Photography Natural History And The Nineteenth Century Museum

The Victorian era heralded an age of transformation in which momentous changes in the field of natural history coincided with the rise of new visual technologies. Concurrently, different parts of the British Empire began to more actively claim their right to being acknowledged as indispensable contributors to knowledge and the progress of empire. This book addresses the complex relationship between natural history and photography from the 1850s to the 1880s in Britain and its colonies: Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, India. Coinciding with the rise of the modern museum, photography’s arrival was timely, and it rapidly became an essential technology for recording and publicising rare objects and valuable collections. Also during this period, the medium assumed a more significant role in the professional practices and reputations of naturalists than has been previously recognized, and it figured increasingly within the expanding specialized networks that were central to the production and dissemination of new knowledge. In an interrogation that ranges from the first forays into museum photography and early attempts to document collecting expeditions to the importance of traditional and photographic portraiture for the recognition of scientific discoveries, this book not only recasts the parameters of what we actually identify as natural history photography in the Victorian era but also how we understand the very structure of empire in relation to this genre at that time.

How did scientists, artists, designers, manufacturers and amateur enthusiasts experience and value the sea and its products? Examining the commoditization of the ocean world during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates how the transaction of oceanic objects inspired a multifaceted material discourse stemming from scientific exploration, colonial expansion, industrialization, and the rise of middle-class leisure. From the seashore to the seabed, marine organisms and environments, made tangible through processing and representational technologies, captivated practitioners and audiences. Combining essays and case studies by scholars, curators, and scientists, Sea Currents investigates the collecting and display, illustration and ornamentation, and trade and consumption of marine flora and fauna, analysing their material, aesthetic and commercial dimensions. Traversing global art history, the history of science, empire studies, anthropology, ecocriticism and material culture, this book surveys the currency of marine matter embedded in the economies and ecologies of a modernizing ocean world.

This edited collection explores the intersection of historical studies and the artistic representation of the past in the long nineteenth century. The case studies provide not just an account of the pursuit of history in art within Western Europe but also examples from beyond that sphere. These cover canonical and conventional examples of history painting as well as more inclusive, ‘popular’ and vernacular visual cultural phenomena. General themes explored include the problematics internal to the theory and practice of academic history painting and historical genre painting, including compositional devices and the authenticity of artefacts depicted; relationships of power and purpose in historical art; the use of historical art for alternative Liberal and authoritarian ideals; the international cross-fertilisation of ideas about historical art; and exploration of the diverse influences of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the histories of nineteenth-century art and culture.

Slides for the magic or optical lantern were a major tool for knowledge transfer in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Schools, universities, the church and many public and private institutions all over the world relied on the lantern for illustrated lectures and demonstrations. This volume brings together scholarly research on the educational uses of the optical lantern in different disciplines by international specialists, representing the state of the art of magic lantern research today. In addition, it contains a lab section with contributions by archivists and curators and performers reflecting on ways to preserve, present and re-use this immensely rich cultural heritage today. Authors of this collection of essays will include Richard Crangle, Sarah Dellmann, Ine van Dooren, Claire Dupré La Tour, Jenny Durrant, Francisco Javier Frutos Esteban, Anna Katharina Graskamp, Emily Hayes, Erkki Huhtamo, Martyn Jolly, Joe Kember, Frank Kessler, Machiko Kusahara, Sabine Lenk, Vanessa Otero, Carmen López San Segundo, Ariadna Lorenzo Sunyer, Daniel Pitarch, Jordi Pons, Montse Puigdeval, Angélique Quillay, Angel Quintana Morraja, Nadezhda Stanulevich, Jennifer Tucker, Kurt Vanhoutte, Márcia Vilarigues, Joseph Wachelder, Artemis Willis, Lee Wing Ki, Irene Suk Mei Wong, and Nele Wynants.

With concepts of participation discussed in multiple disciplines from media studies to anthropology, from political sciences to sociology, the first issue of the new yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to the way knowledge can and arguably must be conceptualized as "participatory". Introducing and exploring "participatory knowledge", the volume aims to draw attention to the potential of looking at knowledge formation and circulation through a new lens and to open a dialogue about how and what concepts and theories of participation can contribute to the history of knowledge. By asking who gets to participate in defining what counts as knowledge and in deciding whose knowledge is circulated, modes of participation enter into the examination of knowledge on various levels and within multiple cultural contexts. The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of approaches, contexts, and interpretations of "participatory knowledge", from the sociological projects of the Frankfurt School to the Uppsala-based Institute for Race Biology, from the Argentinian National Folklore Survey to current hashtag activism and Covid-19-archive projects. HIC sees knowledge as rooted in social and political structures, determined by modes of transfer and produced in collaborative processes. The notion of "participatory knowledge" highlights in a compelling way how knowledge is rooted in cultural practices and social configurations.

What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Why are some photographs valued and others not? Why are some photographic practices visible and not others? What value systems and hierarchies do they reflect? What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. It focuses not on formal collections of photographs as accessioned objects, be they ‘fine art’ or ‘archival’, but on what might be termed ‘non-collections’: the huge number of photographs that are integral to the workings of museums yet ‘invisible’, existing outside the structures of ‘the collection’. These photographs, however, raise complex and ambiguous questions about the ways in which such accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories and knowledge-systems, through multiple, folded and overlapping layers that might be described as the museum’s ecosystem. These photographic dynamics are studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an institution with over 150 years' engagement with photography’s multifaceted uses and existences in the museum. The book differs from more usual approaches to museum studies in that it presents not only formal essays but short ‘auto-ethnographic’ interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work. As such this book offers an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs ‘do’ in museums, expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area of literature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term ‘environment’ the work aims to draw together new approaches to Victorian texts and cultures that conceptualise and are influenced by environments ranging from rural to urban, British to Antipodean, and from the terrestrial to the aquatic.With the pressures of industrialism and the clustering of workers in urban centres, the Victorians were acutely aware that their environment was changing. Torn between nostalgia for a countryside that was in jeopardy and exhilaration at the rapidity with which their surroundings altered, the literature and culture produced by the Victorians reflects a world undergoing radical change. Colonization and assisted emigration schemes expanded the scope of the environment still further, pushing the boundaries of the ‘home’ on an unprecedented scale and introducing strange new worlds. These untamed physical environments enabled new freedoms, but also posed challenges that invited attempts to control, taxonomize and harness the natural world. Victorian Environments draws together leading and emerging international scholars for an examination of how various kinds of environments were constructed, redefined, and transformed, in British and colonial texts and cultures, with particular attention to the relationship between Australia and Britain.

This introduction to the art of tribal peoples of North America, Africa, and the South Pacific does not briefly cover the hundreds of artistic traditions in these three vast areas but rather studies in depth thirty-six art styles within all three areas using the methods of art history, including stylistic analysis and iconographic interpretation. Emphasis is on the art in cultural context and as a system of visual communication within each tribal area. Where appropriate for a more complete understanding of the art, data from archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, religion, and other humanistic disciplines are included.Among the peoples and cultures whose art is studied are the Haida, Kwakiutl, and Tlingit; the Hohokam and Mongollon, the Anasazi and Hopi; the Dogon and Bamana of Mali; the Asante of Ghana; the Benin, Yoruba, and Ibo of Nigeria; the Fan, the Bamum, and the Kuba of Central Africa; Australian aboriginal and Island New Guinea art; Island Melanesia art; central and eastern Polynesia; Hawaii and the Maori in Marginal Polynesia.The format of the text and selected illustrations is based on seventeen years of teaching African, North American Indian, and South Pacific art to undergraduate and graduate students at Herbert H. Lehman College (CUNY), New York University, and Columbia University. The book is intended for art history and anthropology students and the interested lay reader or collector. The detailed notes at the end of the book are for further study, research, and understanding of the tribal art style under discussion.