SCIENCE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
- The photographers assigned to military missions frequently carried out ethnographic, topographic, and other kinds of scientific research.
- Thomas Cook, founder of the Cook's Tours, arranged military transport and cultivated the protection of rulers to safeguard them and the high-end tourist groups he escorted to Egypt and the Holy Land.
- Photographers hired to make and sell group pictures to the sightseers.
- Photography participated in the production of evidence in many fields.
- Geology, biology,botany, medicine, astronomy, and chemistry used photography to collect and exhibit evidence.
- In Russia, more systematic fieldwork aimed at describing physical types and local costumes began to use photography.
- Full-face, profile, and full-length views of people were considered to be the most scientifically useful.
- Prints generally show people identified by tribe and caste, holding a tool denoting their work and social position.
- The lack of standardization in anthropological photography led scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825- 1925) and John Lamprey (active 1870s) to create systems by which humans could be photographed for observation and comparison.
- One of the most persistent of such types of ethnographic photography showed women from the Middle East and Asia in sexually suggestive poses.
- The ten " Orientalism," adopted by cultural critic Edward Said in a 1978 book of the same title, has come to mean the wholesale social labeling of non-Western peoples as passive, rather than active; childlike, rather than active; childlike rather than mature; feminine, rather than masculine; and timeless- that is, separate from the progress of Western history.
- Images of the odalisque, the drowsily reclining naked or semi-nude female pictured in an intimate or exotic setting, were frequent in Western art.
- In photography, the mystery and unavailability of Middle Eastern women were enhanced by costume, and pose.
- Nude and semi-nude images of Eastern women ere marketed in many ways.
- The idea of creating assemblages of thematically related photographs of people was not restricted to scientific pursuits.
- Studios around the world offered exotic images of people deemed typical of an ethnic group.
- In the later nineteenth century, factories and industrial sites were photographed with increasing frequency, and studio shots of labors, especially craftspeople dressed in work clothes and carrying their tools, became the subjects of many cartes-de-visite.
- Child laborers are largely absent from early photography .
- The poor could not afford photographs, and newspaper images tended to reflect the point of view of private industry
- In the last third of the nineteenth century, photographs were used slightly more often in private social reform efforts
- The notion that inner human character could be interpreted through facial expressions persisted throughout nineteenth century portraiture in all visual media.
- Photographs became more general available, they seemed to encourage the reading of inner character.
- The conviction that a clear correspondence existed between inner moods and outward appearances also informed scientific experiments on human gestures and facial expressions, such as the photographs of mental patients taken by. Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond in the 1850's.
Duchenne de Boulogne
- Duchenne was a physician at the Paris hospital La Salpetriere, which treated people suffering from epilepsy, neurological problems, and insanity.
- Duchenne's Mecanisme de la physionomie humane ( The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy), published in 1862, was accompanied by an atlas of eight-four photographs taken between 1852 and 1856 of human subjects whose facial muscles were stimulated by an electric current.
- Duchenne attempted to arouse through electrical stimulation the individual facial muscles that he considered to be in involved in human expression.
- Most of his photographs were of people with mental retardation; forty-five of the eighty-four images are of one old mentally retarded man.
- He took his subjects' emotional responses to be typical of all humans; the individual's personality and distinctive range of reactions did not interest him.
- To aid the camera's recording, swift and subtle muscular reactions were ignored in favor of more dramatic and visible ones.
- The nineteenth-century clash between two approaches to painting, represented by the realism of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and the idealism of Jean-Auguste-Domunique Ingres (1780-1867), was specifically referenced by the commentator in relation to Duchenne's physiological photography.
Darwin
- British scientist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) completed a study that he had begun in 1838.
- The volume underscored Darwin's hypothesis that humans were not a separately created species, but resulted from the processes of natural selection and evolution.
- About nine thousand copies of the book sold in the first four months of publication, both because Darwin was a well-known, controversial author, and because the subject of emotional expression was popular at the time.
- Darwin's introduction acknowledged his debt to the insights and photographs of emotion made by Duchenne de Boulogne.
- Believing that babies exhibited the purest, least acculturated signs of emotions, Darwin used photographs of babies made by Rejlander and the German photographer Adolph Diedrich Kindermann (1823-1892).
- Darwin investigated the means by which photographs might be inexpensively included in the text.
- A technique known as Heliotype, invented by the photographer Ernest Edward (1837-1903), who made a portrait of Darwin in 1868, used printing-press plates to reproduce photographs, and to keep down the price of the book.