PORTRAIT AND PORTRAITS
The most brilliant of all essays on Victorian England is called Portrait of an Age. Its author, G. M. Young, writing during the early 1930s and trying to explain what the Victorians were really like, had a strong visual sense. ‘Every one of us’, he claimed, ‘lives in a landscape of his own.’

Young described how things changed – or did not change – in the years between Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837 and her funeral in 1901, catching the light and the shade. Yet he had nothing to say about photography, the great nineteenth-century invention which changed ways both of viewing and of recording the world. Photography was a triumph of science, but could be conceived of and practised both as an art and as a trade.

EMPIRE
As photography developed there was an increasing interest, expressed also in museums of anthropology, in ‘native ways’. In cartes-de-visite and stereographs the ‘natives’ themselves were sometimes treated as exotic specimens, not least when they were produced, as some were, not in London but in Auckland, Melbourne or Durban. There were many ‘natives’, however, particularly American Indians, who clearly appealed sympathetically to their photographers. There was a strong sense, too, among some photographers that they were recording dress and ways of life that were under threat and that would soon disappear. In Britain anthropologists like the director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, which moved to Oxford in 1883, regarded photographs as so important an adjunct to a museum, that he tried ‘to buy all I can’. Only photographs now remain of the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania.