaning or use of their images. Their images are given meaning by Portman’s subjective view. Today photography is still used to represent other parts of the world to many Americans and other western countries. I wonder how these photographs work as western viewpoints rather than actual representations and how this use of photography Ryan describes still lives on today.

I keep meaning to update about material directly related to the coursework at hand, but getting distracted because there are so many interesting things tangentially related to Victorian visual and material culture that come up in everyday life and distract me. I’m going to go ahead and do a combination post of two of my favorite topics, before returning to cityscapes, street types, etc.

1. Victorian Taxidermy

I was just informed that a collection of Walter Potter’s taxidermy tableaux has (finally!) been reassembled (for the first time since they were auctioned of separately almost ten years ago) for a special showing in Primrose London’s Museum of Everything – it opens tomorrow! on Wednesday, and is supposed to run through Christmas.

Here is the link a friend sent me on the exhibit: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319869/Bizarre-world-Victorian-taxidermist-special-exhibition.html. Fairly thorough details, with a misspelled “Damien Hirst” throughout (sad, as he’s a main figure in pulling this thing together). Another one with more or less the same information, but with poorer graphics: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/oct/08/walter-potter-exhibition-museum-everything. This one gives a little more historical background regarding Potter himself. http://coilhouse.net/2010/10/walter-potter-collection-reassembled-in-london/.

I’m just linking things because almost everything you can find on this guy is online. I tried to order Walter Potter and His Museum of Curious Taxidermy by P.A. Morris off ILLiad for more background info, but apparently there are “4 owning libraries for this title — all in the U.K. None particpate in interlibrary loan,” so alas. Anyway, I am crossing my fingers it won’t be a once-in-a-lifetime reassembly of the collection.

2. Anthropodermic Bibliopegy

The practice of binding books in human skin has been around since virtually forever, but from the very few articles I can find on it (Jstor gives me nothing, help! It might also just be down tonight), it seems that books bound in human skin gained popularity during the 19th century as romantic collector items. I vaguely related this to the last few weeks’ topics, regarding prisoners, as many of the early books were documents of crime, bound in the criminal’s skin. I have found few links worth sharing, but there is this: http://www.hlrecord.org/2.4462/books-bound-in-human-skin-lampshade-myth-1.579032, which says, rather sourcelessly:

In the 19th century, book bindings in human skin captured the romantic notions of the upper class, and anthropodermic bindings became more common. A frequent subject of such bindings were anatomy textbooks, which doctors and medical students may have had bound in the skin of cadavers they had dissected. An early example is the anthropodermic book found in Brown’s John Hay library, Vesalius’ classic work of anatomy, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). The close association of medical and legal gentry of the day led to more than a few law books bound in a similar manner.

Around the same time, the skin of executed criminals was occasionally used for book bindings. The first known example of this was the binding of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in the skin of criminal James Johnson (relation unknown), after the latter was hung in Norwich in 1818. The museum of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, England contains a more famous example – an account of the trial proceedings against William Corder, perpetrator of the storied ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ of Maria Martin in 1827, bound in the executed murderer’s skin.

Okay, I promise the next post I make will actually be related to the readings, but I hope that was interesting at the very least! And if you’re so inclined, please please let me know if you know where I can find more information on the latter subject! (on the other hand, if you’re more interested in the first topic, I have many, many sources I can direct you to, as historical taxidermy in all its bizarre glory has been a research interest of mine in the past).

