Recent Approaches to 19th-Century Visual Culture || Photography, Allegory, and Labor

Photography, Allegory, and LaborAuthor(s): Steve EdwardsSource: Art Journal, Vol. 55, No. 2, Recent Approaches to 19th-Century Visual Culture(Summer, 1996), pp. 38-44Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777744 .

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Photography, Allegory, and Labor

Steve Edwards

T here is a story about photography that we all know. It is the tale of photography's struggle to be regard-

3ed as a fine art. After numerous setbacks and false

paths, the story suggests, the banner of photography was

eventually planted firmly on the pinnacle of art. The problem is not so much that this tale is wrong, but rather that it is one part of a much more complex narrative. Photography was, and is, an allotropic mode of representation that, like the element carbon, exists in two different forms. It too has both its precious and commonplace forms because the ele- vated art picture and the vulgar document make up two

parts of a historical process. An adequate account of photography in the nineteenth century must reflect this dual existence. To do so will not leave the traditional story of

photographic art untouched. This essay seeks to open out

photography onto a series of wider and deeper historical

questions than those offered by the familiar tale of its relation to art. In particular, I am concerned with deploying the

example of photography in order to examine the emerging narratives of industry in nineteenth-century England. Studied in this manner, photography will lead us directly into matters of substance-namely, into the taxonomy of industrial knowledge and its relation to the fetishism of commodities.

The taxonomy of the International Exhibitions plays a central role in this study because in this structure we wit- ness a substantive attempt by intellectuals of the bourgeois class to understand the nature of capitalist society. These exhibitions are one of the crucial moments in the develop- ment of new industrial forms of knowledge-producing a

syntax for which things could be adjacent and related, or

separated and distinct-which spiral out of the display of commodities. The classification developed for the exhibitions also offers us a model for investigating the new lexi- cons of identity and difference that spread beyond the confines of the exhibition rooms to colonize the imagina- tion, and dreams, of a world and its future.

Recent theoretical work on the International Exhibi- tions, such as it is, has been much preoccupied with a notion of the spectacularized commodity. This commodity comes in various forms-fetish, spectacle, simulacrum, even power/knowledge-but, in all of these guises, the exhibitions have been depicted as the fantastic and mes-

merizing array of things that seemed to bewitch the con- sciousness of their visitors. Critical writing on these exhibitions, from Walter Benjamin onward, has operated with an undialectical understanding of the commodity form. The theory of the spectacle is always in danger of wiping out the very real problem that the bourgeoisie encountered in coming to terms with its rapidly developing, and still uncertain, society. To gaze in wonder, to stand spellbound in the palace of crystal, to wander awestruck before the fantastic multiplicity of things: these were real reactions that took place on the site of the exhibitions, but we should not allow them to obscure the philosophical problem represent- ed by taxonomy. There is a risk that late twentieth-century conceptualizations of the commodity-spectacle will be pro- jected back onto the Industrial Exhibitions, and, in doing so, produce a continuum that works to minimize the dramas of our own century. If the logic of commodity fetishism was

present in the exhibition displays, it was not the only force at work. Even less was it destined to work through its

unfolding in an untroubled way, or to operate as if capitalism had never contained any other possibilities or alterna- tive dreams. The theory of commodity-spectacle is inclined to assume that everything is in place, already worked out and singing its siren song to the passersby. The taxonomy of the exhibitions reveals another, parallel process, one in which the bourgeoisie struggled to know that which they could not know: the order, not of fishes or minerals, but of their society and their power. What would this impossible knowledge look like? What form would it take? The com-

plex relation of this search for knowledge to the fetishism of commodities constitutes the substance of our story.1

