Jordan Bear – författare

How do photographs compel belief and endow knowledge? To understand the impact of photography in a given era, we must study the adjacent forms of visual persuasion with which photographs compete and collaborate. In photography’s early days, magic shows, scientific demonstrations, and philosophical games repeatedly put the visual credulity of the modern public to the test in ways that shaped, and were shaped by, the reality claims of photography. These venues invited viewers to judge the reliability of their own visual experiences. Photography resided at the center of a constellation of places and practices in which the task of visual discernment—of telling the real from the constructed—became an increasingly crucial element of one’s location in cultural, political, and social relations. In Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject, Jordan Bear tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading mid-century photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework.

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.

The before-and-after trope in photography has long paired images to represent change: whether affirmatively, as in the results of makeovers, social reforms or medical interventions, or negatively, in the destruction of the environment by the impacts of war or natural disasters. This interdisciplinary, multi-authored volume examines the central but almost unspoken position of before-and-after photography found in a wide range of contexts from the 19th century through to the present. Packed with case studies that explore the conceptual implications of these images, the book’s rich language of evidence, documentation and persuasion present both historical material and the work of practicing photographers who have deployed – and challenged – the conventions of the before-and-after pairing. Touching on issues including sexuality, race, environmental change and criminality, Before-and-After Photography examines major topics of current debate in the critique of photography in an accessible way to allow students and scholars to explore the rich conceptual issues around photography’s relationship with time andimagination.