Developing Orientalism: Negative/Positive Ecologies ‘in the Field’ of the British Empire, c.1850–1888

Abstract

Histories of Orientalist photography focus predominately on the form and content of positive prints. This article argues that more attention should be paid to the distinctive visual qualities and associated meanings of photographic negatives within the colonial visual encounter. Paper and glass-plate negatives were the objects of frequent spectatorship and discussion for travelling British photographers working ‘in the field’ in the early years of the medium. While scholarship on such photography has traditionally emphasized the camera’s capacity to ‘fix’ the racialized Other as a static image available for the imperial gaze, the actual practice of making photographs ‘in the field’ was defined by fluid chemical processes and the fragile materiality of sensitized plates. I argue that such procedures yielded negative images that were defined not so much by fixity as mutability. The distinctive blemishes and marks that appeared on such negatives were read by photographers as indexes of volatile chemical and climatic agencies that decentered photographic authorship. Attending to photographers’ writings on such visual traits thus reveals a counter-discourse to the standard language of stasis and instantaneity that has come to dominate accounts of photography.

Keywords:

• Photography
• negatives
• Orientalism
• eco-criticism
• empire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thomas Ruff after Linnaeus Tripe, Amerapoora, Mohdee Kyoung, 2018. C-type print. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/tripe-ruff).

2 I went to see ‘China and Siam: Through the Lens of John Thomson’ at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London (12 April – 22 June 2018). For a full list of venues from 2009 to the present, see: <http://www.johnthomsonexhibition.org/venues> (22 August 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust.

Notes on contributors

Sean Willcock

Sean Willcock is Departmental Lecturer in the History of Art in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, where he is Course Director for the Undergraduate Certificate and Diploma in the History of Art. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and has held teaching positions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Hong Kong, and on the Yale in London programme. He is Reviews Editor at the journal History of Photography. His first book, Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty and Violence in the British Empire, was published with Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2021.