While reading Picturing Empire I kept thinking of the transition to “photographing race” to filming it. In early American film black face was used to create blackness. It seems like the animation of the photograph allowed the illusion of race to continue even as the truth of anthropological photography was replaced with a less arguable fiction. Although people believed that “photography could ‘rigidly preserve’ the pathology of the human body ensured that photography was taken up by those interested in the classification and identification of different physical and mental conditions”, what were the assumed intentions of film makers? (148) Birth of a Nation instantly came to mind. A silent film made in 1915 that depicted the South during the reconstruction. With African American’s running around raping young white women and committing other crimes against society. The Ku Klux Klan is shown as an admirable army coming to the rescue. After the film premiered there were riots and white mobs harassing black people all over the country- these riots resulted in a few deaths but the strength this film lent to the Klan resulted in countless more. It also promoted the Ku Klux Klan and was used by the group as a recruiting tool until the 70s. But the “black” actors in the film are white men in black face. A falsity becomes doctrine with the application of trust by an audience. I guess I’m just amazed that there was less questioning of the film media as compared to the photograph.

I also found these two photographs and thought they were interesting of white families photographed with their black slaves as a visual counterpoint to the photograph image 58 on page 155

Looking at all images again after last week’s discussion, along with the readings describing why the artists chose to display the men with ape/monkey features made me question about the Darwinian theory and how humans evolved from apes/monkeys.  During this time period, I am assuming to believe that many people were still very religious so being associated with a monkey was offensive because it indicated you were not descended from God, but rather a primate.  So it makes me wonder if the artists specifically chose to demonstrate the men with the negative monkey appearance because of this theory?  Did it add more to the insult of the person being shown?  Or was it simply because it made the individual look more beast like for the political satire and absolutely nothing to do with religion and the Darwin Theory?

In my Modern Urban British Novel course with Professor Alderman, we read an article that has some interesting arguments about the way a city works and what it means for its inhabitants. At least one point in each of our classes, I feel like this idea being introduced to a series of shocks or traumas comes up and I wanted to give some of Simmel’s words on the topic and then explore two different aspects that Simmel’s writing points to for our purposes.

“Thus the metropolitan type of man–which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants–develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart.”(Sec. 2)

“For the reciprocal reserve and indifference and the intellectual life conditions of large circles are never felt more strongly by the individual in their impact upon his independence than in the thickest crowd of the big city. This is because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the obverse of this freedom if, under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd. For here as elsewhere it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man be reflected in his emotional life as comfort.”(Sec. 9)

In class, we’ve discussed how Chaudry’s idea of the “numbing of the self” is very apparent in today’s media world. It is certainly interesting to think about how even if we live in rural areas(aka South Hadley), we are still surrounded by this frenzy of media. For those of us who are constantly on Facebook, Perez Hilton, NYTimes online, there is no escaping the realities(or unrealities for Perez Hilton) of the outside world. Therefore we might think of ourselves as existing in a city of media; our browser becoming a sort of sidewalk where interactions take place via images. I believe many of us certainly have developed the “organ” that Simmel points to, numbing ourselves and adjusting to this age of constant communication and linkage between screens.

I offered the second passage as a look at individuality and representation on sites such as Facebook. Simmel writes that “one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.” With our idea of the internet as a city, we might think of the experimentation with self representation on facebook and how it differs from our “real selves”. Though there is space for education and work information, the bulk of someone’s representation on facebook exists in the pictures we post or are tagged of us. I will often go to someone’s page and deem it as “boring” because of their lack of pictures. We also take photos for the sole purpose of posting them on facebook. We “untag” pictures that aren’t cute and choose the cutest one to post as our profile picture. The amount of thought that goes into the regulation of images on facebook and in the general online community is extremely relevant to us in our discussion of visual culture. To see how far we’ve come: from the pre-cursor to the mugshot to only posting the pictures from Vegas night where we don’t have red solo cups in our hands…My, how photography and its purposes have changed!

You can read the full text of Georg Simmel’s article here: http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Metropolis%20and%20Mental%20Life%20%28Georg%20Simmel%29.htm

This is slightly off topic, but too cool not to share:

This is a TED video in which David Griffin, the director of photography for National Geographic shows some incredible photos and talks about the stories behind them.  I have been thinking a lot about the role that photography plays in current society now that it has both video and audio to compete with, and this quote from David Griffin caught me:

“Photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today’s saturated media world, because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment.”

