![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
The intertwined development of popular photography and cycling in Britain was felt so close that, in the 1880s, contemporary commentators could write of ‘cyclo-photographers’. The camera apparatus available at this time, bulky and fragile, was largely impractical to carry on a ride, and thus cyclo-photographers joined outdoor photographers in asking manufacturers for simpler and easier to operate cameras. However, a close reading of primary sources reveals that such demands were also the result of a new engagement with the possibility of seeing enabled by cycling itself. What was the cyclo-photographers’ experience of visual modernity? This article explores whether, and in what ways, the parallel emergence of a desire for compact cameras was linked to the new, and interconnected, ways of moving and seeing that the engagement with these two modern cultural technologies had made possible.
Notes
1 ‘Our Views’, Amateur Photographer (20 March 1885), 378.
2 Ibid.
3 John Browning, ‘The Tricycle as an Aid to Photography’, Cycling Mercury (1 December 1882), 6–7.
4 ‘Correspondence, Cyclo-Photography’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (May 1888), 196–97.
5 See, for example, Serena Beeley, A History of Bicycles, London: Studio Editions 1992; and David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: The History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006.
6 Glen Norcliffe, Critical Geographies of Cycling: History, Political Economy and Culture, Farnham: Ashgate 2015, 189.
7 A. E. Harrison, ‘The Competitiveness of British Cycle Industry, 1890–1914’, Economic History Review, 22 (1969), 288–89.
8 Harry Hewitt Griffin, ‘Cycling with the Camera’, Amateur Photographer (2 January 1885), 201–03. Griffin was the editor of Bicycling News.
9 See, for example, the No. 5 Folding Kodak, [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (8 January 1892), viii; the Kodet, [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (19 July 1895), xvi; and the Pocket Kodak, the No. 2 Bullet Kodak and the No. 4 Cartridge Kodak, [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (16 July 1897), viii.
10 See Jean-Louise Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa De Laurentis and Stephen Heath, New York: St. Martin’s 1980; and Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.
11 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997, 183.
12 The earliest use of this term that I have been able to trace dates to 1887: Henry Sturmey, ‘Photography for Cyclists’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (February 1887), 74–79. However, it is likely that this term had been in circulation for some time. A ‘cyclo-photo tour’ was mentioned in ‘Cycling Photographic News’, The Wheel World (December 1885), 282. In 1886, Wheel World reviewed a camera named ‘Cyclocam’ produced by J. Lucas and Son, Birmingham: ‘Progress and Invention’, Wheel World (March 1886), 136.
13 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998; and David Rubinstein, ‘Cycling in the 1890s’, Victorian Studies, 21:1 (Autumn 1977), 47–71.
14 See, for example, Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4th edn, London: Laurence King 2014, 81–90 and 165–70.
15 The Brownie camera was launched in 1900 at the price of 5 shillings (or 25 pence in today’s currency), thus making it affordable to the working classes. In 1900, 5 shillings would have had the spending worth of about £15 today.
16 Harrison, ‘Competitiveness of British Cycle Industry’, 297.
17 See, for example, Norcliffe, Critical Geographies of Cycling; and Michael Pritchard, A History of Photography in 50 Cameras, London: Bloomsbury 2015.
18 Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2012.
19 See, for example, Arthur J. Leeson, ‘Correspondence. Photographic Survey of Warwickshire, etc.’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (July 1890), 211; and Chapman Jones, ‘Cycling Records’, Amateur Photographer (7 August 1902), 103–04.
20 See, for example, Duncan Jamieson, ‘Bicycle Touring in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Cycle History, 12 (2002), 68–75; Norcliffe, Critical Geographies of Cycling; Glen Norcliffe, The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869–1900, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001; and Gary Tobin, ‘The Bicycle Boom of the 1890s: The Development of Private Transportation and the Birth of the Modern Tourist’, Journal of Popular Culture, 7 (1974), 838–49.
21 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1987, 41–42.
22 Ibid.
23 The ‘rational recreation’ movement, which aimed at structuring working-class leisure within a middle-class domain, was one outcome of a newly urbanised and capitalist society that sought to regulate the social activities of the working classes. See, for example, Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian Britain, London: Routledge 1978.
24 Simon Gunn, ‘Translating Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and the English Middle Class in Historical Perspective’, British Journal of Sociology, 56:1 (March 2005), 54.
25 See, for example, Phillip G. Mackintosh and Glen Norcliffe, ‘Men, Women and the Bicycle: Gender and Social Geography of Cycling in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Cycling and Society, ed. Peter Cox, Dave Horton, and Paul Rosen, Aldershot: Ashgate 2007, 153–77; and Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Cycling, Modernity and National Culture’, Social History, 41:3 (August 2016), 233–48.
