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rounding their reception and the particular perspective
of the viewer. At a time when western nations continued
to establish their power both politically and culturally,
photography fl ourished as an agent in the production
of new and remarkable bodies of visual information. It
provided a more knowledgeable, educated, and pros-
perous citizenry with further grounds for the rigorous
affi rmation of progress and self-determination, both
hallmarks of modernism.
Gary D. Sampson
See also: Archer, Frederick Scott; Wet Collodion
Negative; Ruskin, John; Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth;
Baudelaire, Charles; Cameron, Julia Margaret;
Hawarden, Viscountess Clementina Elphinstone;
Rejlander, Oscar Gustav; Dodgson, Charles
Lutwidge; Nadar; Carjat, Etienne; Disdéri, André-
Adolphe-Eugène; Cartes-de-Visite; Tintype
(Ferrotype, Melainotype); Beato, Felice; Mumler.
William H.; Ethnography; Orientalism; and Frith,
Francis.
Further Readings
Apraxine, Pierre et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and
the Occult, Stanford: Yale University Press, 2005.
Edwards, Elizabeth, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–
1920 , New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Frizot, Michel, ed., A New History of Photography, Köln: Köne-
mann, 1998.
Goldberg, Vicki, ed., Photography in Print: Writings From 1816
to the Present, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1981.
Hamilton, Peter, and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the
Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Pho-
tography, Aldershot, Hampshire, and Burlington, Vermont:
Lund Humphries, 2001.
Hight, Eleanor M., and Gary D. Sampson, eds., Colonialist
Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, London and New
York: Routledge, 2002.
Marien, Mary Warner, Photography: A Cultural History, New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.
Sandweiss, Martha, Print the Legend: Photography and the
American West, New Haven and London; Yale University
Press, 2002.
Schwartz, Joan M., and James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place:
Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London and
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003.
Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images
as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, New York: Hill
and Wang, 1989.
HISTORY: 6. 1870s
Writing in The Year-Book of Photography for 1870, the
editor, G. Wharton Simpson, began his review of the
previous year by remarking “The history of photography
has passed into the uneventful stage: the art has acquired
a steady, healthful being, and great discoveries no lon-
ger disturb the even tenor of its existence.” This was a
refl ection of a widely held view that photography was
passing through a period of steady but unspectacular
progress along well-trodden paths. With hindsight, we
can see that Wharton Simpson and his peers were, in
fact, entering a decade that was a pivotal period in the
history of photography. The main agent of change was
the introduction of reliable gelatine bromide emulsion
dry-plates in Britain. By the end of the decade gelatine
bromide plates were being mass produced and increas-
ingly adopted by photographers of all classes. The
consequences of this and other technological advances
were to completely transform the practice and nature
of photography.
The 1870s could perhaps be termed the British
decade of photography. It was no quirk of fate that
the key development of the 1870s took place in Great
Britain, or that many of the distinguished photographers
remembered today were British. Britain was the richest
country in the world. Relatively untroubled by events
abroad, political stability, empire, industry and trade
had all helped to create a prosperous middle class with
time and cash to spare. In contrast, Continental Europe
began the decade preoccupied with the Franco-Prussian
War, which was then followed by periods of violent
political instability. French photography in particular
was profoundly disrupted by the social changes arising
from wider events. Across the Atlantic the United States
was a growing industrial and trade rival but in the 1870s
still tended to follow European trends and was still a
frontier country struggling to come to terms with the
trauma of its Civil War.
In 1870, professional photographers could be
found plying their trade all over the world. Despite a
world-wide trade depression, New York photographic
studios remained as Werge had described them fi ve
years earlier. “Their number is legion, and their size is
mammoth...and mammoth is the amount of business
done in some of those “galleries.” (Werge 1890, 199).
In London, Kelly’s London Post Offi ce Directory for
1870 listed more than 250 addresses of “Photographic
Artists,” 28 photographic apparatus manufacturers,
and 26 photographic materials dealers, which included
printers, paper makers and dealers, publishers and al-
bum manufacturers. The photographic artists listed were
mostly professional portrait photographers practising
the wet collodion process in studios much the same as
those of 20 years earlier. Studios would be equipped
with traditionally made mahogany sliding box or square
bellows cameras fi tted with brass lenses and mounted
on stands or tripods. Other studio equipment would
commonly include the headrest and painted backcloths
with appropriate furniture. During the 1870s, gardens
or rural scenes, complemented with items such as rustic
chairs and stiles were fashionable.
The standard portrait form of the period remained the
carte-de-visite but the larger cabinet portraits introducedHISTORY: 6. 1870s