Part memoir, part micro-history, this is an exploration of the present through the lens of the past. We all know that the best way to study a foreign language is to go to a country where it's spoken, but can the same immersion method be applied to history? How do interactions with antique objects influence perceptions of the modern world? From Victorian beauty regimes to nineteenth-century bicycles, custard recipes to taxidermy experiments, oil lamps to an ice box, Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman decided to explore nineteenth-century culture and technologies from the inside out. Even the deepest aspects of their lives became affected, and the more immersed they became in the late Victorian era, the more aware they grew of its legacies permeating the twenty-first century. Most of us have dreamed of time travel, but what if that dream could come true? Certain universal constants remain steady for all people regardless of time or place. No matter where, when, or who we are, humans share similar passions and fears, joys and triumphs. In her first book, Victorian Secrets, Chrisman recalled the first year she spent wearing a Victorian corset 24/7. In This Victorian Life, Chrisman picks up where Secrets left off and documents her complete shift into living as though she were in the nineteenth century.

How do photographs compel belief and endow knowledge? To understand the impact of photography in a given era, we must study the adjacent forms of visual persuasion with which photographs compete and collaborate. In photography’s early days, magic shows, scientific demonstrations, and philosophical games repeatedly put the visual credulity of the modern public to the test in ways that shaped, and were shaped by, the reality claims of photography. These venues invited viewers to judge the reliability of their own visual experiences. Photography resided at the center of a constellation of places and practices in which the task of visual discernment—of telling the real from the constructed—became an increasingly crucial element of one’s location in cultural, political, and social relations. In Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject, Jordan Bear tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading mid-century photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework.

Street Life in London (1877-78), by journalist Adolphe Smith and photographer John Thomson, aimed to reveal by the innovative use of photography and essays the conditions of a life of poverty in London. Now regarded as a pioneering photo-text and a foundational work of socially conscious photography - "one of the most significant and far-reaching photobooks in the medium's history" (The Photobook: A History) - Street Life in London failed to achieve commercial success in its own time. In this groundbreaking book, we see the start, but not the conclusion, of a conversation between text and image in the service of education, reportage and social justice. This newly designed and typeset edition contains the full text and makes available to a contemporary audience Thomson's powerful images in their original size and rich colour.

This major exhibition is the first to examine the relationship between four ground-breaking Victorian artists: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), Lewis Carroll (1832-98), Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-75). Drawn from public and private collections internationally, the exhibition features some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the four artists formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.--National Portrait Gallery.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam, language: English, abstract: Introduction This essay mainly refers to the society in which photography arose. We shall look at the economic and social situation when photography appeared and how photography was perceived by the Victorians. Also some aspects of the problematic discussion if photography can become an art are considered in this essay. These aspects are concerning only the nineteenth century and what people thought in that time about this topic. The first chapter tells the history of photography. It covers an overview how photography developed and what advantages each development involved. The second chapter deals with the initial situation when photography was first publicly announced in 1839. We will come across cultural and scientific institutions and the infrastructure of the means of communication in that time. This is important for an understanding of the context in which the invention of photography took place. And therefore to see why photography developed so fast and powerfully in that century. The third section is about photography as a business, concerning its economical and technical expansion. It illuminates the fact that photography was on the way to become a mass media but was still too expensive to reach all social strata. Moreover, we will have a look at the middle class which is held responsible for supporting photography the most, being the bearer-class and upholder of photography. The fourth chapter highlights the functions photography had. It explains which social requirements and conventions photography had to obey to survive. Furthermore, we will pay attention to some reactions that were written down in newspapers and magazines about the new phenomenon. This section, concentrates on the thesis Jens Jäger had formulated in his book Gesellschaft und Photographie (Opladen 1996), namely that photography’s function was steered and defined by the people’s views and values. The question we will look at is: Which objects were considered to be worth to take a photo of and why? The fifth chapter concerns itself with the artistic status of photography and with its discussions and debates that were led in the Victorian time when photography was classified mainly as a scientific (mechanical and optical) process. In this section I will write, as well, about some photographers who are said to have been artists and to have produced some important artistic works.

David Newsome's monumental history, The Victorian World Picture, takes a good, long look at the Victorian age and what distinguishes it so prominently in the history of both England and the world. The Victorian World Picture presents a vivid canvas of the Victorians as they saw themselves and as the rest of the world saw them.