ABSTRACT
In the mid-1860s Arthur J Munby began to collect the first mass-produced photographic images of working-class women in England, recording fascinating details about the women, the places he purchased the photographs and the raging debates on this new commercial practice of photography, in accompanying diaries. Many of these images – not to mention Munby’s fascinating diaries - have never been published before. This book examines this previously un-investigated archive, offering a fresh and arresting perspective on the interrelationships between photographic representations of working-class women, the creation of new identities of class and gender and the evolution of popular conceptions of photography itself.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1|12 pages
Academically Locating the Archive
History and Theory of Photography – The Nineteenth Century
chapter 5|56 pages
Munby and the Turn to Photography
Hannah, the Private Urban Collection and the Search for Photographic
Truth
chapter 6|52 pages
Starting to Collect
Munby and his Turn to Commercially Produced Photographs of
Working-Class Women
chapter 7|44 pages
Dressing Above Your Station and Making it Work for Him
Domestic Photographs of the Urban Working-Class Woman
chapter 8|26 pages
Under the Skin
Munby's Photographs of Facially Disfigured Women - The Real and the
Symbolic
