In the mid-1860s Arthur J Munby began to collect the first mass-produced photographic images of working-class women in England, recording fascinating details about the women, the places he purchased the photographs and the raging debates on this new commercial practice of photography, in accompanying diaries. Many of these images – not to mention Munby’s fascinating diaries - have never been published before. This book examines this previously un-investigated archive, offering a fresh and arresting perspective on the interrelationships between photographic representations of working-class women, the creation of new identities of class and gender and the evolution of popular conceptions of photography itself.
Author(s): Sarah Edge
Series: International Library of Visual Culture Book 14
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 304
Cover
Author bio
Endorsement
Title page
Copyright information
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Academically Locating the Archive
Photography’s pre-industrial age: 1850–60
Back to the archive
The urban collection
2 What is a Photograph?
3 The City, Photography and Relations of Looking
Munby, photography and the flâneur
Mid-Victorian painting and the imagining of class
Photography and class in the mid-Victorian period
4 Who was Munby?
Munby: the flâneur and man about town
5 Munby and the Turn to Photography
Taking ‘attitudes’: the photographing of Hannah Cullwick
‘Attitudes’ posed by Munby
‘Attitudes’ of Hannah by commercial photographers
6 Starting to Collect
Ensuring urban authenticity and controlling photographic indexicality
‘Photographic hunting and people studying’: photography and the new urban working class
Photographic acceptance: replacing the text with the image
7 Dressing Above Your Station and Making it Work for Him
Maidservants in working dress
The inherent problem of indexicality, gazing and power
Three photographs: three problems
Accepting photographic veracity and the formation of photographic genres in the 1860s and the 1870s
Photography and the formation and control of class difference
8 Under the Skin
Photography and the abject body
Photography, the real and the inhumanity of power
Appendix: The Photographic Archive
Notes
Bibliography
Other sources
Index
