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Nationalities and Universalism in the Early

Historiography of Photography (1843–1857)
François Brunet
Published online: 26 Apr 2011.

To cite this article: François Brunet (2011) Nationalities and Universalism in the Early Historiography of Photography
(1843–1857), History of Photography, 35:2, 98-110, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2010.516587

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 Nationalities and Universalism in
the Early Historiography of
Photography (1843–1857)
François Brunet
A version of this paper was presented at the
Annual History of Photography Lecture at
the University of St Andrews on 14 April
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2010. I wish to thank the organisers,

especially Natalie Adamson and Annette
This article considers the fluctuation, in early commentary and historiography of Carruthers, for their kind support, as well as
photography (1843–1857), between the recurring expression of nationalities as Luke Gartlan, Tom Normand, and Marc
criteria of photographic practice and an aspiration to regard the new medium as a Boulay, among others, for their feedback. I
promising universal language. Several key texts from the period are examined, am also indebted, for the illustrations of this
including David Brewster’s and Elizabeth Eastlake’s landmark essays, as well as article, to Marc Boulay (University of St
reports from the juries of the Expositions of 1851 and 1855. Discussions of photo- Andrews Library), Violet Hamilton (Wilson
graphic nationalities appear to have been prominent in the period, and those Centre for Photography), Garance Chabert
authors who staked universalist claims for photography may have been doing so and Carole Troufle au (Societe
 Française de
in reaction to excesses of patriotism. This mostly Western European discussion Photographie), as well as Serge Kakou. I am
needs, ultimately, to be read in the context of the larger globalising function of responsible for all translations, unless
photography in the nineteenth century. otherwise specified.
1 – Many web pages today still cite this
Keywords: photography (1850s), nationalities, nationalism, universalism, colonisation, statement, found in Helmut Gernsheim,
Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends,
globalisation, World Fairs (1850s), Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–1893) 1839–1960, New York: Dover 1991 [1962],
229; and included in Susan Sontag’s
anthology of quotes in On Photography,
New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 1975,
Few historians or critics in 2010 would accept the once-popular view of photography
192. Gernsheim’s statement echoed Edward
as a ‘universal language’, one that, as Helmut Gernsheim put it, is ‘understood in all Steichen’s historic 1955 show The Family of
parts of the world’ and links ‘the family of man’.1 If we tend now to distrust this view, Man and possibly the veteran
however, it is not primarily because we think of photography as a collection of photographer’s own formulation, in a 1960
article, of photography as the ‘most simple,
national idioms – even allowing for the great recent output of national surveys. direct, universal language’ of visual
Rather, we have grown suspicious of the twin ideas of universality and transparency, communication, comparable as such with
which we regard as situated macro-culturally and historically. On the one hand, the the visual imagery of ‘cavemen’, as quoted by
optical and archival aspirations underlying the invention of photography are seen Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’,
Art Journal, 41:1 (Spring 1981), 19 and n. 24.
today as rooted not in some universal, ahistorical ‘dream of mankind’, but in a
In the latter article, Sekula produced a
distinctly Western European cultural history. On the other, the spread of photo- trenchant critique of the universal language
graphy around the world has often been described as auxiliary to the globalising myth, which he expanded into a narrative
political economy of capitalism and colonialism. Thus the kind of oppositions that attack on the global marketing of images by
Corbis in his ‘Between the Net and the Deep
matter most in the contemporary critique of visual culture are supra-national
Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in
(North/South, West/East) as well as infra-national and societal (race, class, gender), Photographs)’, October, 102 (Autumn 2002),
rather than (inter-)national. To a certain extent, even, surveys of the photo-histories 3–34.
of Brazil, Japan, China, Egypt, or Scotland, have been construed as works of 2 – See, in this connection, Tom Normand’s
foreword to his Scottish Photography: A
resistance or diversification against the historiographical weight of photography’s History, Edinburgh: Luath Press 2007, 11.
‘superpowers’, France, England, the USA, the German-language area, and the kind of Here he voices a concern about the
Eurocentric history these giants tend to perpetuate.2 If we add that this ‘established’ historiographic under-representation of
Eurocentric history has invested a great deal of effort in pacifying the once inescap- ‘photography from Scotland’, while insisting
that his survey intends to provide a survey of
able paternity quarrels surrounding the invention of photography – first and fore-
photography from and about Scotland,
most the Franco-British feud – we may begin to explain why the subject of without assuming something like a national
photographic nationalities, particularly among the medium’s early giants, has Scottish photographic character.

History of Photography, Volume 35, Number 2, May 2011

ISSN 0308-7298 # 2011 Taylor & Francis
 Nationalities and Universalism in Early Historiography

