ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the implications of nineteenth-century photographic discourse for contemporary literary criticism and theory, while the emergence of photographic discourse in 1850s and 1860s has a complex and important history. It uses the work by Victorian photographers, critics, and even consumers, to interrogate some of the most influential and established theories of the photograph that continue to inform the critical discourse. The point of such an interrogation is not, of course, to challenge the 'truth' of contemporary theories of the photograph, but rather to ask whether Victorian photographic discourse and practice offer alternative theories of photographic representation. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, called for the collection of a photographic 'life-history' to be gathered in a 'family register'. The images, themselves, however, resemble modern mug-shots more than normal studio photographs: 'A double row of photographs would run down the side of each page the one containing a medallion of the full face, and the other one of the profile'.
