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producing images of military positions, temples and
palaces. He also worked in Japan and issued the albums
Photographic Views of Japan and Native Types of Japan
in 1868; John Thompson photographed in Malaysia and
Indochina, Cambodia, Hong Kong and China from the
mid-1860s. His The Antiquities of Cambodia appeared
in 1867 and Illustrations of China and its People was
published in 1877/78.
The carte trade was hit by a crisis of profi tability in
1863/64 and never regained its previous giddy heights.
While the portrait business was precarious, some stu-
dios thrived and expanded. During the 1870s W. &
D. Downey and A. & G. Taylor developed businesses
with multiple branches selling through a club system
on credit, causing further anxiety to the smaller ‘re-
spectable’ proprietors. Cameron, Robinson and others
continued to make exhibition pictures, but on the whole
the 1870s saw a lull in art activity. The development
of the gelatine bromide dry plate by Dr Richard Leach
Madox in 1871 facilitated outdoor work and photog-
raphy in diffi cult spaces. Dry plates could be prepared
in advance and developed much later; they were also
more sensitive than collodion negatives. By the end of
the decade their use was widespread. In 1873 Walter B.
Woodbury introduced a form of photographic engrav-
ing—the Woodburytype—which contributed to the
wider dissemination of images.
The key change during this decade was the increased
role photography played in state and private institutions
of social investigation and regulation. In the early 1870s
experiments were conducted with penal photography;
photography also came to play an important role in
anthropology and colonial administration. During the
later 1860s and 1870s photographers also turned their
cameras on the poor and the working class. Along with
other social investigators—journalists, urban mission-
aries and social reformers—they voyaged into ‘unex-
plored’ urban slums, often drawing on colonial imagery.
Thomas Annan was hired by Glasgow City Improvement
Trust to document slum conditions in some of the city’s
courtyards and alleyways, prior to their demolition.
He produced thirty-one albums for the City Council.
In 1878-9 a small edition of these prints appeared as
Photographs of Old Closes, Streets, Etc. Perhaps the
best known of all these projects was John Thompson’s
Street Life in London, which appeared in twelve parts
between 1877 and 1878 and was subsequently issued
as a book. Thompson’s work was distinctive because
each of the thirty-seven Woodburytypes focused on one
individual engaged in some aspect of the metropolitan
street economy. Each plate was accompanied by a com-
mentary written by Adolphe Smith. This individuation
amplifi ed the evidential mode of investigators like Henry
Mayhew and provided a central feature of subsequent
documentary. “Street life” was often depicted through
the fi lter of the urban picturesque, rendering dilapidation
and ruinous dwelling conditions fascinating yet safe for
middle-class viewers. The Society for Photographing
Relics of Old London was founded 1875 to combat the
proposed demolition of a sixteenth-century coaching
inn. Henry Dixon and Alfred and John Bool were com-
missioned to record this building and many others. In
1868 Archibald Burns published fi fteen albumen prints
in his Picturesque Bits of Old Edinburgh.
We have a good picture of the top end of the trade dur-
ing the fi rst half of the 1880s due to H. Baden Pritchard’s
surveys. In this period photography became a large,
concentrated industry. The Autotype printing works
employed 80 people and daily processed 1,000s of feet
of carbon tissue; A & G Taylor employed between 500
and 600 workers (their Forest Hill establishment printed
for scores of regional branches). In the early 1880s, in
addition to their Liverpool base, Brown, Barnes & Bell
conducted two London studios and twelve regional ones.
The provincial branches sent their work to Liverpool
for printing: Pritchard reports that every day 2,000 im-
pressions ran through the toning bath. The Woodbury
Permanent Printing Company produced extensive runs
of pictures for parliamentary candidates and Royal wed-
dings. Allegedly, anything with a print run of less than
100,000 was not worthwhile. James Valentine and Son
of Dundee, the largest Scottish studio, employed forty
workers and made 3,000 prints a day. Alexander Bas-
sano, Valentine Blanchard, William England, Hughes,
Mayall, Robinson and Sarony all conducted grand stu-
dios in London and fashionable towns. Of course, there
were still plenty of studios trading in cheap work.
By this point photography was embedded in a wide
range of social institutions. It was, for instance, an
important plank in the penal system. Prisons increas-
ingly included studios on the premises; the practice was
regulated by formal rules and an archive was established
at Pentonville Prison, centralising photographs of all
British prisoners. Francis Galton also developed his
pseudo-scientifi c composite portraits which claimed
to reveal the underlying characteristics of the ‘crimi-
nal type.’ According to Pritchard, by the mid-1880s
photography was employed by astronomers, meteo-
rologists, surgeons, physicians, geologists, chemists,
physicists and botanists. (Pritchard, Photography and
Photographers, 83) By the middle of the 1880s, the
half-tone printing process was capable of reproducing
photographs and combining them with type, although it
was not until the 20th century that publications routinely
featured photographs.
The last twenty years of the century saw a range of
technical innovations that lead to capturing motion and
more casual compositions: these included faster lenses
and shutters and materials tolerant to fl ash powder.
However, the most fundamental change occurred when