3 – Except perhaps when this subject is become something of a blind spot in historical studies.3 Needless to say, the limited
treated in the stylistic mode of national scope of this paper will not permit anything like a full treatment of a potentially
‘schools’ and ‘traditions’, which I will discuss
in the context of the 1850s (see especially
immense subject. What I propose here is merely to suggest the relevance of nation-
nn. 28, 29). For a recent, suggestive alities in early photographic literature (or historiography), by offering a survey of a
assessment of national ‘trends’ in series of texts, mostly British and French, from photography’s first two decades. I will
nineteenth-century photo-literature, see concentrate on an ambivalence, in this period, between two polarities: on the one
Paul Edwards, ‘Tendances nationales et
tendances economiques dans la constitution
hand, expressions of nationalism and more broadly of national categories in both the
raire’, in Litte
de l’objet photolitte rature et practice and the judgement of photography; and on the other, an aspiration for the
photographie, ed. Jean-Pierre Montier et al., universality of ‘sun painting’, or at least for photography as an international social or
Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes cultural value. This ambivalence may in part reflect a divide between professional
2008, 37–45.
authors and more intellectual critics, which I will not study in detail. I will instead
emphasise the context of the first international exhibitions of photographs, which,
like the larger World Fairs of the period, displayed the contest of nations as the visible
form of civilisation’s progress.
As is known, the contradiction between photography’s universal and national
polarities first emerged in the Franco-English publication procedures of 1839, and
more generally in the Franco-English debate on photography or the idea of photo-
graphy. This debate not only produced the technological duality of daguerreotype
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and calotype and its multiple legal, institutional, technological, commercial conse-
quences. It also engendered, in my view, a broad conceptual alternative, a dialectics
defining photography between representation and expression, between an art of the
object (more closely associated with Arago’s speech at the French Parliament) and an
art of the subject (particularly explored by Talbot in the Pencil of Nature), or, in other
terms, between a kind of institutional apparatus of visual truth, legitimised as a visual
expression of democracy, and a kind of libertarian medium of visual creation,
4 – See François Brunet, La Naissance de associated by Talbot and the calotype school with more aristocratic values.4 More
e de photographie, Paris: Presses
l’ide directly relevant to this paper is the tension that existed within the French publica-
Universitaires de France 2000, ch. 1–3.
tion process itself – specifically in Arago’s discourse and actions – between the
universal(ist) and national(ist) polarities. There is the contradiction between the
celebrated French ‘gift to the world’ of photography, in the free publication of the
daguerreotype process, and the infamous patent taken out in England by Daguerre’s
agent Miles Berry. But a more fundamental contradiction opposed Arago’s 1839
framing of photography as a natural, a-technical mode of picture-making, answering
an ‘old dream of mankind’, open to everyone and universally understandable and
5 – See François Arago, Œuvres complètes, ed.
J.-A. Barral, Paris: Gide & Baudry 1858, t. 7, utilisable, and his continuous insistence on establishing the history of this epochal
516–17; Brunet, Naissance, 80. invention and its later progress as ‘French throughout’.5 Arago’s fervent patriotism,
6 – On Arago’s politics, see Anne McCauley, or spirit of ‘nationality’, as Talbot once put it, was rooted in his Rationalist,
‘François Arago and the Politics of the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic heritage, which viewed France as the birthplace and
French Invention of Photography’, in
Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on protector of universalism, particularly in opposition to England or at least to the
Photography 1983–1989, ed. Daniel Younger, English conservative tradition.6 This explains, for instance, why the first application
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico of photography Arago presented to the French Parliament was the imaginary recrea-
Press 1991, 43–70; Brunet, Naissance, 82–99;
tion of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign and the utopian programme of photograph-
and more broadly, and most recently, the
collection Les Arago, acteurs de leur temps ing ‘millions of hieroglyphs’, thus offering not only a prestigious master corpus for
(actes du colloque de Perpignan), Perpignan: photography’s natural and universal language,7 but also a symbolic terrain for the
Archives departementales des Pyre ne
es- clash of French and British imperial enterprises, in Egypt and elsewhere.
orientales 2010.
One important British reverberation of this early oscillation between universal-
7 – See Sekula, ‘Traffic’, 17.
8 – Unsigned review, ‘Drawing by the Agency ism and patriotism is to be found in the article published in 1843 in the Edinburgh
of Light’, The Edinburgh Review, CLIV Review, usually attributed to David Brewster (figure 1).8 The core of this seminal
(January 1843), 309–44; partial reprint in essay consisted of a remarkably balanced recapitulation of the European history of
Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print,
photochemistry, with especial insistence on the parallel rise of the French
Writings from 1816 to the Present, New York:
Simon & Schuster 1981. In this remarkable (Daguerreian) and English (calotype) processes. Brewster was arguably the first
essay, the Scottish scientist outlined several general commentator to point out the inconsistency of the English patent with the
future key themes in the cultural critique of ‘liberality with which [France] has purchased [the process] for the benefit of uni-
photography, such as its affinity with
versal science’ – an ‘omission’, Brewster emphasised, ‘which we would almost venture
embalming and ‘mortality’ (‘Drawing by the
Agency of Light’, 330). M. Arago still to supply’.9 Declining to claim for Talbot ‘any priority in reference to
9 – Ibid., 320–2. Daguerre’ or to make ‘the least deduction from the merits of M. Daguerre’, Brewster

99
 François Brunet

Figure 1. David O. Hill & Robert Adamson,

Portrait of David Brewster, 1843–1845.
Calotype print. Courtesy of University of St
Andrews Library (ALB24–71).
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Figure 6. David O. Hill & Robert Adamson,

Portrait of Elizabeth Rigby, 1843–1845.
Calotype print. Courtesy of University of St
Andrews Library (ALB24–32).

100
 Nationalities and Universalism in Early Historiography

nonetheless clearly identified the superior merits of the paper process (especially its
lower cost, ‘portability, permanence, and facility of examination’, above all its ‘power
10 – Ibid., 323, 333. of multiplication’10), and went on to detail some important improvements on the
calotype process, particularly by the American John Draper and the German Ludwig
Moser. It is in the light of this very international narrative that we must read
Brewster’s emphatic peroration, where he pitted France’s ‘generous heart and open
hand’ in offering her ‘gift to all nations’ against the inability of England either
to prevent the patenting of the daguerreotype (‘In England alone, the land of
free-trade – the enemy of monopoly – has the gift of her neighbour been received
with contumely and dishonour’) or to ensure a ‘national reward’ for the inventor of
the calotype. The impact of nationality (construed, here, as a framework for public
policy) for the young history of photography could hardly be expressed more
vigorously. Yet as if to drive the point even further, the last sentences of the paper
established an unmistakeable connection between ‘national’ protection (or lack
thereof, as in England) of the new art and the prospect of its application to
programmes of national or imperial illustration:
Nor does the fate of the Calotype [in England] redeem the treatment of her
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sister art. The Royal Society – the philosophical organ of the nation – has
refused to publish its processes in their Transactions. No Arago – no Gay-
Lussac, drew it to the notice of the Premier or his Government. No representa-
tives of the People or the Peers unanimously recommended a national reward.
No enterprising artists started for our colonies to portray their scenery, or
repaired to our insular rocks and glens to delineate their beauty and their
11 – Ibid., 343–4; and Goldberg, 68–9. grandeur.11