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The exhibition of 1862 is given pride of place in my account because it was with this event that the controver- sies surrounding photography exploded and cast their

magnesium glow on to wider questions of industrial soci-

ety. In this exhibition the difficulty encountered with clas-

sifying photography as either art or industry exposed important contradictions in the emerging forms of industrial knowledge. I want to suggest that these contradictions

point to the way in which photography figured, in these

debates, as an allegory of labor. In the process of unpack- ing the allegorical nature of photography, some important relations between the world of art and that of work can be

brought into focus. Let me state the problem as it appeared in 1862. As

we will see later, the exhibition was divided into four cate-

gories: raw materials, machinery, manufacturers, and fine art. Photography was placed not in the section for the fine

arts, but instead in a subsection of machinery. To the Royal Commissioners responsible for the classification, the section to be occupied by photography in the overall taxonomy appeared unproblematic, not least because it had been located in the machinery court in the International Exhibi- tion of 1851. In 1861 the idea to allocate to photography a class of its own within machinery was, in fact, a recognition of developments ten years on. But times had changed, and an immense dispute erupted between the representatives of photography and the Royal Commissioners. About two hundred articles appeared in the photographic magazines contesting the commissioners' decision, and the dispute was taken up across a range of journals from the Times to Punch. Writing of such a sustained quantity must of neces-

sity represent a multiplicity of voices, only some of which will be heard here. It is not unreasonable, however, to state from the outset that the vast majority of these texts laid claim to photography's status as fine art and, to that effect, sought to upgrade its classification.

The first issue of the Photographic Journal that com-

mented on the classification grumbled a little about the commissioners' decision, but insisted that photographers needed to demonstrate that they deserved a better place:

Its [photography's] degradation in the programme of the

coming exhibition from the rank of "Arts and Sciences," where it has hitherto figured in similar entertainments, to the humbler class of "Mechanical Contrivances," has caused in some quarters great and natural dissatisfaction. Such a slight, however, must not be made an occasion of wrangling. Photographers must vindicate the dignity of their art by deeds, not by words. Let them only produce their "best," let them offer to the public criticism "works of art," and there will be little fear of competent judges depreciating them as "mechanical contrivances."2

The advice this author offered was to ignore the classification and celebrate photography. But the slight proved simply too great for such healing words. Wrangling began on the

very same page, where another writer complained about

photography being situated among railway plant, locomotive

engines, carriages, agricultural and horticultural machines, ploughs, harrows, and watering cans, and all this while

engraving and other printing forms were accepted into fine art.3 The British Journal of Photography was certain that, as a consequence, the exhibition would be confined to "Sap- pers and Miners" because it believed that "no artist would exhibit on a footing below that of Manchester printed Cali- cos."4 For a while it appeared as if the photographic display would indeed assume such a lowly form. When the commissioners requested that the London Photographic Society appoint a committee to select the exhibits, that body-the only one that could claim to represent the photographic interest-refused to accept the assignment. The Photo-

graphic Society insisted that the injustice would have to be

righted and the classification corrected before it was pre- pared to act.5 Effectively, photographers blockaded the exhibition, and they remained firm in this resolve until very late

ART JOURNAL

39



in the day. One commentator even went so far as to describe their boycott as "a strike."6

Responding to the commissioners' request for the

appointment of a photographic committee, a representative of the Photographic Society, Lord George Frederick Pol-

lock, argued that photographers had no objection to the location of photographic apparatus in the class of machin-

ery but required that photographs should be displayed sep- arately in the fine art section.7 Pollock's suggestion, had it been accepted, would have had the effect of spatially demarcating the image from its technique. In important respects the whole controversy revolved on the simple matter of such a point of distance: if photographs were seen as an effect of the camera, its operation, and its chemical

manipulation, it would prove difficult to claim the presence of intellect, and the status of mechanical labor was certain to follow. Pollock, with a clear legal mind, could foresee all of this, and so his account proceeded by subjectivizing the

apparatus. Photography, he argued, involved choices and 40 intentions, it necessitated "the exercise of individual

genius" in a way that was inimical to any form of work that was not free and creative. The apparatus used by the photographer possessed, Pollock insisted, no more importance than brushes or easels did for Raphael or Reynolds; they were simply vehicles for the expression of subjectivity. Photography might be an imitative art, but according to him it was art all the same, and certainly art on a par with

engraving. He continued:

The section in which No. 14 [photography] is placed includes every species of machinery, implement, or tool which is used for the purposes of social life; and photography is the only result or product which is placed among the

machinery or apparatus necessary to produce it; it furnishes the solitary exception to what is otherwise a universal rule; even the paper on which a photograph is printed is put into a section above the machine that is used to make it.8

