AN EXHIBITION of Samuel Butler's photography in Gallery Sixteen, an elegant rotunda room just off the entrance to the Tate Britain, offered a rare opportunity to see some of the photography of the author of Erewhon and to contemplate how Victorian photographic realism fares in the setting of a modern museum. The exhibition, celebrating the centenary of Butler's death, ran from November 2002 to May 2003 and was made up of thirty-five framed photographs, some of them digitally touched up by Dudley Simons, and an assortment of photobooks and editions of Butler's self-illustrated volumes. It was developed by Tate curator Richard Humphreys and Butler scholar Elinor Shaffer, with the support of librarian Mark Nicholls from St. John's College at Cambridge, which houses most of Butler's extensive photographic work in its special collections. Titled “Samuel Butler and the Ignorant Eye,” after Shaffer's notion in her Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer, and Art Critic (1988) that Butler's photography renders “the eye of the viewer … ignorant and open” (229), the black-and-white secularism of Butler's work offered a startling change in imagery from the intense colorism of “Rossetti and Medievalism,” the exhibit that preceded it in Gallery sixteen.

From the lush folds enveloping Rossetti's mannered and mystic women, one arrived at Butler's idea of “medievalism” in a photo titled “‘The Wife of Bath’ on Board the ‘Lord of the Isles’ Going to Clacton” (1891) (Figure 26). A hearty middle-aged woman in an ample black traveling dress and an odd miter-like hat sits on a bench inside the cabin of a steamer savoring her meal in abstracted contentment. The food and drink are spread out in a clutter of bowls, jugs, plates, and open baskets beside her. A woman with strong hands and frank appetites, she is an obvious satire on photographic literariness and efforts to ennoble photography through manipulation for painterly effect. Butler's methodology, which was one of the themes of the Tate commentary, is to apply the blunt imagery of contemporary material to displace styles conferring more privileged artistic status. The irony can be startling. Further down the gallery wall in a graphic male nude titled “‘Rose’ the model” (1865), Butler offered a close-up frontal of the male model's thighs, pubic area, and rippling torso. With biological literalism, the photograph conveys the material truth behind the alabaster male torso of classical sculpture that it self-consciously displaces. In this exhibition of strong photographic presences, what was absent was as important as what was shown.

Samuel Butler, “‘The Wife of Bath’ on Board the ‘Lord of the Isles’ Going to Clacton,” 1891. Photograph courtesy of the Master and Fellows of St. John's College, Cambridge.

Like many Victorian photographers, Butler had come to the camera after extensive sketching and work in watercolors and oils. At Heatherly's School of Fine Art in London in the 1860s and 1870s, he had struggled unsuccessfully for years to emulate the colorful naturalism of Giovanni Bellini, although he had managed on several occasions to get his work hung at the Royal Academy. In the midst of his regimen as a student at Heatherly's, he had been introduced to photography and, from the start, as the Rose study shows, he had appreciated the potential of the lens to dismantle the academicism under which he was laboring. Although the photographs of this exhibition reveal a painterly sensitivity for the effects of light and shadow and the power of the frame, they rarely subordinate the photographic image to the canvas; indeed, some of them convey a certain irreverence that may have been Butler's reaction to his artistic failures. Butler used the photographic surface very successfully to explore visual ambiguity, in a manner that drew on the camera's empiricism to yank incongruous elements together in a way that suggested a more complicated reality. We can see this process at work, for example, in another of the exhibition photographs, his 1889 shot of a Fleet Street scene looking east toward St. Paul's (Figure 27). The paradox of photographic time is brilliantly captured in the hurried activity of hatted figures casting slanting shadows in the afternoon, a falling sun beyond the frame and a clock frozen at two thirty-five. In the background, the advertisement for “Rubber Stamps,” the source of the photograph's title, suggests iteration amid multiple forms of motion and time.

Samuel Butler, “‘Rubber Stamps’, Fleet Street, Showing St. Paul's,” 1889. Photograph courtesy of the Master and Fellows of St. John's College, Cambridge.

Enabled by a legacy left by his wealthy father to purchase his own cameras in 1887, Butler and his factotum Alfred Cathie produced a steady output of photographic plates through 1900. Some of his earliest photography was produced to illustrate Ex Voto (1888), his study of life-sized terra-cotta dioramas of the sixteenth-century Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem of Varallo in Northern Italy. The photographs of this ruminating, Tussaud-like exploration of the religious grotesque include graphic scenes of flagellation, the gory massacre of the innocents, a grinning terra-cotta Herod complete with a dust-ridden mane of human hair, and a vast Crucifixion scene. These photographs of terra-cotta Biblical figures, many of them in poor repair, convey a feeling not so much of a New Jerusalem of divinity and evil as of a Counter-Jerusalem of ghoulish deformation and decay. As Shaffer has argued perceptively in her pioneering study, Butler's photography frequently takes us into “a world of naturalism exploiting the photograph's innate tendency towards the grotesque and its historical tendency towards deflation and comedy” (228). Some of his later photography was employed in developing visual evidence for his The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), an archaeologically-inspired localization of the story of Ulysses in the western Sicilian locale of Trapani. Here, we find more examples of Butler's ironic juxtaposition, as he is photographed beside his Sicilian scholarly companion Signor Sugameli peering out from the cave of Polyphemus, a large hillside grotto outside Trapani. This secularization of the Homeric tradition, grounded in Butler's photographic literalism, was one of the inspirations, Hugh Kenner held, of James Joyce's Ulysses.

But the bulk of the Butler photographic archive is the result of years of patient and quirky observation. A compulsive wanderer in England and abroad, especially in Italy, Butler lugged camera equipment with him constantly, and his output, as this Tate exhibition selection decisively showed, was considerable and omnivorous: country landscapes, urban scenes, family portraits, children, laborers, priests, tramps, counts, freaks, and barnyard animals. More than 3,500 plates and photographs survive in collections at St. John's College at Cambridge University and at the Chapin Library at Williams College, Massachusetts. A massive CD-ROM of some two thousand of his snapshots prepared by the St. John's College special collections staff offers the visitor to that archive a curiously riveting viewing experience, an opportunity to become immersed in a vanished Victorian landscape. And for all of Butler's pervasive photographic intellectualism, his restless and sometimes aimless ironic play with visual representation, there is much in this extraordinary body of work that reveals a profound warmth and deep sympathy for his subjects. The loveliest and most arresting, and, indeed, most painterly, piece of the exhibition was that of an old priest who appears to be saying his Rosary in the dark shadows of a Sicilian church, with a blinding stream of light flooding through a great open door and illuminating the floor in front of him (Figure 28). This piece shows Butler at this best in working with the effects of light and the simple image, and it represents a photographic style that is found throughout the larger collection. Butler had an archival instinct matched by few Victorians and left behind an immense body of unpublished work, including a series of thoughtfully edited notes and aphorisms, a manuscript work of fiction (The Way of All Flesh) that he considered his magnum opus, and a meticulously prepared correspondence. His photography is by no means the least of his remains.

Samuel Butler, “Old Priest in the Church of the Addolorata, Monte Erice,” 1894. Photograph courtesy of the Master and Fellows of St. John's College, Cambridge.