Armour and Lace: Women Photographers in Nineteenth-Century Institutions

Among the approximately 150,000 photographs registered in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in the nineteenth century, I have discovered that close to 8,000 were made by women, representing a significant contribution to the V&A’s nineteenth-century institutional photographic collection. This number includes photographs made in the museum’s photography studio by the museum’s first woman Official Museum Photographer, as well as photographs made by women photographers documenting other institutional collections. This significant corpus of photographs indicates that women not only played a role in the formation of institutional photographic collections, but also that institutional photography was a career for women in the nineteenth century.

This study identifies nineteenth-century women photographers making photographs in various European art and science institutions. Presented as a series of case studies, it probes the social and professional contexts in which women institutional photographers lived and worked. Foregrounding the material approach, it defines the breadth of their practices, with a particular focus on the circulation of their work, revealing the extent of their contribution and influence within the developing network of institutional photographic studios emerging in Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Considered collectively, these case studies represent a challenge to Roger Fenton and Charles Thurston Thompson’s monopoly of a rich lode of photographic history, adding nuance to our understanding of the status of nineteenth-century professional women, institutional photographic practices and the visual ecosystems to which these women contributed. While few photography historians know these women's names, I argue for the breadth of their influence, regardless of their historical invisibility. This influence stems from the implantation of the images that make up their output in the collective subconscious of all those who have intersected with the inherently pedagogical characteristic of institutional operations in the past and the present. Attaching proper names, and in the process, gender, to the makers of these works helps to identify the social and cultural factors contributing to the invisibility of women’s professional photographic activities. This, in turn, makes women’s contributions to Victorian networks of knowledge production visible and complicates prevailing understandings of their role in nineteenth-century institutional photographic practices, scripting new narratives regarding the history of photography and, more broadly, women’s history.

Key photographers examined in this thesis: Louise Laffon; Jane Clifford; Isabel Agnes Cowper; K. Marian Reynolds; Alice Everett; Edith Rix; Annie Russell; Julia Margaret Cameron; and Emma Schenson. Key nineteenth-century institutions examined in this thesis: Royal Collections, Madrid; Musée Napoléon III, Paris; South Kensington Museum, London; Natural History Museum, London; Royal Institution, London; Royal Observatory, Greenwich; the archives of Carl Linnaeus, Uppsala, Sweden. What this thesis is not about: The art of photography or art photographs, the history of V&A objects photographed, amateur photographers, art history, and the biographies of ‘exceptional women’.