There was a luminous logic to this argument: why should

photography occupy the place of lonely anomaly among the

array of social forms? This was a difficult question for the

commissioners, and as we shall see, others searched hope- lessly for its resolution. The problem was that the apparatus seemed simply too present to allow for any easy separation from its product. Even that word product-and for all his legal care it is the one Pollock opted for-will not do, for it concedes the argument before it has begun. For photography to be designated as the product of

machinery was enough to deny photographers the prize they wished to claim: entry into fine art. It was this proximity to an apparatus or, to be more exact, to the associations which that closeness called to mind, that would produce a

deadweight resisting the reclassification of photography. The analogies, the metaphors, and the half-glimpsed narratives of work that the apparatus appeared to suggest

would produce extreme difficulties for the claims of photographers themselves. In 1862 there were, then, plenty of

good reasons for expecting to find photography exactly where it had been put.

The man primarily responsible for designing the classification system for the exhibitions was Lyon Playfair. He had been given the task in 1851 in an attempt to over- come the general lack of interest among the manufacturers.9 Playfair sought to involve the manufacturers as much as possible in developing a new taxonomy, and to this extent the exhibition was geared toward the interests of these men. He entered into a dialogue with the principle manufacturers in each trade to establish what should

appear where, and in what sequence. In this manner, Play- fair gave the exhibition the form of a vast industrial report. Playfair was one of that small group of rising professional administrators who came into public prominence with the exhibition of 1851. His real mission was that of an ener-

getic campaigner for the professionalization of science and for scientific and technical education. In designing the classification for the International Exhibition of 1851, his

project consisted of investigating the relationships of the

myriad industrial products to other aspects and practices of the society. In this sense, the taxonomy of the exhibition was concerned as much with developing a syntax for the division of labor as it was with displaying things.

In an essay on Playfair's classification for the 1851

exhibition, the Reverend Dr. William Whewell wrote a key text on taxonomy and its relation to the industrial world. This essay, "On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibi- tion on the Progress of Art and Science," holds a special place in the investigation of commodity fetishism, for in it we find the language of spectacle combined with the most

rigourous attempt to examine what might be learned from the exhibition.10 Appearance and science figure side by side in Whewell's account.

By way of demonstrating the success of Playfair's system for 1851, Whewell recounted the taxonomic problems faced by a series of French exhibitions between 1806 and 1844. These various systems, he believed, were "artificial taxonomies," which were "arbitrary conveniences"

uniting things that have no "natural connection."1 Whewell worked the well-tried metaphor of Babel to describe the exhibition of 1851 and in the process demon- strated both the indispensability of taxonomy and its

mythology. He argued that work on the Biblical tower came to a halt when the objects of everyday work ceased to have a common currency in the multiplicity of tongues. Accord-

ing to him, the construction of the tower failed because a

request for a spade was met with a bucket, or a call for mortar answered with a plumb line. Whewell insisted that without taxonomy social action was impossible. He argued that cooperative labor required a common language and an established taxonomy:

SUMMER 1996



It is not only necessary that they should call a brick a brick, and a wire a wire, and a nail a nail, and a tube a tube, and a wheel a wheel; but it is desirable, also, that wires, and nails and tubes, and wheels, should each be classified and

named, so that all bricks should be of one size, so that a wire number 3, or a tube section 1, or a six-inch wheel, should have afixed and definite signification; and that wires, and tubes, and wheels, should be constructed so as to correspond to such significations; and even, except for special purposes, no others such.12

In his view an agreed taxonomy would have the effect of

fixing the forms of the industrial world. This system of classification would allow us to know the order of things-what fits where, what is next to it-and that one could pick up a

cog and know, in advance, that it would mesh with another. Whewell's account also rendered language transparent, producing, as he put it, a "settled and common" language among the manufacturer, the man of science, the artisan, and the merchant.'3 This would facilitate their cooperation, by preventing the diversity and ambiguity of language. If Whewell's account constitutes a metaphysics of class har-

mony, it also demonstrates the social indispensability of taxonomic knowledge. This argument presents simultane-

ously an ideology of social relations and a credible analysis of the role of taxonomy in social practice.

