At Home in the Victorian City? Revisiting Thomas Annan and the Social Contexts of Early Urban Photography. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Boman, Charlotte
• Is Part Of: History of photography. Volume 43:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 27
• Page End: 46
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Thomas Annan (1829–87) -- Glasgow, professional photography -- Victorian city -- architecture, social class -- civic culture -- print market -- digital humanities; Photography -- History -- Periodicals; 770.905
• DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2019.1600860
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0308-7298

Abstract

Abstract : Photographs of mid-Victorian cities evoke an unsettling perspective of modernity by calling attention to the spasmodic process of societal and environmental change in this period. Focusing on four diverse commissions undertaken by the professional photographer Thomas Annan in Glasgow in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this article explores intriguing exchanges between photography and other media in an enlarging Victorian print market. This material suggests that we have yet to fully appreciate the ways in which photography participated in the often-fraught public debate on urban space and civic identity in localised environments. The article also explores how recent interventions in digital humanities, particularly in the field of mapping technologies, have opened up new possibilities of animating and reexamining the remote, conventional and impersonal viewpoints that characterise photographic representations of metropolitan areas in this period.