Photography and Identity in the Victorian Period

Visiting Fulbright Scholar, Professor Jennifer Tucker, and Sean Willcock will both present papers, and then the floor will open for general discussion.

Jennifer's paper is entitled Portrait of a Gentleman: The Great Tichborne Trials and the Rise of Modern Visual Evidence and investigates the role of photography and other forms of visual evidence and display in the celebrated nineteenth-century trials in Britain of the 'Tichborne Claimant.'  Familiar to historians as the longest legal proceedings of the Victorian age and a popular cause that attracted working-class support, the Tichborne trials (1871-1874) were also a landmark in the emergence of modern visual culture, concepts of evidence and new methods of historical narration through portraiture. Analysis of some of the central images from the case frames a discussion of historical methodologies at the heart of current Victorian visual studies, history of science and technology, public history, legal studies and social and cultural history.

Sean's talk will be on Aesthetic Bodies: Photography and the Imperialism of the Pose in Nineteenth-Century British India and will look at how photography inaugurated a period in which aesthetic imperatives increasingly came to structure the engagement of colonial bodies with the traumas of warfare in British India.   The formal conventions of image-making practices were not consigned to a discreet virtual sphere; they were channeled into the contested terrains of the subcontinent through the poses that British and Indian figures were striking for the camera.   In this talk Sean will examine some of the ways in which aesthetic concerns thus worked to inflect the political logic of imperial relations in times of violent crisis.

Everyone is welcome!

Please note the time and location of this event have changed from those originally advertised.  Apologies for any inconvenience.