610
business. George Bishop, manager of the carte whole-
sale-company Marion & Co., claimed by 1862 they were
monthly printing 50,000 cartes (‘Mason v. Heath,’116).
These merchant houses, and large companies like the
London Stereoscopic Company, were not universally ap-
plauded. Stephen Thompson complained of “tradesmen
or capitalists” who “hold much the same position in the
trade with regard to their employees as what are termed
‘sweating houses’ do in the slop-trade. Everyone is un-
der-paid and over-worked on the one hand, and the pub-
lic over-charged on the other, and thus profi ts are made
at both ends.” (Thompson, ‘The Commercial Aspects
of Photography,’407). The large concerns increasingly
drew smaller studios under their control. The corollary
of success with celebrity portraits was the growth of
‘photographic piracy’—the illegal copying of pictures.
One report recorded wholesalers possessing between
500 and 700 illegal images: it claimed one dealer held a
stock of 100,000 (Anon., ‘Photographic Piracy,’566–7).
Although this issue was not clearly resolved, the Copy-
right Act was extended to photography in 1862, largely
to protect producers of celebrity cartes.
The rise of professional photography was important
for the aesthetics of the medium that developed in the
1860s. The central event in this transformation was the
International Exhibition of 1862. In 1861 commission-
ers for the exhibition announced their plan, categorising
photography with machinery. In a long running dispute,
the Photographic Society mounted a campaign to see
their worked reclassifi ed as Fine Art. Eventually, a
compromise was struck and photography appeared in
a “separate apartment” within the Machinery Court.
This was a pivotal moment because for the fi rst time a
signifi cant number of photographers began to view their
work as a Fine Art.
The development of professional photography pro-
vides the context for the aesthetics of photography.
This was an aesthetic of distinction designed to assert
the respectability of photographers. During this pe-
riod important fi gures like Alfred H. Wall and Henry
Peach Robinson built on Price’s ideas, but claimed that
photography now constituted a Fine Art. These men
retained central categories from Academic theory, but
in line with wider trends in English art, they suggested
that photography was best suited to pictures in the
lower genres: portraiture, picturesque landscapes and
moralised genre scenes in the tradition of Wilkie and
Hogarth; they also emphasised the importance of nature.
The pictures that resulted took three forms, all typifi ed
by a distance from the copy or document. Firstly, there
were genre scenes, sometimes made with allegorical
intent, sometimes depictions of “everyday life.” Price,
Robinson, Rejlander and Cameron all worked in this
vein; which could take the form of posed tableaux or
‘combination prints’ (pictures assembled from multiple
negatives): examples of the latter include Rejlander’s
The Two Ways of Life (1857) and Robinson’s Bringing
Home the May (1862). The extensive labour involved
and the reliance on accepted subjects and compositional
arrangements emphasised the role of the photographer.
Combination prints met with a mixed reception and the
tableau gradually assumed precedence. Secondly, the
picturesque landscape tradition provided a great deal of
scope for photographers, because it combined attention
to nature with formal rules. The trick was to demon-
strate taste in fi nding suitable arrangements. Robinson’s
Pictorial Photography is an important statement of
this trend and he, along with Mudd and many others,
worked in this tradition. Thirdly, there were tasteful
portraits, often made by the elite studios, which placed
a premium on poses, arrangements and backgrounds
derived from painting. To some extent, Cameron broke
with the established consensus by employing a “soft”
focus equally across the picture.
While British colonial photography was not restricted
to India, the ‘jewel in the crown’ occupied a central
place in the Imperial imagination. Many photographers
working in the sub-continent from the 1850s were army
offi cers or employees of the British East India Company,
or both. From 1853, John Murray, a Scottish army doc-
tor and employee of the Company, focused on exotic
and picturesque subjects; his pictures were distributed
by the Dehli School of Industrial Art and Picturesque
Views in the Northwestern Provinces of India appeared
in 1858. Linnaeus Tripe, an army captain, published
300 views of Burma and under commission for the
Company recorded objects of interest to antiquarians
and architects as well as documenting the ‘races’ in the
southern provinces of India. In 1862 Samuel Bourne
visited the ‘Holy Land’ and was allowed to photograph
previously restricted sites. In 1863 he travelled to In-
dia to work as a professional photographer producing
800–900 negatives; in the mid-1860s he made three
tours of the Himalayas, resulting in images, which
Haworth-Booth characterised as ‘imperial picturesque’
(104). The Bombay government employed a number
of army offi cers to photographic ancient sculptures
and inscriptions. Among the most ambitious colonial
photographic projects was The People of India, edited
by Dr. John Forbes Watson and Sir John William Kaye,
which appeared between 1868 and 1875. This govern-
ment-authorised pseudo-scientifi c study of “the Races
and Tribes of Hindustan” contained 468 albumen prints
by fi fteen photographers. From about 1870 a booming
trade developed in Indian views, to which some indig-
enous Indian photographers such as Lala Deen Dayal
contributed. After a British military invasion in 1840,
China surrendered Hong Kong and subsequently opened
coastal cities to colonial adventurers: photographers fol-
lowed in their wake. Felice Beato worked for the army