Let me stay, for a moment, with the strong thread in Whewell's essay. He argued, as others have since, that taxonomic systems constitute the very ground of general state- ments and form the base of theory. On the basis of such an

argument, it should be apparent that any attempt to escape taxonomy must be vain and result only in empiricism. If we take Whewell seriously, we can see that the issue is whether particular classificatory systems can be employed in our understanding of the social world, and if they can, what conditions are necessary for their cognitive adequacy. A dialectical approach to the problem of taxonomy must entail searching out the points at which taxonomic forms break down so that new systems might be generated that are at once natural and partial. In the case of the Interna- tional Exhibitions, this search involves detailing the relation of knowledge to the commodity fetish. But it also involves the recognition that we live in a world shaped by this contradiction, and grasping the limits of what can be known, and done.

Playfair's system emerged out of just such a break- down in the existing taxonomic schemata. Previous systems had involved an arbitrary number of fixed groups:

The effect of this grand division was highly beneficial, for within each of these sections classes could be formedfar more homogeneous than was possible while these sections were all thrown into one mass: when for instance, the cotton tree, the loom, and the muslin stood, side by side, as belonging to ves-

tiary art; or when woven and dyed goods were far removed, as

being examples, the former of mechanical, the latter of chemical processes. Suitable gradation is the felicity of the classi-

fying art, and so it was found to be in this instance.14

Playfair's flexible classification was significant because the idea of a fixed and immutable world had broken numerous

attempts to account for the wares of a society. His innova- tion of introducing subdivisions into the organizing sections or classes was particularly important given the

dynamic nature of industrial capitalism and the pace at which the division of labor was developing. In this way, new classes could be added without disturbing the logic of the system. Playfair's solution to the taxonomy of the exhi-

bition, which was adopted in 1851 and continued in the other exhibitions, introduced the new category of machin-

ery. His new structure met with the approval of commentators like one in the London Review who wrote: "Nothing can be conceived more simple or beautiful than this

arrangement. First comes the raw material; then the machine by which it is worked; next the manufactured arti-

cle; whilst finally, comes the impress of genius, raising the manufactured article into a work of art."15 Iron might appear in Section I: Raw Materials as an ore, in Section II:

Machinery as the apparatus that worked it, and in Section III: Manufactures as a finished artifact (for example, a frying pan). To take another example, a particular mineral could be traced from its raw state, through its manufacture into a pigment or dye, to its use in printed cotton ware, and

finally be seen to emerge-metaphorphosized by genius- into fine art. The real advantage of Playfair's taxonomy, however, was that in addition to these four sections-raw

materials, machinery, manufactures, and fine art-it also

possessed twenty-nine subsections or classes. This subdi- vision meant that a particular process could be followed

through the successive stages of its production, and could also be compared to similar practices or artifacts within its own class. The frying pans of the respective manufacturers could thus be judged against each other as well as part of the story of iron. As such, the manufactures would find their wares grouped with others of a similar kind rather than forced into preexisting categories that were either

arbitrary or so broad as to be meaningless. By 1862 the

system had come to encompass thirty-six such classes, with photography one of seven new additions.

One of the most rigourous attempts to sort out the

problem of photography's peculiar place in the array of

capitalist knowledge forms came from Playfair himself.16 In a letter to the secretary of the Photographic Society of

London, he declared that mixing up pictures with the instruments used in their production was "a gross philosophical error" that he felt would disgrace the classification in the eyes of knowledgeable foreign visitors. Playfair pointed out that:

ART JOURNAL

41



The group Machinery cannot embrace Photography with any propriety. If it has been placed there on account of the apparatus employed in its production, this in itself is a misunder-

standing of the principles upon which the classification was framed. Cameras belong to the general class of "Philosophi- cal Instruments, " and have no more title to a separate class in

machinery than telescopes, microscopes, electrical or survey- ing instruments, all of which are sections of one class.17

This was a mistake, Playfair believed, akin to displaying sculpture with edge tools, or paintings with brushes and

pigments. How, he asked, could the jurors in the machin-

ery section be competent to judge pictures? In a second letter, clearly unhappy with the way he

had previously formulated the question, Playfair again took

up the question of photography's place in the taxonomy of industrial forms.18 On this occasion he argued that if, by 1862, photography had developed to the point of being deemed worthy of a specific class, this situation must be

4 treated according to the logic of the classification. Playfair was concerned with the commissioners' error of classifying products with the apparatus employed to make them because this effectively collapsed two major sections of the

taxonomy and risked "losing the whole philosophy of classification." In this way the misclassification of photography threatened the entire system of industrial knowledge proposed by the exhibition.

