ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author recalls Norman Bryson's apposite phrase 'looking at the overlooked', which he used of still life painting. She explores the ways in which collected objects were represented photographically in the second half of the nineteenth century. The author points to some of the theoretical concerns that present themselves in the representational and stylistic devices that were applied to a wide range of objects and that cohered in this overlooked corner of photographic practice. Photographing objects was integral and crucial to the apparatus through which ethnographic and museological knowledge was made, generating discourse around objects; yet it is one naturalised within museum curatorial practices. In the light of the author's consideration of the visual rhetorics photographically enmeshing ethnographic objects, she looks at the earliest institutional photography of ethnographic objects in Britain. This was as part of the substantial portfolio of objects from the British Museum made by Stephen Thompson in 1872.
