Photography

Photography was one of the most significant media innovations of the nineteenth century, and its impact across Victorian culture was profound. While photographic antecedents date back to ancient Greek and Chinese cultures and were further developed throughout the Renaissance in Europe via the camera obscura, permanent photographic images were a product of the nineteenth century. In 1839 and thus just two years after the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s French daguerreotype and William Henry Fox Talbot’s English talbotype—or calotype—were both announced to the public, heralding a shift in visual culture. At once regarded as a science and an art—and sometimes both or neither—photography is best thought of as multiple: a range of photographic technologies put to diverse uses. A study of Victorian photography should consider developments in these technologies throughout the period, understanding each in its contexts and applications. General overviews tend to focus on the history of photography as a technology and a practice, while theoretical approaches can be generally subdivided into more foundational post-structuralist readings and more recent material histories interpreting the relationship between photographic developments and culture and subjectivity. The interdisciplinary study of photography and literature has been a dominant scholarly trend in Victorian studies since the mid-1970s, and realism has largely dominated this area. More recently, scholarship has grown beyond realism to consider other forms of fiction, poetry, and print/media culture. Other works read photography in light of art history and the histories of gender, science, and spiritualism. Context is ever important in the study of Victorian photography, and other analyses focus on international, transnational, and colonial subjects. The history of photography is a global one, and a complete accounting of its diversity is outside the scope of this bibliography. In this article the emphasis is on the British Empire, although American and other national and transnational studies are also robust sites of scholarship on 19th-century photography. For more information on Victorian visual culture, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Visual Culture.”