26 This attitude aligned itself with that broader debate between ‘vulgar’ tourists and (self-appointed) sensitive travellers that first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. See, for example, James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture 1800–1918, Oxford: Clarendon 1993; and Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing, Berkeley: University of California Press 1999.
27 ‘Holidays’, Cycling (August 1878), 7.
28 ‘Rambles in Essex. – No. VII. Trips and Tours’, Cycling (July 1879), 169.
29 ‘Correspondence. The Art of Touring’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (April 1886), 134–35.
30 ‘Some Tendencies of Modern Cycling’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (October 1894), 290.
31 James Means, ‘Wheeling and Flying’, The Aeronautical Annual (1896), 24–25. See also Jamieson, ‘Bicycle Touring’.
32 One of Them, ‘Letters to the Editor. Cycling Photography’, Amateur Photographer (19 December 1884), 165–66.
33 Griffin, ‘Cycling with the Camera’, 201.
34 Stein and Varden, ‘Round West London with Cycle and Camera’, Amateur Photographer (17 March 1893), 178–79.
35 ‘Photo-Cycling Notes’, Amateur Photographer (10 July 1896), 36.
36 For an analysis of the impact of railway travel on space and time, as well as on perceptions of landscape and mobility, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1977), trans. Anselm Hollo, Berkeley: University of California Press 1986.
37 H. J. Leake and A. J. Marret, ‘On a Sociable Tricycle with a Camera in North Wales’, Amateur Photographer (5 December 1884), 134–35.
38 H. Smith, ‘Photography and Cycling’, Amateur Photographer (12 December 1884), 153.
39 Griffin, ‘Cycling with the Camera’, 202.
40 Roadster, ‘Cyclo-Photography’, Amateur Photographer (3 March 1893), 144.
41 A. Wheelman, ‘Cycle & Camera’, Amateur Photographer (8 August 1905), 105.
42 ‘Cycling and Photography’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (December 1887), 433–34.
43 See, for example, Griffin, ‘Cycling with the Camera’; Vincent St. George, ‘The Tricycle and the Camera’, Amateur Photographer (4 September 1885), 344; ‘Cyclo-Photography’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (March 1889), 38; ‘Cyclo-Photography’, Amateur Photographer (3 March 1893), 144; and ‘Notes and Comments’, Amateur Photographer (1 August 1905), 81–82.
44 See, for example, Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2000; and Philip Davis, ‘Victorian Realist Prose and Sentiment’, in Rereading Victorian Fiction, ed. Alice Jenkins and Juliet John, London: Macmillan 2000, 13–28.
45 Woll, ‘Cycling Photographic News’, Wheel World (October 1885), 169.
46 R. McGahey, ‘Among the Alps with Cycle and Camera, Part I’, Amateur Photographer (27 May 1898), 422–23.
47 ‘Cycling and Photography’, Cycling Mercury (1 October 1884), 3. The article was reported as having first appeared in the British Journal of Photography.
48 ‘Letters to Editor. Cycling Photographers’, Amateur Photographer (19 December 1884), 165.
49 ‘Cycling and Photography’, Amateur Photographer (10 July 1896), 35.
50 Leslie Selby, ‘A Plea for the Cyclist’, Amateur Photographer (7 May 1897), 380.
51 McGahey, ‘Among the Alps with Cycle and Camera, Part I’, 422–23.
52 R. McGahey, ‘Among the Alps with Cycle and Camera, Part II’, Amateur Photographer (3 June 1898), 442–43.
53 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, rev. edn, London: Verso Classics 1997, 36.
54 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon 1995, 13. ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ was written in 1859–60 and first published in 1863.
55 Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, 122.
56 In Walter Benjamin’s assessment of urban modernity, for example, human experiences emerge diminished, the individual alienated by shock and stimuli that cannot be assimilated. See, for example, Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. For Georg Simmel, urban experiences are equally overbearing, forcing the individual to protect him or herself from metropolitan life by becoming socially indifferent or ‘blasé’. Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage 1997, 174–86. The idea of modern life as defined by experiences that are fleeting, however, has also been seen in perhaps more positive terms as the motor behind the emergence of ‘a commitment to otherness and change’; for instance that embodied by the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century avant-gardes. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 66 and 95–148.
57 Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1997, x, 24 (original emphasis).
58 Ibid., x.
59 ‘The Scenograph’, Cycling (July 1879), 171–72.
60 H. H. Dore, ‘The Camera on Wheels. From London to the Isle of Wight’, Amateur Photographer (4 December 1885), 587.
61 ‘Correspondence. Cyclo-Photography’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (April 1887), 171 (original emphasis).
62 The manufacturer was not specified, but the description included in the article indicates this might have been one of E. Deyrolle’s plate cameras.
63 ‘The Scenograph’, Cycling.
