New Mobile Experiences of Vision and Modern Subjectivities in Late Victorian Britain
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qvw76
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.15180/191204
- Title of journal
- Science Museum Group Journal
- Article number
- 191204
- First page
- -
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- -
- ISSN
- 2054-5770
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/browse/issue-12/new-mobile-experiences-of-vision/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Building on her previous work on cyclo-photographers, Dominici’s article explores the new ways of seeing enabled by cycling in relation to the experience and temporality of late-nineteenth-century modernity, questioning how this influenced amateur photographers’ approach to the representation of what was, effectively, a modern gaze. Dominici conducts this investigation through a close reading of photographers’ accounts of their own experiences as published in the photographic and cycling press, using new research into the Cyclists’ Touring Club Archives and visual material held by the Science Museum to contextualise photographers’ practices. In doing so, the article demonstrates that their visual experiences should also be understood as an early example of the modernist transformation of perception then taking place.
More generally, the article contributes to our understanding of the role that British amateur photography played in the constitution of visual modernity. Conventional narratives identify the expression of new ways of being modern in the experience of early avant-garde movements, particularly in France, while Britain is often considered marginal to the formation of such visual expressions. However, the article shows that Britain did participate in the visual dimension of this modernist project through its burgeoning middle-class. The camera and cycle users at the centre of this article were popular modernists in the sense that their practices implicitly questioned established visual norms while projecting visual and technological desires into the future. Consequently, the article has a clear interdisciplinary character that contributes both to photographic studies and to wider scholarship on both modernism and society’s relationship with technologies. Additionally, it provides a model of photographic scholarship that does not privilege the visual product but that focuses instead on the conditions of possibility of certain photographic practice, demonstrating how the photograph is just the end point of much more complex relations of social, cultural, and technical experiences.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
