Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of Empire

The Victorian era heralded an age of transformation in which momentous changes in the field of natural history coincided with the emergence of photography. During this period, different parts of the British Empire began to actively claim their right to be acknowledged as indispensable contributors to knowledge and the progress of empire. Corresponding with the rise of the modern museum, photography’s arrival was timely and it rapidly became an essential technology for recording and publicising rare objects and valuable collections. In Empire, Photography and the Nineteenth-Century Museum, Kathleen Davidson draws on wide-ranging archives and visual material to explore the complex relationship between natural history, photography and museums from the 1850s to the 1880s in Britain and its colonies, principally Australia and New Zealand. This comparative international study investigates how natural history networks transformed conceptions of empire, and the role of photography in that process. In an interrogation that ranges from the first forays into museum photography and early attempts to document scientific expeditions to the importance of traditional and photographic portraiture for the recognition of scientific discoveries, this book not only recasts the parameters of what we actually identify as natural history photography in the Victorian era but also how we understand the very structure of empire in relation to this genre at that time.