415
DEVILLE, ÉDOUARD (1838–1924)
French survey photographer
Édouard Deville surveyor, civil servant (born La
Charité-sur-Loire, France, 21 February 1838; died
Ottawa, Canada, 21 September 1924). Deville studied
at the naval school in Brest, and on his retirement as
a hydrographer from the French navy, immigrated
to Quebec, Canada, in 1874. He immediately went
to work for the provincial government as a surveyor and
astronomer and by 1877 he was appointed Inspector
of Surveys. In 1880 he joined the federal government
in Ottawa to work on western homestead surveys, at
which he excelled. In 1881 he was appointed Inspector
of federal surveys, the following year he made Chief
Inspector, and in 1885 Surveyor-General.
In an effort to extend federal surveys into the western
mountainous regions, Deville turned to photography.
Using a sturdy but light fi eld camera of his own design,
and building on Aime Laussedat’s metrophotographie of
Paris, Deville developed the mathematical formulae that
converted oblique views taken from mountain peaks into
topographic maps. By the 1920s his photo-topography
had enabled Canada to a map 52,000 square miles of
the western Cordillera at a fraction of the cost of more
traditional survey techniques. Although Deville also
experimented with copy cameras to reproduce maps
for fi eld use, he is best known for having been the fi rst
Canadian to use photography as a tool of measurement
(photogrammetry). Deville’s photo-topography was
used in the western mountains up to the early 1950s,
long after the introduction of aerial photography, which
it complemented.
Jeffrey S. Murray
DIAMOND, HUGH WELCH (1809–1886)
British photographer
Hugh Welch Diamond’s father was a surgeon for the
East India Company who later settled in Kent, where
Diamond was born. Diamond followed in his father’s
footsteps by studying medicine fi rst at the Royal Col-
lege of Surgeons beginning in 1824 and continuing
his work in 1828 at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He
set up private practice in Soho Square shortly after
this and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Sur-
geons in 1834. During this early portion of Diamond’s
career, photography was not yet a feasible form of
artistic expression or scientifi c analysis. However,
in the 1840s when photography became more acces-
sible Diamond both shifted his medical interest from
surgery to psychiatry and began to practice and write
about photography in conjunction with his profession,
becoming known as the “father of clinical psychiatric
photography.” Diamond’s photographs can be found,
without accompanying case studies, in the collections
of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Norfolk Record
Offi ce and the Royal Photographic Society.
Diamond studied psychiatry at Bethlem Hospital
under the tutelage of Sir George Tuthill in the early
1840s and became resident superintendent of the Female
Department of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in
1848, a post which he inhabited until 1858. This decade
marks Diamond’s most signifi cant achievements as both
a clinical psychiatric photographer and writer of techni-
cal and medical treatises about photography. Diamond’s
work during this period relied not just on advances in
photographic practice such as the calotype and glass
plate collodion photography, but the widespread belief
that photography was intrinsically linked to empirical
truth, making it useful for such scientifi c fi elds as psy-
chiatry, which because of Diamond’s work was the fi rst
to use photography in a systematic way to “diagnose”
and “treat” patients.
Between 1852 and 1854 Diamond published more
than twelve articles about photography in the journal
Notes and Queries, including “On French collodion”
(1852); “On photography applied to the microscope”
(1852); “On the simplicity of the calotype process”
(1853) and “The application of photography to the
copying of ancient documents, prints, pictures, coins,
etc.” (1856). The range of these pieces demonstrates
the author’s varied interests in photographic technique,
the scientifi c uses of photography, the popularization of
photography (particularly the calotype process devel-
oped by William Henry Fox Talbot which allowed for
use of paper negative and therefore multiple prints), and
archaeology, one of the doctor’s many hobbies. Dia-
mond read “On the simplicity of the calotype process”
to the Photographic Society in November 1853 and the
successful article was later reprinted.
In addition to his writing, Diamond was consis-
tently taking photographs of his economically deprived
resident patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum
and using them to physiognomically identify types of
insanity much as Alexander Morison and J.E.D. Esquirol
had done before him using line drawings rather than
photographs to illustrate their work. Diamond presented
a photographically illustrated lecture series on this topic
in London in 1852, the photographs from which later
formed the basis for psychiatrist John Conolly’s 1858
case studies on “The Physiognomy of Insanity” pub-
lished with lithographic translations of the photographs
in The Medical Times and Gazette.
Conolly’s case studies coupled with Diamond’s pho-
tographs provide a useful barometer of mid-nineteenth-
century attitudes toward the economically disadvantaged
mentally ill as well as an indication of how Diamond’s