Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth-Century Museum

Kathleen Davidson teaches art history at the University of Sydney. Her recent publications include ‘Colonial Science and Photographic Portraits’ in Judy Annear (ed.), The Photograph and Australia (AGNSW Press, 2015); ‘Connecting the Senses: Natural History and the British Museum in the Stereoscopic Magazine’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2014); ‘Speculative Viewing: Victorians’ Encounters with Coral Reefs’ in Grace Moore and Michelle Smith (eds.), Victorian Environments (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming); and ‘Photography and the Triumph of Science in European Vision and the South Pacific’ in Jaynie Anderson and Christopher Marshall (eds.), The Multiple Legacies of Bernard Smith (Power Publications & AGNSW Press, 2016). Previously, she was Curator of International Photography at the National Gallery of Australia.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Rethinking the Role of Photography in Victorian Natural History
Emerging Sites of Production: A Comparative Approach
Formative Visions of Empire
Exchanging Views of Empire
From ‘Immutable Mobiles’ to ‘Boundary Objects’
Making and Moving Images
Peripatetic Objects of Empire and Collections at the Periphery
Navigating the Archive

Chapter 1 – Paper Museums: Photography and Natural History at the British Museum
From Institutional Priorities to Imperial Interests
A Virtual Inventory of Specimens: Circulating New Knowledge and Filling in the Gaps
Private Operators and Entrepreneurs

Chapter 2 – Museum Traffic: Naturalist Correspondents and the Advent of Photography in the Colonial Museum
From German Settler to Cosmopolitan Scholar: Colonial Masculinity and the Rise of the Self-made Man
Naturalist Correspondents, Photography and the Reframing of Natural History
Expeditionary Photography and the ‘New Traveller’s Tales’

Chapter 3 – The Rhetoric of Exemplarity: Portraiture and the Naturalist as Celebrity
Gentleman Amateurs and Professional Bodies: The Social Formation of Victorian Science
The Naturalist Refashioned

Chapter 4 – Nature as Spectacle: Encountering the Moa from Christchurch to Madras via London and Paris
The Origin of the Natural History Collections at the Canterbury Museum
A New Era of the Museum Begins: The Debate over Order versus Spectacle
Portraits and the Press: The Colonial Naturalist as Publicist

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index