Playfair was clearly puzzled by the correct place in which to locate photography. On the whole he was inclined to concede the photographers' position and accept their

argument for a place in the fine art section, but-and this was the sticking point-to do so would only open up a whole series of problems associated with photography as illustration: "I see many difficulties which arise in treating [photography in this manner]. For instance, photographs of machines might require to be placed along with machinery, just as drawings of machinery would be so placed; while

photographs of structures and buildings might appropriate- ly belong to civil engineering and architecture."19 Others saw matters differently, particularly among the ranks of

professional photographers. The editor of the British Jour- nal of Photography, for example, felt that there was no dilemma in this reclassification. He argued pragmatically that photography could simply be split into applications and art. Applied photography could then appear throughout the classification and still allow the claim for art to stand.20

Playfair, however, was not concerned with such mun- dane matters as these. For him, what possible significance could the mere professionalizing arguments of photographers possess in the face of the grand philosophical problem of classification and the ordering of the manufacturer's wares? Playfair entered the fray because the paradox of

photography seemed to threaten the whole arrangement.

The photographic apparatus, so many commentators

believed, was a self-acting machine that did not involve conscious direction. That is to say that the photographer occupied an equivalent position to the worker. As a conse-

quence, art and machinery, as well as intellect and work, appeared in bewildering proximity. These properties, which should be kept apart, were made adjacent; transi- tions between them were becoming too abrupt; and in the

process, questions of disturbing proportions were begin- ning to surface. Because of the aspirations of photographers, the category of labor was being inscribed across the

wrong points of the taxonomy, and some of the most pro- found ideological distinctions of the capitalist order were in danger of collapsing.

Playfair worked as a kind of intellectual border

guard, policing the correct spaces between the social practices of the capitalist order. His role was to guarantee an ideal model of capitalist social structure, to demonstrate its self-evident rationality, and to do so in a manner that suggested how that world could be known: exact, linear, with

everything and everyone in the correct place. But in the end Playfair's solution was not convincing, for he could see the problem only too clearly. If photographs had to be separated from the apparatus, then where would photography be placed? Fine art might be one possibility, but what of all those other photographic uses and practices? What of the

photograph as document, or as illustration, both of which

depended on the presence of the machine and mechanical labor as conditions of their knowledge effect? 21

In retrospect, the obvious location for photography would have been the one Playfair did not contemplate: Section III: Manufactures. This placement would have

kept the classification intact: apparatus in the machinery section; images, as their products, with all the other products of mechanical labor. But even this solution would have left the perplexing matter of art and creative labor

outstanding. This was not an easy problem for someone like Playfair, because his system was built linearly upon the idea that things could appear only once and in their correct place. Photography confounded this plan, appear- ing simultaneously across the multiple sites of the taxono-

my. To Playfair, photography must have seemed very much like a creature from some old bestiary: a fabulous animal formed from the odd bits of others. Just like those beasts- made up from parts of fish, birds, and mammals-how was it to be classified? Fragments of the creature might proper- ly be located in one class, but the whole seemed to elude him. Playfair's system ought to have been able to incorpo- rate every kind of human endeavor, but it proved incapable of coping with an activity that was simultaneously the

product of genius and of the mechanical. In his taxonomy of industrial capitalism, those two categories simply did not overlap; they were the attributes of different kinds of

subject. The complexity of photography illuminates the

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structures of Playfair's arrangement as those of an artificial

system. Photography provides an important moment when that which must be systematically occluded emerges into the light. The categories of labor that such a model of

knowledge denies will break it in the end, and the fetish can be glimpsed, if only momentarily, shivering in the split second of its exposure.

