Karen Shepherdson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474435734
- eISBN:
- 9781474453721
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474435734.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson ...
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This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson examines commercial seaside photographic practice from 1860 to 1920, offering a visual exposition of the British seaside through the refracted lens of the itinerant beach photographer. Despite their humble means of production, the photographs discussed are frequently evocative, drawing the viewer into a nostalgic past shaped by visual half-truths. Photographic half-truths too readily can become amplified from a view to the view and to the experience. This chapter examines the conventions, expectations and mythologisation of what seaside portrait photography of this period should present, and how these inevitably provide a highly mediated view of the actual Victorian seaside experience.Less
This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson examines commercial seaside photographic practice from 1860 to 1920, offering a visual exposition of the British seaside through the refracted lens of the itinerant beach photographer. Despite their humble means of production, the photographs discussed are frequently evocative, drawing the viewer into a nostalgic past shaped by visual half-truths. Photographic half-truths too readily can become amplified from a view to the view and to the experience. This chapter examines the conventions, expectations and mythologisation of what seaside portrait photography of this period should present, and how these inevitably provide a highly mediated view of the actual Victorian seaside experience.
Andrea Henderson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198809982
- eISBN:
- 9780191860140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198809982.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter argues that British photography of the 1850s and 60s wedded realism—understood as a commitment to descriptive truthfulness—with formalism, or a belief in the defining power of structural ...
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This chapter argues that British photography of the 1850s and 60s wedded realism—understood as a commitment to descriptive truthfulness—with formalism, or a belief in the defining power of structural relationships. Photographers at mid-century understood the realistic character of photography to be grounded in more than fidelity to detail; the technical properties of the medium accorded perfectly with the claims of contemporary physicists that reality itself was constituted by spatial arrangements and polar forces rather than essential categorical distinctions. The photographs of Clementina, Lady Hawarden exemplify this formalist realism, dramatizing the power of the formal logic of photography not only to represent the real but to reveal its fundamentally formal nature.Less
This chapter argues that British photography of the 1850s and 60s wedded realism—understood as a commitment to descriptive truthfulness—with formalism, or a belief in the defining power of structural relationships. Photographers at mid-century understood the realistic character of photography to be grounded in more than fidelity to detail; the technical properties of the medium accorded perfectly with the claims of contemporary physicists that reality itself was constituted by spatial arrangements and polar forces rather than essential categorical distinctions. The photographs of Clementina, Lady Hawarden exemplify this formalist realism, dramatizing the power of the formal logic of photography not only to represent the real but to reveal its fundamentally formal nature.
Andrea Henderson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198809982
- eISBN:
- 9780191860140
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198809982.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth ...
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Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a “science” of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wave-like stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll’s children’s books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.Less
Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a “science” of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wave-like stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll’s children’s books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.