As already suggested by these words, several broad trends favoured, in the 1850s,
the extension of national and nationalist concerns from the realm of invention to the
plane of photographic practices and images. The swift transition, in Europe, from the
daguerreotype to negative-positive photography, although accompanied by renewed
discussions of priority and property, accelerated the transformation of photography
from the status of invention and its primary usage as a commercial medium of
portraiture to its modern status as a social and public form of visual culture,
evidenced at the end of the 1850s by stereography and its attendant industries,
photo-illustrated albums and the carte-de-visite boom. This transition was accom-
panied by the emergence of specific, national or regional, photographic institutions
and periodicals, and, in close parallel, the regular display of photographs at large-
scale international exhibitions. Finally, the original group of the founding photo-
graphic nations, all European, was augmented around 1850 by the rather sudden
introduction of US photographic equipment and pictures on the European scene.
Thus it was in the triple context of emerging national associations, recurring inter-
national exhibitions, and aggressive US efforts to reach European markets and
arenas, that the competing claims of nationality and universality were recurrently
staked for photography as a pictorial and cultural medium.
In the wake of the publication of Frederick Scott Archer’s collodion process,
national photographic associations and periodicals promoted nationalist discourses
on matters of technology and trade. In the USA, the creation of the first photographic
societies and periodicals was fuelled by various controversies involving claims on
‘American’ processes and patent discussions, the clearest example being the affair of
the ‘hillotype’, an incomplete colour daguerreotype process that between late 1850
12 – See François Brunet, ‘Le point de vue
and 1853 seemed to promise a US revolution in photography.12 In France and
français dans l’affaire Hill’, Etudes
photographiques, 16 (May 2005), 122–39. Britain, the formation of national photographic societies was in part a race for
international leadership. Charles Eastlake, in preliminary efforts towards forming
the London Photographic Society, appealed to Talbot in 1852 to relax his patents,
arguing that:

101
 François Brunet

Figure 2. Robert J. Bingham, View of the

Universal Exposition of 1855, 1855. Albumen
print. Collection S. Kakou, Paris, used by
permission.
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the art of photography upon paper, of which you are the inventor, has arrived
at such a degree of perfection that it must soon become of national importance
[. . .] at present, however, although England continues to take the lead in some
branches of the art, yet in others the French are unquestionably making more
rapid progress than we are. It is very desirable that we should not be left behind
by the nations of the continent in the improvement and development of a
purely British invention.13 13 – Quoted by Helmut Gernsheim, The
Origins of Photography, London: Thames &
Between 1852 and 1855 photographic relations between Paris and London, although Hudson 1983, 223.
somewhat pacified, were still marked by deep antagonisms. The short-lived French
periodical La Lumière consistently occulted Scott Archer’s glass process in favour of
Le Gray’s wax paper process. As Andre Gunthert has shown, its early demise, along
with that of the ephemeral Societe  Heliographique, was largely determined by its
Anglophobia and impudence.14 14 – Andre  Gunthert, ‘L’institution du
Conversely, international exhibitions – foremost the London Great Exhibition photographique, Le roman de la Socie te

heliographique’, Etudes photographiques, 12
of 1851 and the Paris Exposition of 1855 (figure 2) – highlighted rankings of national
(November 2002), 56–7.
achievements in technology and art, tending to explain such hierarchies by various 15 – On nineteenth-century expositions, see
discursive strategies that commonly relied on the eighteenth-century framework of Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas. The
civilisation and progress as a peaceful competition of national energies and char- Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions
and World Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester:
acters.15 The Crystal Palace Exhibition, whose larger agenda included an effort
Manchester University Press 1988; and
towards establishing international industrial standards, put in relief not only the Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The
technological diversity of photography but a paradoxical distribution of photo- Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago:
graphic nationalities, often rehearsed by twentieth-century historians: in the daguer- University of Chicago Press 1993; on the
Crystal Palace Exhibition, see Jeffrey
reotype department, the pre-eminence was accorded to US exhibitors, who carried A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (eds),
three first-class medals, while the French led in the English process of the calotype Britain, the Empire, and the World at the
and England excelled in the glass process, then considered partly French in origin. In Great Exhibition of 1851, London: Ashgate
2008; and on the cultural politics of Second
the jury’s general report on the photographic collection, it was stated that:
Empire Exhibitions, see Patricia Mainardi,
for daguerreotype portraits, America stands prominently forward; – France, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The
Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867, New
first in order of merit for calotypes, or sun-pictures; – England, possessing a
Haven: Yale University Press 1987.