64 Ibid.
65 ‘Letters to the Editor. A Camera Wallet for Cyclists’, Amateur Photographer (27 March 1885), 399.
66 Sturmey, ‘Photography for Cyclists’, 76 (original emphasis). Henry Sturmey was both a cyclist and a photographer. He promoted the Bicycle Touring Club (which became the Cyclists’ Touring Club), edited Cyclist (later The Cycle and Motorcycle Trades Review), launched the journal Photography (which was later absorbed into the Amateur Photographer), founded the International Cycling Association, and invented, with James Archer, the three-speed hub gear for bicycles. For a brief period he also produced the periodical Flying. David Webb, ‘Sturmey, John James Henry (1857–1930)’, in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy, London: Routledge 2008, 1358; and Richard A. Storey, ‘Sturmey, (John James) Henry (1857–1930)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53518 (accessed 12 September 2017).
67 ‘The Camera and the Bicycle’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (November 1887), 413.
68 A. W. Duncan, ‘Correspondence. Cycling and the Camera’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (April 1888), 151–52.
69 ‘Queries. 159. Camera for Bicycle’, Amateur Photographer (3 February 1888), 78.
70 ‘Correspondence. Cyclo-Photography’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (July 1895), 207.
71 A. H. Fry, ‘Cycling with a Camera’, Cycle and Motor World (14 April 1897), 117–18.
72 Walter D. Welford, quoted in ‘Touring and Holiday Resorts’, Amateur Photographer (30 April 1897), 353.
73 ‘Cycle and Camera’, Amateur Photographer (23 September 1898), 755.
74 ‘Cyclo-Photography. Some Recent Developments, Including an Ideal Cycle’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (August 1890), 239–44.
75 Arthur W. Green, ‘Letters to the Editor. How to Carry the Camera’, Amateur Photographer (22 April 1898), 303.
76 ‘Correspondence. Cyclo-Photography’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (May 1891), 131.
77 ‘Apparatus. The Eastman Film’, Amateur Photographer (28 August 1885), 331–32.
78 Ernest R. Shipton, ‘The Wheel and The Camera’, C.T.C. Monthly Gazette & Official Record (March 1887), 123–27 (original emphasis); Ernest R. Shipton, ‘The Wheel and the Camera. Part I’, Amateur Photographer (4 March 1887), 107–09 (original emphasis); and Ernest R. Shipton, ‘The Wheel and the Camera. Part II’, Amateur Photographer (11 March 1887), 118–21 (original emphasis).
79 Sturmey, ‘Photography for Cyclists’, 78.
80 Ibid.
81 A. H. Fry, ‘An Easter Cycling Holiday Through La Touraine’, Cycling World Illustrated (18 March 1896), 16–18.
82 J. U., ‘Cycle and Camera’, Amateur Photographer (12 August 1898), 642.
83 Griffin, ‘Cycling with the Camera’, 202.
84 ‘Progress and Invention. A Compact Camera’, Wheel World (March 1886), 136–37.
85 ‘Notes and News’, Amateur Photographer (6 August 1897), 102–03.
86 J. U., ‘Cycle and Camera’, Amateur Photographer (26 August 1898), 675.
87 Tonute, ‘Cycle and Camera’, Amateur Photographer (7 July 1899), 3.
88 [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (16 July 1897), viii.
89 [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (20 August 1897), x.
90 [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (10 September 1897), viii.
91 [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (28 January 1898), xvi.
92 See, for example, the Kodak advertisement published in the Amateur Photographer (21 September 1888), viii.
93 Douglas R. Nickel, Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1998, 10.
94 See, for example, Elizabeth Brayer, George Eastman: A Biography, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press 1996; Brian Coe, Kodak Cameras: The First Hundred Years, Hove: Hove Foto 1988; and Reese V. Jenkins, ‘Technology and the Market: George Eastman and the Origins of Mass Amateur Photography’, Technology and Culture, 16:1 (January 1975), 1–19.
95 Brayer, George Eastman, 152.
96 [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (14 November 1884), 96.
97 [Advertisement], Amateur Photographer (14 November 1884), 96. Lancaster published this advertisement in the Amateur Photographer until early 1887.
98 ‘Answers. Cycle-Clip’, Amateur Photographer (6 February 1885), 282.
99 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. This quote is from ‘II. Daguerre or the Dioramas’ in the section ‘Paris – The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 163.
100 Brian Coe, ‘The Rollfilm Revolution’, in The Story of Popular Photography, ed. Colin Ford, London: Century in association with the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television 1989, 60–89.
101 Brayer, George Eastman, 59–60; and Pritchard, History of Photography, 40–41, 44–47, and 56–57.
102 Maynard, Engine of Visualization, 68–71; see also George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988.
103 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 86.
104 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso 1983, 13.
105 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 41–42.