It seemed to photographers that the commissioners had made an unwarranted connection between the image and its means of production, but as one commentator

pointed out, this connection was inscribed in the very lan-

guage of photography:

So little attention has been given to art-culture amongst photographers, that almost the whole terminology of the art is of a mechanical character. Is a picture very fine, the question at once asked is "by what process was it produced, and with what lens?" When a process is described, it is the manipulations which concentrate the interest; and the person who

practices photography professionally is an operator.22

Those three terms-process, manipulations, operator, with their echoes of the workshop or the mill-called up the

presence of work in a manner that was always destined to undermine photography's claim to the high ground of art, and which would wreck havoc on the forms of industrial

knowledge. The allotropic nature of photography-its existence as art and labor, diamond and carbon-destabilized the clear distinctions of the taxonomy. In the process it called into question capital's ideal self-representation.

The commission replied to claims by and on behalf of the photographic interest with the statement that its position had been misunderstood: there was nothing to prevent photographs being placed in a separate apartment from the

apparatus, and being located adjacent to engraving or any other suitable class of objects.23 This was really only a restatement of the position the commissioners had occu-

pied all along, more palatably phrased perhaps, but still

representing photographs as the products of a technical

apparatus. Yet this was a position that photographers even-

tually had to accept. When the London Photographic Soci-

ety finally accepted the separate apartment with little time left for maneuver, it attempted to pass off its climb down as a belated offer to photographers from the commissioners.24 A commentator at the meeting of the South London Photo-

graphic Society was probably correct, however, when he

suggested that the compromise amounted to a reward of a

half-penny accompanied by a kick because the cost of

accepting the separate apartment would involve accepting the classification in the machinery section.25 The physical separation of the machine from the pictures meant that the

apparatus was distanced, yet it was still too close for com- fort and its determining effect could still be felt. The com-

promise of the separate apartment is still with us today in the form of major international museums of photography,

which allocate one popular space for the apparatus and another, more rarefied one, for pictures. In the process these institutions and their official histories articulate a fetishized account of photography in which the semantic conditions of the image are rigidly demarcated from their conditions of production.26

In the International Exhibition of 1851, photography could be contained in one department, but by 1862, as the division of labor accelerated and photography diversified

throughout the practices of society, so it spread throughout the taxonomy. Against the logic of Playfair's system, photographic chemicals appeared in various places: in raw materials, in the national displays, and in the photographic department. Cameras were to be found in both the class for

philosophical instruments and that for photography, while

photographs appeared everywhere as illustrations of other

processes of production. This confusing distribution was even further compounded when the commissioners gave the photographic jury responsibility for all photographic practices throughout the exhibition.27 As Playfair had observed, how could anyone lay claim to the multiple lan-

guages that would be necessary to access the whole span of the taxonomy? To pronounce upon the picture and the machine, on art and on mechanical work, was the problem with which Playfair had attempted to grapple. One solution to this problem entailed separating the photograph from its

apparatus. Yet it was apparent to him that in many cases the image required its apparatus for its truth effect. Babel had come to exist in photography. In creating taxonomic confusion, the photographic department told us much about the forms of industrial knowledge. Fraser's Maga- zine, commenting upon other kinds of "lunacy" that

escaped the classifications of industrial society, noted:

In the majority of cases, the specifications were clear and concise; but there were exceptional cases where the objects proposed to be exhibited must have been the ideal creation, of individuals labouring slightly, if not seriously, under

lunacy. Thus one person wished to exhibit an aerial machine in action, under one of the great domes, in which he proposed to spring up and down like an acrobat in a

gigantic baby-jumper; another desired to send "evidences of one general metallic root. "Another had a scheme for show-

ing coffins; another solicited space to exhibit a patent moustache guard, to protect the moustache from being spoiled by soup, & c.28

This list reads like a much older taxonomy, but if these

proposals were really any stranger than photography, it was because they were eccentric and individual projects that

escaped the circuit of capital accumulation. Precisely because of its widespread economic significance and rele- vance across the division of labor, the impossible category of photography threatened to be the ruin of industrial tax-

onomy. Photography was the class that at once confused

ART JOURNAL

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and compounded the diversity of social knowledges- industrial, artistic, scientific-and yet had no center other than those knowledges. In 1862 photography appeared as the practice that recounted the paradox of the machine and posed the riddle of labor.

Notes I would like to thank Adrian Rifkin and Gail Day for their comments on versions of this essay, and Susan Siegfried for her conscientious editorial work.

