History of Photography — Module 05: Photography, Science, and the Myth of Objectivity
In the nineteenth century, photography revolutionized science and social science by providing an empirical tool for documentation and discovery. Accepted as an objective recorder of truth, the camera allowed researchers to document medical achievements, geographic expanses, and ethnographic studies. However, this perceived objectivity frequently masked deep biases, cultural prejudices, and deliberate manipulations. Photographers like Thomas Barnardo and Jean-Martin Charcot staged their subjects to elicit specific emotional reactions or reinforce scientific falsehoods. Ultimately, photography expanded human knowledge while simultaneously codifying Western imperialism and prejudice, proving to be both a faithful mirror and a deceptive mask.
Photography as an Exploratory and Scientific Tool
Pre-photography: Prior to the camera, scientists and explorers relied on subjective paintings, drawings, and written travel accounts.
Geographic and Astronomical Documentation: Photography allowed researchers to "fix their finds". Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen invented the "revolver camera," an early panoramic lens system used to sequentially record the transit of Venus. James Nasmyth constructed and photographed detailed plaster models of the moon to circumvent the limitations of telescopic photography.
Topographical Surveys: The U.S. Bureau of Ethnology was established to document Western terrain and the cultures of Native Americans before they "disappeared".
Documenting the Inner Life and Psychology
Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne: Applied electric currents to patients' facial muscles to systematically document dramatic emotional states in his 1862 book, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine.
Charles Darwin: Relied on heavily edited medical photographs, commissioned theatrical poses, and infant portraits to prove that physical signs of emotion were universally shared across all species and cultures.
Jean-Martin Charcot: Documented psychiatric patients with hysteria at the La Salpêtrière hospital. Though he insisted his camera was a strict documentary tool, his subjects assumed highly theatrical, exaggerated poses.
Urban Poverty and Social Science
Henry Mayhew and Richard Beard: Commissioned daguerreotypes of the urban poor to create engravings for the seminal 1851 sociological survey, London Labour and the London Poor.
John Thomson: Collaborated on Street Life in London, dedicating his work to strict, objective, and unembellished documentary realism without a political agenda.
Thomas Barnardo: Contrasting with Thomson, Barnardo intentionally exaggerated poverty by posing children in torn clothes, creating highly manipulated "before-and-after" images to advertise his charities.
W. W. Hooper: Documented extreme human suffering to raise relief funds during the Madras famine.
Ethnography, Imperialism, and Bias
Anthropometric Systems: To standardize ethnographic comparison, Thomas Henry Huxley and John Lamprey mandated photographing nude subjects in front of portable silk-thread grids.
Orientalism: Western photographers commercially exploited non-Western subjects (particularly Middle Eastern and Asian women) by using specific costumes, props, and odalisque tropes to portray them as exotic, sexually passive, and timeless.
"Dying Cultures": Photography reinforced the prejudicial belief that indigenous populations lacked the strength to survive Western expansion, as seen in the 1866 "The Last of the Tasmanians" exhibition.
Photography in Daily Life and Systems
Photographic Intimacy: Writer Oliver Wendell Holmes envisioned a precursor to social media, where people formed deep connections entirely through the exchange of carefully staged self-portraits.
Legal and Organizational Systems: Law enforcement utilized photographic affidavits as courtroom evidence and proposed national identity cards to systematically organize visual data and prevent crime.
The nineteenth century's faith in photography as a scientific instrument rested on a premise that was never fully examined: that the camera, unlike the human observer, had no point of view. It recorded. It did not interpret. It could not lie. This made it invaluable to medicine, anthropology, astronomy, and law, and it made those fields willing to accept whatever the camera produced as evidence. The gap between what was photographed and what was true was rarely the camera's failure. It was almost always a decision made by the person behind it.
Duchenne de Boulogne attached electrical probes to the facial muscles of a mentally disabled man and induced expressions of terror, grief, and joy, then photographed the results as a systematic study of human physiognomy. Darwin borrowed Duchenne's photographs, had the engraver soften the wrinkles and remove the electrode from the image, and published the results as evidence that emotional expression was universal across species and cultures. Charcot staged weekly public exhibitions of his patients at La Salpêtrière, coaching women diagnosed with hysteria through their symptoms before an audience of scientists and socialites, and then published the photographs as clinical documentation. Each of these men described himself as a neutral observer. Each one was making pictures of things he had arranged.
What the camera omitted was as consequential as what it recorded. The American Civil War produced tens of thousands of photographs of military installations, officers, and battlefields. It produced almost no photographs of slavery. The expanding cities of Europe were extensively photographed for architectural and civic documentation. The people displaced by those renovations were not. Indigenous peoples around the world were photographed as subjects of ethnographic study, often with the explicit assumption that they were vanishing and therefore worth recording before they disappeared. The camera confirmed whatever it pointed at. What it never pointed at, it rendered invisible. That power to define reality by selecting what to include was not a flaw in the instrument. It was the instrument.