102
 Nationalities and Universalism in Early Historiography

distinct character of her own, and presenting illustrations of nearly all the
processes which have as yet been adopted. America stands alone for stern
development of character; her works, with few exceptions, reject all accessories,
present a faithful transcript of the subject, and yield to none in excellence of
execution. France, in her daguerreotypes, of which she has but few, offers bright
sunny representations; their effect rather injured than improved by too great
masses of sunlight; but in her calotypes she stands unrivalled, and but rejecting
the processes of Daguerre, has concentrated all her energies in the further
16 – Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the development of those of Talbot and his school.16
Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was
Divided . . ., London: Spicer 1852, vol. 1, 244; This seemingly surprising distribution of roles could easily have been explained by
see the comments by Gernsheim, Origins, legal, technical, and commercial factors – notably Daguerre’s and Talbot’s patents in
120.
England, French disrespect for the latter, intense US ingenuity and competition – but
in 1851 it became the object of comparative discourses on national geniuses,
characters and traditions. One influential trope of such discourses was a naturalistic
theory of photographic climates, which clung to the notion of photography as sun
painting, and which Arago had first vented when he had claimed, back in 1839, that a
bright Southern sun would produce stronger actinic power. Thus in 1851 climate was
invoked to explain the somewhat disturbing success of US daguerreotypists. The
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Crystal Palace jury suggested, in a spirit of ‘fairness’ to English ‘photographists’, that

17 – Reports by the Juries, 277; see Robert the striking results of US daguerreotypes, whatever their technical merits, had been
Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A
Social History, 1839–1889 [1938], New York: ‘seconded by all that climate and the purest of atmospheres could effect’, and that
Dover 1964, 68–72; Marcy J. Dinius, ‘‘‘Best attention was due to ‘the importance of a clear atmosphere’ in order not to ‘overrate
in Show,’’ American Daguerreotypes at the the superiority of execution which America certainly manifests’.17 Although the
Great Exhibition’, Common Place, 9:4 (July critics of the Illustrated London News and the Athenaeum ostensibly differed from
2009), http://www.common-place.org/vol-
09/no-04/dinius/, accessed 6 April 2010. such official explanations,18 a debate on visual nationalities had clearly begun, and
18 – See Gunthert, ‘L’institution du within this debate the climate thesis enjoyed a measure of success, especially in the
photographique’, 20 and n. 35, who notes USA. In an era of virulent US expansionism and cultural nationalism, summed up by
that the 1851 Exhibition marked the first
the cry of ‘Manifest Destiny’, popular patriots such as Horace Greeley were quick to
attempts at ‘geographical characterizations’
of photography, and cites an anonymous exploit the ‘triumph’ of US daguerreotypists, and slogans such as ‘an American sun
article ‘Photography in the Palace of Glass’, shines brighter’ gained credence, US photography henceforth presenting itself as the
The Athenæum, 1233 (14 June 1851), 632. In home of a practical, democratic kind of realism.19
this article one reads the following remarks:
Meanwhile in France, in the context of the newly established Second Empire and
‘Daguerreotypes are largely displayed by the
French, – as might have been expected, that its ambitious photographic projects, a great amount of attention was paid, as Andre
country being proud of the discovery: – but Rouille has shown, to the expansion, industrialisation and vulgarisation of photo-
the examples exhibited by the Americans graphy, still largely conceived as a purely French invention, and now largely envi-
surpass in general beauty of effect any which
we have examined from other countries. This
sioned as an auxiliary of French imperial prospects by professional authors who
has been attributed to a difference in the generally ignored or despised foreign pictorial contributions.20 Witness, for example,
character of solar light as modified by this passage from Ernest Lacan’s Esquisses photographiques, a book-long commentary
atmospheric conditions; we are not, on the 1855 photographic exhibition attached to the Paris Exposition:
however, disposed to believe that to be the
case. [. . .] we know of no physical cause by [It is since 1851 that] photography [. . .] has become such a powerful auxiliary
which the superiority can be explained, – and for sciences and arts. It has, by and by, come down from the rooftop of the
we are quite disposed to be sufficiently
portrait maker to the painter’s studio, the scientist’s laboratory, the man of the
honest to admit that the mode of
manipulation has more to do with the result
world’s cabinet, even to the boudoir de nos le e gantes. It has crossed the seas,
than any atmospheric influence’. passed mountains, traversed continents: there are photographers in Bombay,
19 – For the quote from The Illustrated Madagascar, Valparaiso; and, as one applies it to one’s tastes or needs, it has
London News and a technical-professional gone, with the artist and the tourist, into museums, cathedrals, the darks of
explanation of the US success, see Taft, silent woods, the rugged tops of the Alps or the Pyrene es.21
Photography and the American Scene, 69; for
a longer discussion of this success, see It is, nonetheless, in the official report of the (international, but predominantly
Brunet, Naissance, 179; and for a general French) jury for this exhibition that we find one of the clearest statements about the
discussion of the US daguerreian ‘standard’,
distinctive merits of French and English photographs – indeed French and English
see ibid., ch. 4.
20 – See Andre  Rouille
 (ed.), La Photographie photographies – which together towered above all other nations in the final medal
en France: textes et controversies, une count. Specifically, this jury formulated a cultural theory of photographic nationalities,
Anthologie 1816–1871, Paris: Macula 1989, by remarking on a rather predictable division of labour between English landscapes and
182–296, esp. 218.
French monuments. In their overview of the photographic exhibitions, the jurors
21 – Ernest Lacan, Esquisses photographiques
[1856], reprint Paris: Jean-Michel Place justified the greater count of medals awarded to France by a claimed deficit of English
1979, 21–2. monuments:

103
 François Brunet
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Figure 3. Roger Fenton. Valley of the Wharfe, ca. 1856. Albumen print. Courtesy of Societe
 Française de Photographie.

Figure 4. Roger Fenton. View on the Hodder,

ca. 1860. Albumen print. Courtesy of The
Wilson Centre for Photography.

104
 Nationalities and Universalism in Early Historiography
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Figure 5. Roger Fenton. Bolton Abbey, ca. 1856. Albumen print. Courtesy of Societe
 Française de Photographie.