Is it possible that in today’s chaotic and overstimulating culture the simplicity of a still image carries more weight than a moving, talking, video clip?  Just some food for thought, and also the photographs he shows are so incredible, it’s worth watching just for those.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of a mug shot, so I decided to do a little internet digging and found some interesting things. I came across a few reviews for a book called Under Arrest: A History of the Twentieth Century in Mug Shots, and while I realize they’re not at all from the Victorian era, I did find that they were relevant to some of the topics we were discussing in class.

This book was written by a man named Giacomo Papi and contains an array of famous twentieth century mug shots. One review points out the modern take on a posed mug shot: “The mug shot becomes an opportunity to carve out one’s identity. Steve McQueen raises his hand in a peace sign. Jane Fonda holds up a fist. Michael Jackson’s face is a Peter Pan mask. Frank Sinatra poses like a model” (The Guardian). It’s hard to know if the Victorian motivation was similar, but the photos that we looked at in class may very well have been precursors to the posed mug shots of the twentieth century.

Another review discusses the unreliability of the mug shot:

“The most disturbing photographs in Under Arrest are those that fail, giving away nothing of the inner person. Stalin is dapper. The cannibal serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer appears geekier than Bill Gates (included here for a driving violation, age 22). Rudolf Hoess evinces all the menace of a wrongly-accused postman. He was the commandant of Auschwitz.” (Telegraph)

Even now, when technology is much more advanced, a solitary photograph cannot be trusted to give accurate details about its subject. Our senses can play tricks on us, physical appearance can change, and an altered expression or pose can completely transform the tone of a picture.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3655524/A-history-of-the-twentieth-century-in-mugshots.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/aug/19/photography

After our class discussion on Wednesday I continued to think about the contrast in prison photos between what we read and saw in the article Fenians in the Frame and Sontag’s piece concerning the modern role of photography in capturing prisoners of war and the violence of torture.

When thinking about these two pieces I tried to focus on the way in which these differing photos sought to, in some way, inform the audience of truth. Historically many careers, friendships and romantic relationships have been destroyed by the simple presence of one incriminating photo, one violent or sexual image. This leads me to wonder about the kinds of ways photos seek to express or claim truth. It seems as if one can divide photos into two distinct categories: ones that depict truth and ones that expose truth.

For example, the photos (mug shots) of the detained Irish rebels would be an example of truth depiction. These photos seek to capture the very details and distinguishing features of the face and body to share them with an audience already anticipating that they are looking upon the faces of criminals. Truth isto be simply depicted or shown here, there are no revelations or curtains pulled back, the image stands on it’s own as historical and physical proof of the fact that these Irish men were once detained.

In contrast, it seems as if the modern photos shown in the Sontag article are not as subtle in expressing or showing truth. These photos are not merely a depiction of actual events, they are abruptly and radically exposing truth, there is action, a pulling away any sort of mask or curtain that shrouds what people believe to be going on in the Abu Ghraib prison. There is an action implied when this photo is taken, an action of stripping away layers to get at the core of what is really going on, the violence and indignities of war, the truth.

This is so very different from the kind of truth-telling that Fenian mug shots represent and I hope to continue to explore more ways in which photography relates directly to what we as an audience perceive as truth.

What I found interesting about this piece was the description of people’s reluctance to be photograph as well as the Victorian’s obsession with photographing people of different races due to their belief that their race would soon die out in the face of British expansion. I believe this articles links back to what we discussed last class and for Bleak House in regards to the power of the photograph. By posing for their new rulers’ it raises questions from the viewers about the role these play in a colonial society. Moreover, like Bleak House it emphasises the fact that when you pose for a picture you’re given away your power as people can interpret it any way they want. This is most apparent in this piece as these photographs were used to emphasise Britain’s strength. Moreover, it’s interesting to find out the different fears about photography especially in modern society we no longer have qualms about being photograph or seem to think about the power we give people through access to our images.