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ties of the medium. However, the rise of ‘postmodern’
staged photography associated with Victor Burgin,
Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Olivier Richon has led
to a revival of interest in this mode of work that, by the
later nineteenth century seemed retardataire. During
the 1980s and 1990s a number of writers argued that at
least some early photographs needed to be viewed, not
simply as plain transcriptions of things, but as densely
textured refl ections on the process of representation.
Geoffrey Batchen, for example, has argued that Bayard’s
Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840) should be seen
as a meditation on his own marginalisation in photo-
graphic culture (Batchen, Burning with Desire). Carol
Armstrong’s feminist investigation of the work of Julia
Margaret Cameron as an exploration of gendered iden-
tity is particularly signifi cant, because, alongside the
revival of staged photography from the 1970s, feminist
scholarship played a crucial role in this revaluation of
‘allegorical photography.’ Feminist accounts, like that
advanced by Armstrong, stress the performance of gen-
der, arguing that the complex layering of meaning avail-
able in staged images enabled women to explore their
own ambivalent relation to the cultural conventions of
femininity (Armstrong, Scenes in a Library). Cameron’s
work obviously plays a leading role in these debates, but
readings of decorative photographic albums complied by
aristocratic and bourgeois women could equally fi gure
as examples. Similarly, one account of F. Holland Day,
articulated from the perspective of queer theory, puts the
weight of interpretation on his coded departure from het-
ero-normative sexuality (Crump, ‘Suffering the Ideal’).
Mike Weaver’s Christian reading of Talbot provides an
account of allegory and photography, which stands as
an exception to this theoretical trend. For Weaver, in
The Pencil of Nature, Talbot produced self-conscious
pictures in the emblematic tradition. According to him,
The Open Door and The Ladder (both 1843) are to be un-
derstood, not only as everyday images of work at Lacock
Abbey, but also as allegorical meditations on the soul’s
salvation, in which broom, lamp, ladder and doorway all
carry long-established Christian connotations (Weaver,
‘Henry Fox Talbot: Conversation Pieces’).
However, there are problems with these accounts
of allegorical photography, only two of which can be
raised here. Firstly, it is not easy to distinguish between
allegorical images and a photographic art of moralised
genre. Whereas Rejlander’s The Two Ways of Life (1857)
and his picture discussed above are intentional allegori-
cal pictures, many of his other photographs conform to
the model of ‘scenes from everyday life’ common at the
time. Similarly, while Henry Peach Robinson typically
produced genre pictures, Little Red Riding Hood (1858)
and The Lady of Shalott (1860–1) are most probably
allegories. There is no stable or clear cut distinction
between these aesthetic modes. This distinction is fur-
ther complicated, because genre pictures can be read
for implicit moral, or ideological, content—indeed,
this is their point. In fact, almost any act of interpreta-
tion entails a second moment of reading in which the
literal, or ‘denotative,’ depiction of things and events is
complemented, or overlaid, by implied, or ‘connotative,’
associations. The second problem revolves around the
question of anachronistic interpretation. recent critics
often unrefl exively project their own values back into
the nineteenth century, attributing forms of their own
self-consciousness to photographers for whom they were
simply unavailable. This is to say, in much of the existing
literature there is insuffi cient attention to the distinction
between allegory (images intentionally designed to be
read in two registers) and allegorisis (allegorical reading
in which the critic generates the second interpretation).
Allegorisis is an important critical method—particularly
in debates relating to history and identity as they are
being formulated at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst
century—but it is an approach that foregrounds the inter-
pretive act rather than the initial context of production or
fi rst use. This important distinction is often, unhelpfully,
elided in discussions of these photographs.
An alternative approach to nineteenth-century al-
legorical photography might entirely forego the arty,
staged image and suggest, instead, that allegorical mean-Fredericks, Charles DeForest. “Political Allegory with
Flowers.”
Courtesy: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © The J.
Paul Getty Museum.