Between the two nations, the first rank may be attributed to France, for while to
the admirable English views and landscapes of Messrs. Fenton, Maxwell Lyte,
Llewelyn, France can oppose in perfection those of Messrs. Martens, Aguado,
Heilmann, Great Britain has nothing to match the gigantic reproductions of
monuments by Messrs. Baldus and Bisson, or the curious heliographic plates of
Messrs. Niepce de Saint-Victor, Nègre, Baldus and Biffaut. Bavaria exhibited
portraits which, with respect to modelling and effect, several persons place
22 – Exposition universelle de 1855: Rapports above every other comparable product.22
du jury mixte international, Paris:
Imprimerie impe riale 1856, Vol. 2, 569. Further on, the near absence of monuments in the English exhibition was pointed out,
even though England, the jury mused, ‘contains magnificent cathedrals well worth the
attention of photographers’, and although ‘no people travel as much as the English and
23 – Ibid., 572. could have, as they, make us know the monuments of the whole world’.23 In the
landscape section, however, the jurors unequivocally admitted English superiority,
echoing in this connection the traditional painterly distinction between colour and line:
While the English school does not display prints on so colossal a size as those of
Messrs. Legray, Baldus, and Bisson, through the use of collodion it attains effects
of transparency, perspective and light that are so particular as to warrant the
appellation of colourist. Collodion, as used by the English photographers, has
some special qualities that must be attributed to the presence of a great
proportion of potassium bromide, which is more easily impressed than iodide
by green rays. Thus it is that foliage is more nuanced [on English photographs],
especially in the shadows, and never displays those black masses that impair
24 – Ibid., 573. some of the best productions of French photographers.24

And here is how they justified the first-class medal awarded to Roger Fenton and his
‘many landscapes’ (figures 3, 4), characterised as a whole by perfection and variety:

105
 François Brunet

In the Valley of the Warfe and in Huck Fall, the tints are gradated with such truth
that one could tell the distance between each ground in the terrain; ordinarily in
photographic landscapes the various grounds appear packed one against the other,
as in painted stage sceneries, and one cannot feel the air moving between them. It is
impossible to render perspective better than in the Pool before the Strid, which
represents two fishermen on rocks in the middle of a forest crossed by a stream.
Several views of Rivaulx Abbey, as well as instantaneous prints of Admiral Napier’s
English fleet, leaving Portsmouth, demonstrate the variety of Mr. Fenton’s talents,
and the profit he has availed himself in using the collodion process.25 25 – Ibid., 574. In this passage the jury also
expressed their regrets that Fenton’s views of
Such judgements, like those mentioned above in the context of the Crystal the Crimean war and especially the camp at
Palace Exhibition, typically marginalised what I would call historical factors Sebastopol were not displayed.
(such as, in France, the political agenda behind the photographic inventory of
26 – The US contribution to the 1855
historical monuments and the institutional reasons for prolonged indifference exhibition consisted of a few portraits and
to the collodion process), covering them with ‘cultural’ and even archetypal was considered poor. In France it was widely
wisdoms that bordered on cliche. The proposed distribution of roles between admitted that America had neither
English landscapes and French monuments, while sanctioning the marginalisa- monuments nor a taste for landscape: see
Francis Wey, ‘Comment le soleil est devenu
tion of portrait (and thereby US) photography,26 clearly disregarded Fenton’s peintre, Histoire du daguerre otype et de la
views of ruins and abbeys, among others (figure 5).27 Yet it served an obvious photographie’, Le Muse e des familles (20 July
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diplomatic role: justifying the overall pre-eminence of the French, while recog- 1853), 290–1.
27 – In 1856 Roger Fenton, a member of the
nising merit to the English, and rehearsing well-established art-historical dis-
Societe Française de Photographie since
tinctions and hierarchies (particularly between landscape and history as genres). 1853, donated a series of thirteen prints to
This particular theory was to enjoy considerable success in the later historio- the French body, which were described in the
graphy, down to a 1985 article by Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Nir, for whom a following issue of the Socie te
 Française de
Photographie’s Bulletin as including
comparative survey of nineteenth-century European photography in the Holy ‘landscapes, monuments, and groups from
Land demonstrated precisely this same partition of tastes – monuments and nature’ (BSFP 1856, 301), and which were
inscriptions for the French, landscapes and atmospheres for the English – exhibited in 1857 along with some other
thereby suggesting the play of ‘cultural predispositions’ and even religious Fenton prints (I thank Carole Troufle au for
this information). The fact that the
heritages in the early artistic progress of photography.28 Whatever its actual ‘monuments’ were mostly religious edifices
merit for art history, this theory of cultural climates could, in France in the or ruins may have contributed to the larger
1850s, be twisted to serve clearly ideological and even xenophobic goals, as perception that Fenton and other English
photographers did not excel in architecture.
another, lesser known document will show.
28 – Yeshayahu Nir, ‘Cultural
Although obscure today, the French writer The ophile Gautier’s account of the Predispositions in Early Photography: The
1857 exhibition of the Societe
 Française de Photographie contains a striking discussion Case of the Holy Land’, Journal of
of the relationship between universality and nationality in photography – especially as Communication, 35:3 (1985), 32–50. See also
the recent exhibition presented in 2007–2008
it is articulated to a precociously modern reflection on photography as art.29 Along
at the Metropolitan Museum and then the
with Flaubert, Gautier belonged to the Realist offshoot of French Romanticism, and as Muse e d’Orsay, L’image reve
le
e: premières
such was called a ‘photographic’ writer by champions of the ‘ideal’. In France this photographies sur papier en Grande-Bretagne
classic debate came to a head some time before Baudelaire’s famous 1859 diatribe on (1840–1860) [Impressed by Light, British
Photographs from Paper Negatives (1840–
photography, precisely in 1857, with the manifesto on Realism by the critic 1860)], Paris: Musee d’Orsay 2008.
Champfleury, which staged a parable pitting ten daguerreotypists and ten painters in According to the press release, ‘The fondness
an open field, and concluded that the ten mechanical images turned out identical, of the early British photographers for
whereas among the ten paintings ‘not one was like another’.30 Gautier’s text would bucolic, undulating landscapes underlines
the strong ties with the land at this time, of
seem to have been composed precisely to counter this anti-photographic argument, this essentially rural nation’.
and by the same token to vindicate his own brand of Realism. For the writer, 29 – The ophile Gautier, review of ‘The
photography was no mere chemical operation, but involved significant human choices Photographic Exhibition’, L’Artiste
(December 1856–March 1857), 193–5,
and, in a word, taste. Strikingly, it was nationality that served as evidence of the great
partially reprinted in Rouille, La
truth that the ‘soul of man’ always shows through whatever he touches. ‘In an Photographie en France, 282–5. This same
exhibition of heliographic prints from various countries, Gautier wrote, nationalities text is quoted in Dominique de Font-
are easily recognized’. Hence followed a gallery of national styles, typically starting with Reaulx’s essay in the catalogue to L’image
vele
re e [Impressed by Light], 13, with the
English photography, and typically describing it as purely derivative: comment that English calotypists ‘managed
to imbue their photographic prints with a
English photography, for example, resembles paintings and engravings from
purely British character, nourished by
Britain; it has the look of keepsake and book of beauties, nature in it is made to painting and engraving’.
look like something clean, neat, shiny, smooth, elegant, and fashionable [itali- 30 – On this episode and its contexts, and for
cised terms in English] that catches the least attentive eyes. You see some references, see François Brunet, Photography
animals and you think they are done after Landseer; landscapes remind you of and Literature, London: Reaktion Books
Constable, Turner, Callow, and William Wyld; daily scenes are Mulreadys and 2009, 70.

