The invention and rise of photography runs parallel to the emergence and professionalization of science over the Victorian period, with John Herschel first using the word “photography” and William Whewell coining the word “scientist” around 1840. Nature Exposed offers fascinating and judicious analyses of the ways in which various amateur and professional photographic and scientific societies, the print media, and the wider public interacted to interpret and validate this new but problematic chemical datum of the phenomenal world. Refuting patronizing but persistent ideas that the Victorians received photographic evidence with simple credulity, as direct imprints of objective facts, the book usefully documents the various canons of proof by which the photograph came to be acceptable as a scientific record, and in so doing places it in relation to the fine arts, scientific drawing, and the hybrid form of the “touched up” photograph. The first chapter grounds the study by tracing the culture of photography among the early to mid-Victorians, as fraternal societies of photographers endeavored to build the social status of their practice, joining commercial photographers in asserting its mechanical objectivity, while also making this integral to an earnest gentlemanly moral code.
From the proliferous back catalog of Victorian sciences Jennifer Tucker's study shrewdly focuses upon those (principally spiritualism, bacteriology, meteorology, and astronomy) for which photographs furnished particularly ambiguous and controversial ciphers. Exacerbated by technical difficulties with long exposure times and inconsistencies in the developing process, by which chemical emulsions apparently revealed spiritual emanations and blurred photographs of Mars evidence of an advanced civilization, such images are seen to effectively furnish Rorschach tests that brought forth the tacit cultural assumptions that both scientists and the wider public brought to the formation of various scientific disciplines, and which determined the allocation of authority within them. The most scientifically tenuous of these endeavors, spiritualism, the subject of the second chapter, accordingly proves to be the most telling. Indeed, as the subsequent discussions demonstrate, in many important respects spiritualism furnishes a paradigm for understanding the other disciplines. It highlights the paradoxical demand placed upon photography by the Victorians, that it not only catch the fleeting moment but reveal and fix the invisible—so that oddly, while much clearer images of bacteria are obtained by the microscope and of the planet Mars directly through the telescope, it was only when photographs of such phenomena were produced that their credibility became established among both the public and many scientists. Spiritualist photography, rather like such documents as P. G. Tait and Balfour Stewart's anonymously published The Unseen Universe (1875), is seen to bring into strong relief the popular ideologies and psychological needs, as well as the increasingly masculinist and middle-class professionalism, that shaped the emergent cultures of science in the second half of the nineteenth century.
A scholarly cultural critique explicating the broader conditions by which the Victorians came to accept photography as a medium for scientific representation and research, Nature Exposed is most interested in pervasive social contexts of popular culture and democratization, ideologies of imperialism, gender, and nationalism, the everyday working practices of scientists and photographers, and the role of established conventions of reading images in shaping photographic epistemologies. The book's fruitful focus upon some liminal scientific activities is complemented, and extended, in its discussions of geology, meterology, and bacteriology, while there are intriguing references to the role of photography in other sciences also. The work of the physicist and chemist William Crookes in promoting photography and testing spiritualism is discussed, and the scope that the ether concept gave as a medium not only for light but for the “energy” of human thought and emotion is noted as a rationale to explain unseen spirits becoming manifest in certain photographic plates. Several mentions are made also of spectroscopy, another great Victorian discovery that, like photography, finds in the intimate relations of chemistry and light direct revelations of the object world. By developing some of these references a little further it may have been possible to give a clearer idea of the role of photography in the more dominant and definitive (though nonetheless popular) nineteenth-century scientific practices of physics, chemistry, and animal biology. It would, for example, have been interesting to know more about the competition that photographs of creatures and plants offered to the use of the lightly caricaturing forms of scientific illustration (or for that matter preserved original specimens) in defining biological types. This is, however, to cavil among plenty. While such discussions could have in some respects rounded out and completed the study, they might equally risk distraction from its main interests and achievements, and dissipate its admirably focused lines of argument. The book establishes a model that will no doubt be followed to examine the use of photography in other sciences during the Victorian period. Nature Exposed is a solid and very readable work of scholarship, drawing widely upon periodicals and other neglected print sources, and happily enhanced with reproductions of the many compelling and curious images that it has uncovered and analyzes.
