History of Photography — Module 07: Social Reform, Science, and the Modern City
At the turn of the twentieth century, photography became a pivotal tool for documenting modern life, driving social reform, and expanding scientific understanding. As urbanization and industrialization accelerated, photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine utilized the medium to expose societal inequalities and advocate for the working class. Concurrently, scientific advancements such as X-rays and chronophotography fundamentally altered human perception, revealing invisible realities and the mechanics of movement. These innovations not only enhanced governmental and industrial control through archives and motion studies but also profoundly influenced avant-garde art movements like Cubism and Futurism, redefining the boundaries between objective record and artistic expression.
Scientific Innovations: Motion and Time
Chronophotography: Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey pioneered stop-action photography, capturing the sequence of animal and human movement on film to resolve scientific queries.
Industrial Efficiency: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth applied these motion studies to industrial labor, creating "chronocyclegraphs" to trace and standardize efficient worker movements.
Futurist Art: Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the Italian Futurists adapted motion studies into "photodynamics," intentionally blurring motion to capture the world's "invisible vital energy".
The X-Ray and Altered Perception
Shattering Traditional Vision: The 1895 discovery of the X-ray allowed viewers to see through solid matter, sparking both public anxieties about decency and associations with the occult and a "fourth dimension".
Aesthetic and Artistic Influence: Chemists Eduard Valenta and Josef Maria Eder explored the aesthetic delight of X-rays, while the multiple perspectives and monochromatic palette of the technology heavily influenced Pablo Picasso's Cubist paintings.
Photography as Archive and Control
Criminal Identification: Alphonse Bertillon revolutionized police work by inventing the mugshot, breaking down physical appearances into standardized units to create vast, controllable government archives.
Eugenics: Francis Galton utilized composite mugshots to attempt to show general hereditary laws and "pictorial statistics".
Imperialism and Anthropology: Photography documented indigenous peoples in Africa and the Pacific Islands, often reinforcing Western stereotypes; however, widely circulated postcards of Africans by François-Edmond Fortier directly influenced European artists like Picasso
War and Photojournalism
The "Living-Room War": The rise of half-tone printing and photojournalism allowed the public to heavily consume up-to-date imagery of the Spanish-American War.
World War I Censorship: Governments strictly managed and censored photographic output during WWI to maintain morale, leading to a discrepancy between sanitized official photos and the horrific reality of the trenches.
Jacob Riis went into the tenements of lower Manhattan with a flash and came out with photographs that shocked people who had never been there and confirmed what people who lived there already knew. His book landed in 1890. By contemporary standards his reform instincts were conservative: he did not call for government intervention, he hoped the wealthy would build better housing out of charity, and he divided the poor into deserving and undeserving categories with the confidence of someone who had never been required to qualify. The photographs were more radical than the man. They put faces in front of people who had been abstract, and they made looking away harder, at least for a while.
Lewis Hine understood that looking away was always an option, and that the photograph alone would not prevent it. He worked for the National Child Labor Committee for years, assuming false identities to get into mills and mines, documenting children at looms and in canneries who should have been in school. He also said, clearly, that while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. He knew exactly what he was doing and what its limits were.
Muybridge settled an old question about horses in 1878 by lining a racetrack with twelve cameras triggered by trip wires: do all four hooves leave the ground at once during a gallop? They do. The photographs proved it. What they also proved, almost accidentally, was that the camera could see things the human eye could not. Marey took that discovery further, recording entire sequences of movement on a single plate with a rotating disk that opened briefly at regular intervals, producing a smear of overlapping positions across one exposure. He called it chronophotography. The step from a sequence of still images to a sequence of images in motion was short. Edison's kinetoscope and the Lumière brothers' cinématographe both grew directly from the stop-action experiments, and the motion picture was the result. At the same time, the chronophotograph's fracturing of a single action into its component positions across time and space gave painters a new way to think about representing movement on a static surface. The multiple perspectives and fragmented planes of Cubism are not identical to chronophotography, but they are not unrelated to it either. The camera taught painting that a single fixed viewpoint was a choice, not a necessity.
The X-ray arrived in 1895 and immediately became something the public could not stop thinking about. People stood in line at department stores to look through their own hands. A London shop sold X-ray-proof undergarments. What the X-ray did was simpler and more profound than any of the cultural noise around it: it made visible what had always been present but could not be seen. It passed through the surface and revealed the structure underneath. Several scholars have argued that this possibility, of seeing through opacity to the forms beneath, runs directly into the multiple perspectives and fractured planes of Cubism. Boccioni said the Futurists were like the X-ray. What every one of these moments shared was the same unsettling recognition: the world visible to the naked eye was not the complete world. The camera, in its various forms, kept demonstrating that there was more.
Headshot, mugshot, or portrait? It’s a question of purpose and who controls the narrative. Portraits are designed to promote and elevate, tell a person’s story in a way that person wants it to be told. A mugshot is a device for recording and control. Choose your photographer carefully. Make sure they are helping you tell your story.