106
 Nationalities and Universalism in Early Historiography

portraits are Lawrences. You will object that such a character owes to the land
itself, or the nature of the objects represented, and that there is nothing so
surprising about the reproduction of an English site or person wearing an
English cachet; yet the same physiognomy remains, even when the picture is
made in Egypt or in Greece, after very different types. Albion’s photographers
have a manner of placing their models, of distributing their lights, of taking
their points of view, that cannot be mistaken. Some are more Byronian, some
are Lakists in the way of Wordsworth, some are Biblical in the Martynn genre,
31 – Gautier, in L‘Artiste, 193. some are Neo-Raphaelites like Millais.31

The French writer did not find other photographic nationalities worthy of such
eulogium:
Germans, on the contrary, produce a kind of photography that is intimate and
homely, as in a novel by Auguste Lafontaine; they display maudlin sentimen-
tality, Swabian naivety, a housekeeper’s care and punctilious cleanliness; they
place soulful figures in interiors that are crowded with home utensils; wherein
Charlotte, who was just leaning out of the window amid the volubilis, exclaim-
ing ‘o Klopstock!’ while gazing at the moon, turns back to cut out slices of bread
and butter for the little children. [Germans] lack colour, and their pictures
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generally display the soft pallor of those charcoal card drawings that the painters
32 – Ibid. of Munich, Berlin or Düsseldorf never seem to manage to colour on the wall.32

As for Belgians, they ‘have no clearly marked character; they imitate the French and
can only be distinguished by a slight Walloon accent’. Meanwhile:
with the Italians we recognize the taste for monuments, the love of the grand
style of painting, the passion for archaeology; they care for art more than they do
for nature, and seek the beauty of lines before the magic of effect. Like their
painters, they lack chiaroscuro; broad light, strong locality, clear-cut shadow are
33 – Ibid. the ordinary qualities of their photographs.33

After such a definitive gallery of foreign national types, one is curious to hear
what Gautier had to say about the French – and one is perhaps not surprised to find
that they defied such convenient typology:
Individuality reigns among the French: everyone follows his particular idea; the
same diversity of genres is found at the photographic exhibition as at the Salon –
strange thing to say, and yet true, one finds among the French photographers
the draughtsmen and the colourists; the former fix their contours, cut out sharp
outlines, and admit but white or grey tints; whereas the latter blur the edges of
objects, concentrate their lights, thicken their shadows, warm up their tones, silk
up their blacks, and even know how to darken up [culotter] the sun’s work as an
old Rembrandt etching is softened down [estompe e] on yellow paper. Each
photographer of repute has his cachet, and his prints do not need his signature
to be unravelled from those of others. This [diversity] owes to lenses, chemical
agents, albumen, collodion, washing, wax paper or glass plate, to the weather on
that particular day, the length of exposure in minutes or seconds, the colour,
nature, greater or smaller immobility of the model – something, no doubt, to
each and every one of these circumstances, but chiefly to the artist’s taste, his
manner of considering and understanding things, of choosing, arranging, dis-
posing, and above all – why not say it? – to a certain fluidic transmission, which
34 – Ibid., 193–4. science is not capable of ascertaining today, but which exists nonetheless.34

Thus Gautier came back to his main thesis – that there was a significant ‘action of the
photographer on the photograph’, an action ‘great enough to give a different style to
the apparently mathematical reproduction of a like object’ – a theme that resonated
with the French critical debate of the late 1850s and tended to disprove Champfleury’s
experiment. Thus nationality came into play as the preferred illustration of the artful-
ness of photography. In this sense, Gautier’s theory could be called a theory of artistic
climates. Moreover, Gautier defined the French national style as individuality – i.e. as
the lack of a national style, thus equating Art with France and, in a sense, condemning
other nations to merely photographic photography. Whereas English or German

