Photography and Science in Victorian Culture

This is a volume of primary sources that speak to the relationship between photography and science in Victorian culture. As a product of experimentation, as a tool of scientific inquiry, and as a metaphor for conceptualizing the natural world, photography occupies a central position in the culture of the period. Photography was implicated in virtually every key scientific context of this era, and as such was also the subject of particularly lively and vigorous debate. Indeed, the primary source texts that attend to photography, in a wide range of scientific disciplines, constitute a remarkable, if often overwhelming, resource. The volume will guide readers by selecting and situating a group of texts that register the most significant of these debates in engaging ways. It will provide scholars working in a variety of fields–the history of science, literary studies, and art history, to name only a few–with access to overlooked but critical sources that can stimulate their own inquiries. Students will be immersed in the most vivid disputes of scientific culture, and will benefit from the skills developed by analyzing and situating primary sources.

About the Author

Jordan Bear is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, Canada. His previous publications include Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (2016) and a co-edited volume, with Mark Salber Phillips, What Was History Painting and What is it Now? (2019).