Anxious Ornament – Photography: A Victorian Sensation

“More photos are taken now in two minutes than the entire 19th century.” This factoid is writ large at the beginning of Photography: A Victorian Sensation, yet what the material (and there’s lots) of the exhibit appends to this mathematical curiosity is the precious objecthood of photographs from the period.

It’s as easily forgotten that the 90s didn’t have Google as it is that  there was a time when photographs were thought of not just as virtual files, to be shared and deleted at whim, but revered and prized possessions. In the National Museum exhibition, A.D. Morrison pays a due debt of gratitude to the collection of the late Bernard Howarth-Loomes. It’s Howarth-Loomes’ taste for the unusual objects that gives the edge to this historical exhibition. There is in one vitrine what can only be described as a shiny golden hand roller of framed postage sized portraits.

But it’s not a case of quirk worship. With figures like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes’ analyses of Victorian photography so often referenced, it’s only proper to give this emergent period of the medium proper attention beyond cursory clichés of torturous exposure times, and variously sordid rumours of the content of the first photograph.

Cutting across the development of the medium is a Victorian obsession with technological advancement. Yet many of the blurred, dreamily hazy images of rural France that are exhibited in the show, the curator Morrison argues, acted as an antecedent for Impressionist painting. In an odd back and forth, the aesthetic potential of these ‘accidents’ for photography as an artistic medium was only fully realised in dialogue with the work of Impressionist painters. The show tacitly suggests links with Monet in its display of the work Gathering Water Lilies from the 1880s by Peter Henry Emerson.

One of the most interesting inclusions are the 'stereoscopes'. Using a pair of lenses and coupled images, the illusion of 3D images they created generated a 19th century craze. Sales of these gadgets reached the hundreds of thousands at their height. In the exhibition, there’s a selection of the kinds of views popular at the time, including ancient ruins and epic architectural structures.

As well as the consumer high technology of the day, also displayed are the early tools of the burgeoning photographic sciences. There are some surprises, like the dinky domestic iron that would be used to apply wax to negatives, making them more transparent and reducing the printing time.

The exhibition looks towards the formation of photography as an artform, as well as the necessary accompanying scientific developments. Nevertheless, it’s the tremendous number of examples of the decoration that surrounded photographs that is its most dominant and interesting element. Perhaps some of the anxiety of presentation came from an instinct to tame the strangeness of the new technology of photography. Though now sounding like cheap tat, 'photo jewellery' was the height of fashion during the 19th century, with Queen Victoria at the avant-garde of the trend. Particularly poignant are the small oval brooches containing pictures of deceased loved ones, and decorated with a curled lock of their hair.

It’s probably unlikely that some of the processes on show could experience a resurgence of popularity a la the enthusiasm for previously dead formats like vinyl. Yet with the proliferation of cheap disposable cameras, Photography: A Victorian Sensation taps into this nostalgia for pre-Cloud photography. Okay, some of the impressively in-depth details of the perfection of the Daguerreotype may prove too dry for all but the buffs. But there’s a wealth of unusual eye candy for those more interested in the decorative history of the photograph, and heaps upon heaps of weird Victorian faces.