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 François Brunet

photographs seemed mere photographs, we might say, of national artistic traditions

and types, it fell to the French photographers to embody true photographic creativity
and therefore to confirm at once the art of photography and the genius of France.
Such photographic patriotism, whether natural, cultural or artistic, is remarkably
lacking from the last text I want to review, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake’s famous 1857 essay
on photography, to which I turn, indeed, as the period’s prime statement of photo-
graphic universalism. Wife of Charles Eastlake, who had been the president of the
Royal Academy (1850) and the first president of the London Photographic Society
(1853), but probably a more active and enthusiastic fan of photography than her
husband, especially through her Scottish connections, Lady Eastlake (figure 6) was
especially known as a conservative but astute art critic and a brilliant travel writer,
versed in several languages and continually touring the Continent. In her Quarterly
Review articles she not infrequently commented on national characters and traditions,
and in 1845 she published a striking essay on ‘Lady Travellers’, which linked the
feminine ‘domestic’ orientation – particularly characteristic, in her view, of English
women – with a greater ability to discover and appreciate foreign cultures.35 Her 1857 35 – See Angelia Poon, Enacting Englishness
essay on photography, truly a founding text for the cultural and artistic critique of the in the Victorian Period, Colonialism and the
Politics of Performance, London: Ashgate
medium, is striking as a kind of conclusion to – and perhaps a discreet critique of – the
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2008, 28.
debate on photographic nationalities in the 1850s.
The essay opened with a social utopia, a liberal vision of the expansion of
photography as social progress. Photography, for Eastlake, was ‘a new sympathy’,
uniting ‘men of the most diverse lives, habits, and stations, so that whoever enters its
ranks finds himself in a kind of republic, where it needs apparently but to be a
photographer to be a brother’.36 This ‘republic’ united society – at least English 36 – Unsigned review [Elizabeth Eastlake],
society (‘the nobleman, the tradesman, the prince of blood royal, the innkeeper, the Quarterly Review, 101 (1857), 442–68,
reprinted in Beaumont Newhall (ed.),
artist, the manservant’, etc.). In the same vision, the formation of photographic Photography: Essays and Images, New York:
societies united the UK – excepting Scotland (where the Photographic Society of MoMA 1980, 81–96.
Edinburgh was just forming): ‘Liverpool assists Norwich, Norwich congratulates
Dublin, Dublin fraternises with the Birmingham and Midland Institute, London
sympathises with each, and all are looking with impatience to Manchester’.
Photography also united Britain and British India, it united Britain and France,
and indeed it united Europe:
Nor is the feeling of fellowship confined to our own race. The photographic and
political alliance with France and this country was concluded at about the same
period, and we can wish nothing more than that they may be maintained with
equal cordiality. The Duke de Luynes, a French nobleman of high scientific
repute, has placed the sum of 10,000 francs at the disposal of the Paris
Photographic Society, to be divided into two prizes for objects connected
with the advance of the art,–the prizes open to the whole world. The best
landscape photographs at the Exposition des Beaux Arts were English, the
best architectural specimens in the London Exhibition are French. The
Exhibition at Brussels last October was more cosmopolitan than Belgian. The
Emperors of Russia and Austria, adopting the old way for paying new debts, are
bestowing snuff-boxes on photographic merit.37 37 – Eastlake, in Newhall, Photography, 84.

Registering the wave of international events and contests that set in after 1851 – such
as the Paris Exposition of 1855, the 1856 Brussels Exposition ‘for the encouragement
and development of industrial arts in Belgium’, which was repeated in 1857, etc., and
the famous ‘concours du duc de Luynes’, launched in 1856 by the French Photographic
Society in order to stimulate the elaboration of ‘permanent’ photographic prints and
practicable photomechanical methods – Eastlake consistently chose to describe these
events in internationalist, or at least highly diplomatic, language. While the ‘political
alliance’ with France reflects the revival of the Entente cordiale in the first years of the
Second Empire, the notion of a contemporary ‘photographic alliance’, in the 1850s,
remains quite debatable, as we have seen. As for the competition sponsored by the
Duke of Luynes, it was indeed declared open to all nations, the object being, as the
French society’s Bulletin noted, ‘art in the general point of view, and not from the

108
 Nationalities and Universalism in Early Historiography

, La Photographie en
38 – Quoted in Rouille point of view of national work’.38 However, although several English competitors
France, 204. were registered, it would seem that their merits may not have been properly regarded;
in the end, both the small and great prizes went to Alphonse Poitevin, in 1862 and
1867, for processes that modern historians regard as less promising in retrospect than
39 – Ibid. those of some other French and English candidates.39 Also worth noting is the critic’s
deft parallel between English landscapes in Paris and French views of monuments in
London – a harmonious chiasm applied to what was treated in France as a clear
dichotomy. Indeed, Elizabeth Eastlake’s photographic ‘republic’ obeyed a distinctly
40 – According to the Oxford English ‘cosmopolitan’ worldview.40
Dictionary, the adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ The following section of Lady Eastlake’s paper, devoted to the history of the
appears to have entered the English language
in the 1840s, first in the sense of ‘belonging to
invention, was equally non-patriotic. Not unlike that of her friend David Brewster,
all parts of the world’, and then, especially in the narrative she wove was consistently international, or at least Franco-English,
Emerson and Dickens, as ‘having the listing Niepce and Daguerre, Talbot, Niepce de St Victor and then Scott Archer (the
characteristics which arise from, or are suited latter elegantly internationalised in the sentence: ‘the Daguerre to this Niepce was a
to, a range over many different countries;
free from national limitations or countryman of our own’) before describing gun-cotton as ‘partly a French, partly a
attachments’. The noun ‘cosmopolite’, in the German discovery’ and quoting a poem by Schiller in German as a measure of
sense of ‘citizen of the world’, was common optimism for those discouraged by photographic disappointments.41 A gentle
since the seventeenth century, but it enjoyed
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reminder of the criticisms levelled at Talbot’s patents by fellow English calotypists