1. On the International Exhibitions, see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983); Cristoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: Things and Their Perception in Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Com- plex," New Formations 4 (1988): 73-102; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Cul- ture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle (London: Verso, 1990). There has been a great deal of bad reading of Marx's account of the fetishism of commodities as the false representation of the real process of capitalist exploitation. For Marx, fetishism was the reality of this process and not simply an illusion. See Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), 1:77-78. My essay attempts to maintain the sense of the difficult formulation offered by Marx in which social relations between individuals appear "as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things" (p. 78).

2. "Photography and the Exhibition of 1862," Photographic Journal, April 15, 1861, 147-49. The question of photography's classification in the exhibitions of 1851 and 1862 has been touched upon in Roy Flukinger, The Formative Decades: Photography in Great Britain, 1839-1920 (Austin: University of Texas, 1985).

3. "Photography and the Exhibition," 149. 4. "Photography at the International Exhibition of 1862," British Journal of

Photography, May 15, 1861, 180. 5. Frederick Pollock to F. R. Sandford (May 6, 1861), Photographic Journal,

May 15, 1861, 172-74. 6. Antoine Claudet, F.R.S., "On the Classification of the International Exhibi-

tion of 1862 as Regards Photography," Photographic Journal, August 15, 1861, 243.

7. Pollock to Sandford, 173. 8. Ibid., 173. 9. Wemyss Reid, Memoirs and Correspondence of Lyon Playfair (London:

Harper and Brothers, 1899). 10. William Whewell, "On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the

Progress of Art and Science," Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 2 vols. (London: Royal Society of Arts, 1852-53), 1:1-34.

11. Ibid., 21. My account of taxonomy differs radically from that offered in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (Lon- don: Tavistock, 1970). In particular, it seems to me that Foucault's ceasuralism leads him to trivialize the necessary taxonomic condition of knowledge. For an account of taxonomy related to my own, see Jeffrey Steele, "Taxinomia and Taxo- mania: Some Groundwork towards an Evaluation of the Art of Robert Smithson," in John Roberts, ed., Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art

(London: Verso, 1994), 133-55. On the distinctions between artificial and natural system in taxonomic theory, see David Knight, Ordering the World: A History of Classifying Man (London: Burnett Books, 1981), and Vernon Pratt, "Foucault and the History of Classification Theory," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Sci- ence 8, no. 2 (1977): 163-71.

12. Whewell, "On the General Bearing," 26. 13. Ibid., 25. 14. Ibid., 22. 15. "Contemporary Science," London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics,

Literature, Art and Society, May 25, 1861, 600. This article was also published as "Photography and the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1862," Photographic Journal, June 15, 1861, 205-6.

16. Lyon Playfair, "Lyon Playfair to the Secretary of the Photographic Society of London" (May 27, 1861), Photographic Journal, June 15, 1861, 197.

17.Ibid. 18. Lyon Playfair, "Lyon Playfair June 3, 1861," Photographic Journal, July

15,1861, 225-26. 19. Ibid. 20. "Photography at the Industrial Exhibition of 1862," British Journal of

Photography, August 1, 1861, 263-64. 21. Playfair, "Playfair June 3, 1861," 225-26.

22."Photography and the International Exhibition," Photographic News, August 23, 1861, 396.

23. F. R. Sandford, "F. R. Sandford Reply to the Right Honourable Sir Freder- ick Pollock," Photographic Journal, May 16, 1861, 196.

24. The Photographic Society finally appointed the committee in November 1861. See "Photography at the International Exhibition," British Journal of Pho- tography, December 16, 1861, 435.

25. [A. H. Wall], "The Societies and the International Exhibition," Photo- graphic News, June 28, 1861, 304.

26. On photography museums that replicate this structure, see Allan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983 (Halifax, Canada: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 77-101; and John Tagg, "The Silent Picture Show," in S. Bezencenet and P. Corri- gan, eds., Photographic Practices: Towards a Different Image (London: Comedia, 1986), 110-12.

27. Photographic Journal carried "The Report of Jurors" between December 15, 1862, and June 15, 1864.

28. "The International Exhibition," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, no. 390 (June 1862): 800.

STEVE EDWARDS teaches in the Department of Historical

and Theoretical Studies at the University of Derby. He is

researching the relationships between art, photography, and work in nineteenth-century England.

SUMMER 1996



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