a strong revival in the first half of the
nineteenth century, especially in opposition (‘photography made but slow way in England; and the first knowledge to many even
to ‘patriot’. of her existence came back to us from across the Border’) allowed the critic to single
41 – Elizabeth Eastlake, in Newhall, out Edinburgh as the source of the ‘first earnest, professional practice of the art’ in
Photography, 87–9.
the UK, but also prompted her, once again, to spread a pacifist blanket over the early
history of photography, ‘not so generous in character, she wrote, as that of its
maturity’. This tone of genteel appeasement continually reminded the reader of
the new ‘sympathy’ Eastlake exalted in her exordium, or of what she called later in the
text a ‘new form of communication between man and man’.
Her central topic, however, was a discussion of photography’s merits for culture,
and especially for art, which makes the text’s principal appeal today. To the commen-
tary of these merits Elizabeth Eastlake brought essentially the same cosmopolitan
approach, fuelled by her observations, direct or indirect, of international exhibitions,
but hardly mentioning individual photographic artists – let alone nations. Her discus-
sion of photography’s semiotic and aesthetic faculties is, in fact, valued today precisely
42 – Brunet, Photography and Literature, on account of its general, philosophical framework, as I have shown elsewhere.42 For
73–5. instance, in her lengthy discussion of landscape, she insisted on the necessary model-
ling of depth, a characteristic usually associated with the collodion process and there-
fore, in 1857, with British photography, and most if not all of her examples, explicit or
implicit, were English or Scottish, but this national specialisation was all but muffled in
her argument. Thus it comes as something of a surprise to read, in the midst of her
cosmopolitan discourse, a veiled statement of British supremacy in photography,
when in her discussion of the practical conditions for successful picture-making she
comes to rehearse the theory of photographic climates:
As a general rule, too, however numerous the exceptions, the cloudy day is
better than the sunny one. Contrary, indeed, to all preconceived ideas, experi-
ence proves that the brighter the sky that shines above the camera the more
tardy the action within it. Italy and Malta do their work slower than Paris.
Under the brilliant light of a Mexican sun, half an hour is required to produce
effects which in England would occupy but a minute. In the burning atmo-
sphere of India, though photographical the year round, the process is compara-
tively slow and difficult to manage; while in the clear, beautiful, and, moreover,
cool light of the higher Alps of Europe, it has been proved that the production of
a picture requires many more minutes, even with the most sensitive prepara-
43 – Elizabeth Eastlake, in Newhall,
tions, than in the murky atmosphere of London. Upon the whole, the temperate
Photography, 89. Roger Taylor, in L’image
vele
re e, 21, notes that ‘climate conditions’
skies of this country may be pronounced most favourable to photographic
were an ‘essential’ point in the choice of action, a fact for which the prevailing characteristic of our climate may partially
processes (especially between collodion on account, humidity being an indispensable condition for the working state both
glass and was paper) in the 1850s. of paper and chemicals.43

109
 François Brunet

Thus London’s murky atmosphere was more photogenic than Arago’s bright
Southern suns, and, as indicated by the reference to the photographic slowness of
the Alps, climatology bore directly on landscape art, indirectly explaining the British
superiority in that department which the essay’s discussion of photographic aes-
thetics suggested. Still, Eastlake’s final verdict on photography’s artistic potential was
rather reserved (photography could help art, she famously quipped, mostly ‘by
showing what it is not’) and is remembered today, rather, for her insistence on
what she called the ‘historic’ interest of photographic details. Even though her
general faith in English cultural superiority is plain from many of her writings, her
eulogium of London’s climate must in my opinion be read as consistent with, rather
than in opposition to, her general cosmopolitan view of photography as a ‘new form
of communication’, possibly elaborated in part as a response to the rise of photo-
graphic nationalisms in the 1850s, whether French, Austrian, American, or even
English. In other words, by 1857 the theory of natural photographic climates
remained the most polite or diplomatic expression of geo-photographic hierarchies.
In the way of conclusion, I must admit first of all that the above survey is all too
partial, focusing as it does on the Franco-English debate on photography, and perhaps
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downplaying especially the reverberations of US cultural nationalism. Keeping in

mind, however, my starting point about the apparent irrelevance of questioning
photographic nationalities in the age of global visual culture, I would draw attention
to the competing imperial contexts of French and British photography of the 1850s.
Where The ophile Gautier saw a difference in artistic traditions, I see a difference
between political traditions and situations – one that the genteel Elizabeth Eastlake
would all but suppress. What emerged in the 1850s was, on the one hand, social and
economic expansion of photographic technology, which to learned observers offered a
potential promise of progress and harmony, and justified discourses on either uni-
versality or ‘soft’ cultural difference; and, on the other, the mounting antagonism of
economic and colonial empires, first and foremost British and French, secondarily
American, Belgian, Austrian, Prussian, and Ottoman – those being the nationalities
that were deemed worthy of notice by the 1855 jurors – which, in the context of the
Crimean War particularly, compelled the same liberal observers to acknowledge
nationalities and somehow make sense of them. From this point of view, the stylistic
differences between British and French photographs of the Holy Land and other world
sites are one expression among others of the two empires’ competing appetites for
strategic territory; and furthermore, this competition is not a superficial aspect but part
of the very substance of the ‘colonising’ enterprise that has been the object of the
critique of Orientalism. I think the critique of photographic colonisation is quite in
order – but it begins at home, in London, in Paris, even in Edinburgh, and it calls upon
us to strive at more affirmatively international histories of photography.

110